Interview with Hans Bernhard
Which art project do you attend the Amber Festival with?
Psych|OS Cycle/2000-2009/mixed media
http://www.ubermorgen.com/psychos
What is your aim with your art work?
Hans Bernhard is a chemical cyborg. Hans Bernhard has been exposing, pushing, augmenting and enhancing his body with synthetic drugs for 25 years.
From 1984 to 1999 through the intense use of synthetic drugs such as LSD, ecstasy, meth, speed, fentanyl, angel dust, dextroamphetamine and nitrous oxide to explore, interact with and absorb contemporary digital networks and become part of them by zooming into techno music, digital art and mass media.
Since 2000, he has been protecting and enhancing his brain and body by the use of prescribed psychotropic drugs: Benzodiazepines, Olazapine, Seretide, Prothipendyl, Valproic Acid, Carbamazepine, Chlorprothixen, Zotepin, Oxymetazoline, and Salbutamol; all interacting with one another.
During his 25 years of substance abuse and after a series of brain upgrades, one day in march 2002, Hans experienced a manic outbreak and total mental meltdown in South-Africa.
This would later on be diagnosed as bipolar affective disorder and Hans would learn that he had prevented the outbreak of the illness for almost 15 years by means of self-medication.
Hans Bernhard’s neuro-networks and brain structures are similar to the global synthetic TCP/IP networks he help build and kept in close and subversive relationsship with. Both are highly unstable. And now, these networks are infected and contaminated by waves of mania and depression. WHO ICD-1, F31.1.
Contemporary high-tech societies deal with hardcore brains using bio-chemical agents to enhance & control the internal information flow, we call them psychotropic drugs.
We are all chemical cyborgs.
How does your project works?
It doesn’t work. It is.
Could you describe your process of creation?
I was at the psychiatric hospital. I filmed and shot photos. Later on I discovered and published them as the start of the cycle. additionalto that I publish a daily drug&food blog since 4 years, now on.
twitter: http://twitter.com/hansblog
How long have you been producing digital art?
Since 1991
How do you describe your art as an artist using technology?
We-UBERMORGEN.COM – call it Media Hacking. Intrusion into massmedia with low tech.
What made you choose digital media as medium?
There was no choice, or should I write with a pen or paint with a brush? Also, in the early 1990s I was extremely excited by the opportunity the internet offered us as artists.
Do you have aesthetic concerns while producing your art?
yes, we are concerned about aestehtics, but it is not our main concern.
What do you think about the literal and figurative integrations of the human body and technology?
I am a chemical and mechanical cyborg and i dreamt to be a machine.For me this is a non-intellectual but emotional process – ongoing,certain but uncertain in it’s outcome.
What we may become as a result of our increasing engagements with technology?
I don’t know. what do you think? We are already part of a universal organism – the internet being one technological representation of that, religion is another spiritual representation – we are on the on the edge looking down into the abyss of a wonderful future. I love battlestar galactica for that.
Interview: Çiğdem Zeytin
