Johanna Hedva's GLUT: a superabundance of nothing

Banner image: Still from ‘GLUT: a superabundance of nothing’ (2021), Johanna Hedva. Text source: Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark by Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

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Awarded Shape’s flagship Adam Reynolds Award earlier this year, writer, artist, and musician Johanna Hedva today launches the digital counterpart to GLUT: a superabundance of nothing, now showing physically at HKW Berlin, a project which challenges our understanding of human experience through an eerie and mystical video game environment. Experience GLUT now.

Created in collaboration with Hot Knife Digital Media, Johanna Hedva’s latest project - GLUT: a superabundance of nothing - is an inquiry into understandings of embodiment, rooted in the premise that AI has existed long before computers in the forms of divination and mysticism. Following this premise, GLUT asks what, how, and where we can know and un-know what we think we do. One of the provocations of GLUT is the question of whether Amazon, in predicting our desires and shaping our future, is our latest divining tool, a kind of contemporary mysticism. 

The physical manifestation of this project is showing now as part of Illiberal Arts at HKW, Berlin as an installation that draws on the dissociated “void room” settings in films like Get Out and Under the Skin. In the video game, users - playing as an avatar - drag themselves through an environment cheating at non-Euclidean geometry through a series of nesting black holes, intestinal tunnels, glittering caves, and oceans of black water. The effect is a world that disorients as much as it confirms what knowledges are available to the body.

Download GLUT for free now