Johannes Büttner has developed a diverse body of works, often arranged in comprehensive spatial installations. He negotiates present and past, speculative as well as science-based socio-economic topics. Thereby he thinks about the future in all its potentialities, but with an awareness of planetary crises. In order to sketch future scenarios, he avoids to reproduce an established, capitalist rhetoric influenced by Silicon Valley and the tech industry, but rather contrast it with subcultural practices, different forms of hacking, queering, DIY practices and calls for self-organization. His work contextualizes the space in which it happens and often integrates people standing outside of the art world.
He finds inspiration and sources in current and past counter-culture literature, political manifestos, the cyberpunk genre, DIY-YouTube-tutorials, and also in spiritualism and (urban-) mythes. These are all seen as prisms through which to investigate larger claims surrounding the conditions of ideology and belief. Questions of how to work and make a living, contemporary fears of automation and regulation and a ‘creative culture’ in which we are all expected to be entrepreneurs. The resulting scenarios oscillate between reality and fiction. They challenge general agreements and assumptions about what reality is. Scientific systems and narratives of reality are juxtaposed with those of fiction and speculation.