Felix Lenz - Soft Image, Brittle Grounds

Soft Image, Brittle Grounds

About

The mixed-media installation Soft Image, Brittle Grounds, commissioned by the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna and created by research-led artist and filmmaker Felix Lenz explores the intricate entanglements of technology, ecology, power, and inequality.

Departing from their 30-minute essay film Brute Force [Exhibition Cut] and expanding into the three-channel video installation Valley of the Heart’s Delight, Lenz investigates the material, ecological, and political implications of technology, capturing—through a queer lens—how our world’s complexity collides with the simplified rationalities of the digital age.
The shrinking shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, USA, the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere, serve as a central metaphor to illustrate how processes of data extraction and knowledge production reshape Earth’s topographies, linking environmental devastation to neocolonial practices which continue to shape access to resources, knowledge, and land.

»By looking, thinking, and acting with and through the eyes of our instruments these images have become dull, soft, flat.
But as rivers drain and soil becomes brittle, even endless streams of data lose their meaning.«
[quote from the voice-over in Brute Force]

Brute Force [Exhibition Cut], 2025
Essay film, 4K 17:9, color, stereo, 30 min

In Brute Force Felix Lenz exposes the hidden infrastructures of digital technologies and reveals the omissions and distortions inherent to knowledge extractivism. In the course of three chapters, the film traces the instruments that capture our images and data, the environmental cost of the infrastructures which process them, and the geological imprints they leave behind. Shot across salt lakes and deserts in Utah and California, the film conceptualizes salt as an archive of water’s absence—an index of climate change, resource depletion, and their unequal impact and distribution.

The first chapter, Capture, explores how data collection—from the smallest particles to planetary-scale satellite imagery—is not a neutral act but an active practice of world-making. Drawing on quantum physics, it illustrates how through acts of measurement matter and meaning co-emerge, shaping our reality and environments as they unfold. Process addresses the limitations of algorithmic simplifications and how the growing dependence on data centers— themselves reliant on immense amounts of water for cooling—exacerbates water scarcity in already fragile ecosystems. Finally, Omission shifts the focus to landscapes, suggesting that mineral residues themselves form an alternative archive of extraction and exploitation.
Felix Lenz’s artistic approach is deliberately ambiguous, blurring the line between documentary and constructed narrative. By integrating sculptural elements and staged interventions into natural landscapes, they subvert expectations of objectivity. Information is codified into spoken word, poetry, and metaphors: The voice-over, narrated by poet Day Eve Komet weaves together insights from feminist physicist and theorist Karen Barad, media artist Vladan Joler, and geologist Diego P. Fernandez, offering a layered, interdisciplinary critique of technological neutrality and objectivity.

Valley of the Heart’s Delight, 2025
Three-channel video installation, HD 16:9, color

The three-channel video installation Valley of the Heart’s Delight expands on aforementioned themes, drawing connections between materiality, surface, and power. Its title references the historical name of Silicon Valley before its transformation into a global tech hub. Close-ups of layers of soil, sand, and crushed white shells are captured in slow-motion by an industrial robotic arm—both an instrument of automation and an observer of its own impact.
The shells evoke the sacred shellmounds and midden sites of the Indigenous Ohlone people—burial grounds and remnants of ancestral life—now hidden beneath corporate headquarters, linking histories of displacement to the present-day architectures of technological dominance.

A symbolic fragment of an architectural glass façade either reveals or conceals the videos, depending on the visitors’ position. Its structure is reminiscent of the sleek exteriors of tech campuses that mask deeper power imbalances and the systemic misuse of authority.
Through these visual and material juxtapositions, the installation mirrors the political dimensions of information control, questioning who has access to knowledge, who dictates its terms, and whose histories are buried beneath dominant narratives of progress.

»Knowledge is no accumulation of data. It is a material practice«
[quote from the voice-over in Brute Force]

The act of capturing and processing information inevitably distorts the world it seeks to represent, flattening complexity into consumable metrics.
While technological infrastructures promise seamless efficiency, their premises rest on the silent erosion of landscapes, histories and communities that bear its consequences. By exposing these contradictions, Soft Image, Brittle Grounds challenges the illusion of equality in technological progress, urging us to see not only what is shown, but what is lost in the telling.

Credits | overall exhibition

Commissioner: Lilli Hollein, General Director and Artistic Director, MAK
Curator: Marlies Wirth, Curator, Digital Culture and Design Collection, MAK
Artistic concept and realization: Felix Lenz

Exhibition management: Mario Kojetinsky
Technical coordination: Philipp Krummel
Graphic design: Lisa Penz, David Gallo
Research and production assistants: Miriam Daxl, Leo Mühlfeld

Funding: Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport of the Republic of Austria
Cooperation partner: University of Applied Arts, Vienna
Kindly supported by: 4YOUREYE projektionsdesign & -technik gmbh / Austrian Cultural Forum Milan

Credits | Brute Force

Concept, research & direction: Felix Lenz
Co-direction: Ganaël Dumreicher
Produced by: Felix Lenz
Produced at: Design Investigations, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Produced with the support of: BMKOES, ORFIII, Land Tirol, Bildrecht, HUFAK, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Supported by: EIZO
Full credits and further details here

Credits | Valley of the Heart’s Delight

Artistic concept, direction & production: Felix Lenz
Consultant: Gregg Castro, T’rowt’raahl Salinan / Rumsen & Ramaytush Ohlone, culture director, Association of Ramaytush Ohlone (ARO)
Production assistants: Miriam Daxl, Leo Mühlfeld
Cinematography: Jaakko Taavila
Camera assistant: Julian Giacomuzzi
CMOCOS motion control operator: Andreas Margreiter
Additional consultants: Ganaël Dumreicher, Dunia Sahir
Special thanks to: Selma Mühlbauer, Julia Hahnl
Supported by: CMOCOS Camera Motion Control System