Depressed Animals

Depressed Animals

since 2018

In DEPRESSED ANIMALS, the movements of animals with stereotypical behavior are transferred to "smart objects" such as drones, vacuum cleaner robots and trolleys to ultimately represent depressed robots. The behavioral abnormalities are repetitive and compulsive and serve no function. These anomalies often occur in captivity. While the captivity of animals arises from the cage, the captivity of kinetic objects lies in their programming.

Depressed robots, foolish AIs, autonomous cigarettes - these are the protagonists of Elisa Jule Braun's videos and installations. Their settings: urban and rural living environments, more or less structured by digital technologies. And as it is in networks, something is always being transmitted: data, rituals, language, mood, movements or power, always including their interferences. Using means of visual anthropology, Braun dissects conflicts that lie in the tension between globalized capital and local reality.

With unproductive machines such as vacuum cleaners, drones and trolleys brought to life, and in semi-documentary fables that sketch a Swabian science fiction, Braun's works analyze the world in a playful, conceptual way and unmask the technological-industrial complex. Dialect meets dialectic, tradition meets technology, and hauntology meets hegemony.

Elisa Jule Braun is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. She studied Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths College London and Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Elisa Jule Braun deals with the visual language of the mass media and social media world, with communication and failed communication. Her video works and installations reveal patterns of thinking and complex interrelations of the society in a figurative way.