»I work with and against technology«

Interview with the artist Jonas Roßmeißl

Jonas Roßmeißl, Trauriges Windrad, 2025, Photo: choreo.info

When talking to Jonas Roßmeißl about technology, the conversation quickly turns to materials: friction, resistance, wear. His works expose the physical infrastructures of our present and translate them into sculptural forms, driven by an attempt to understand their actual functional principles.

For his sculptures, including the two works in the Stadler Collection, "Faust, 2024" and "Trauriges Windrad, 2025", he undertook an extensive investigative effort that, in search of specific components, sometimes took him halfway around the world. These complex paths that make a work possible in the first place, as well as the personal encounter with the artist, particularly fascinated Rainer and Annette Stadler. His works introduce a perspective into the collection that approaches contemporary social and technological developments through distinctly individual artistic means.

In the interview, Jonas Roßmeißl speaks about formative experiences and encounters, the role of aesthetics and sensuality in dealing with technical realities, and about a surprisingly radical answer to complex problems:
Principle 46 – the use of explosives.

When would you locate the beginning of your artistic career? Was it a clear moment, a longer process, or a particular encounter?

An early aesthetic judgment that, in retrospect, seems constitutive to me was the shameful disgust I felt toward my photographic documentation of a Grand Tour I undertook through Central and South America after graduating from school. Looking back, I regard this travel as an attempt to seek adventure and possibly also misery in order to escape the security of my own socialization. An act that can be observed from the Renaissance to the petty bourgeoisie of today. Afterwards, I looked at the images from this six-month journey exactly once, alone, and could detect no rupture in my perspective, but rather the mere reproduction of a degenerate gaze that I supposedly sought to question. I have not deleted this data, but I will never open it again, yet I am aware of its existence. I still find it difficult to pick up a camera.

Do you remember your first realized work?

Whether this should be considered a work is open to question. At the beginning of my studies in 2015, affordable drones suddenly appeared on the consumer market. I put one “on a short leash,” which also served as its power supply, and together with a friend who is a computer scientist I programmed it so that, using its onboard camera, it would detect people in the room and attempt to fly toward them; yet be held back by the lifeline necessary for its operation. At the time, I had a rather empathetic movement in mind, especially since I was simultaneously trying to gain access to a package of oxytocin intended for intravenous administration. A hormone/neurotransmitter that plays a central role in social bonding, trust, and closeness and is used, for example, to support women after childbirth when their milk ejection reflex is not triggered after a C-section. Given today's applications of drone systems, my approach at the time has lost its innocence; nevertheless, I was able to draw some insights for my later and current practice.

Which places have had a particular influence on your artistic development?

On one hand, Uttenreuth, a small village in the immediate vicinity of my birth city and the places of my childhood and youth. An environment therefore very familiar to me, where I had my studio for eight years. The world seems to be in order there. The prevailing dogma of laptop and lederhosen opened up a perspective on the subtle fictions of tradition, whether as a quiet observer in the beer tent or as a curious guest in a research laboratory. The familiarity allowed me to distrust comfortably.

On the other hand, I commuted to Leipzig, the city where I studied both economics and art. Without wanting to sound presumptuous, what shaped me there above all was the encounter with a concept or understanding of work that had been unknown to me until then. People who, for example, spent their first working years in a VEB (state-owned enterprise) and subsequently went through a failed attempt at self-employment in reunified Germany look differently upon their work in an art school workshop than a young student who feels an ungrounded urge toward expression. I have great appreciation for the people who accompanied me there.

Jonas Roßmeißl, Glocke, 2025, Photo: Roman März (not part of the Stadler Collection)

You work in several studios and recently moved into a new one. Why do you need different work locations, and is there a specific division between them?

I think I desire the rurally-mondane, though not among people who have left the city, but rather in the alternation between periphery and center. In the countryside the fields are cultivated, in the city the yields are distributed.

Your works “Faust, 2024” and “Trauriges Windrad, 2025” are part of the Stadler Collection. Can you describe the history and idea behind one or both of these works?

The sculpture Faust originates from the aesthetic appeal of a dichotomy between complexity and triviality, condensed within the sculptural body. It was initiated by the relation between a profane insight, the understanding of a fact determined by natural law, and the simultaneous inability to imagine an adequate, consistent imagery for the consequence of that very fact. I should elaborate:

At the center of the sculpture is a submarine fiber optic cable, the NSW Minisub DA 288. Each optical fiber of this leading technological carrier has an estimated transmission capacity of 2.5 to 3.75 terabytes per second. The sum of all fibers yields a theoretical maximum of up to 1,080 TB/s. Assuming current data traffic volumes on the European continent, a conservative estimate for continental data exchange comes to approximately 10 to 50 TB/s. This means that through the merely 8 mm diameter of this data conductor, the entirety of European internet traffic can be transmitted: every video, image, every email and message of every individual. At the same time, this undersea cable is as vulnerable as a garden hose. If it is bent too sharply, the flow of data ceases and the light exits. The fact that a single hand can silence a cable connecting continents is profoundly fascinating. I understand the physical laws behind it, yet the real consequence remains incomprehensible. An image of the totality of exchange of an entire continent eludes my imagination.

However, a constant clamping was required to maintain the bend of the cable. In the course of my search for a form, I came across a Russian CGI designer who caught my attention because he was expressing his protest against the Russian war of aggression on a commercial, American 3D model trading platform. I wanted to purchase the 6-megabyte file chessfigur[fist].stl, but the SWIFT sanctions and the blocking of further payment service providers prevented me from transferring the requested $9. He legitimately insisted on being paid, so I had to find a way to physically transfer this amount of money to a place where it could be entered into the Russian SWIFT equivalent, SPFS (System for Transfer of Financial Messages), where a piece of paper became information. Once this amount was available in his Sberbank account, he sent me a plain email with an attachment, through a cable that had previously not been permitted to allow the settlement, the balance reconciliation between my bank and his, to pass.

The aluminum casting of this file was carried out without a positive. A negative mold was created using sand printing, which was filled in a prototype foundry. The casting then went to the research department of a company that developed a process to mechanically grind and polish the complex form through trowalization. Altogether a highly automated and reproducible process. The normative surface of the sculpture does not reflect the humiliation inherent in the mechanically monotonous movement of grinding, but rather refers to an emancipation from the capital-grounded power of disposal over the workers. No human hand worked on the fist. What value does this shine hold?

Jonas Roßmeißl, Faust, 2024, Photo: Roman März

You work with very different materials, from raw materials to high-tech components. What new themes or materials would you like to explore in the future? (Note: can you give an example of how you obtain special materials like the deep-sea fiber optic cable?)

Unfortunately, I cannot provide detailed information on this. In many cases, this is also due to the sensitive and lengthy processes involved.

Take the example of the submarine fiber optic cable: these are part of critical infrastructure that is currently [very likely] still being attacked by Russia. At the time of my procurement efforts, this was fortunately not yet the case. But you phone around the world, write countless inquiries merely to locate a person who is in any way connected to the relevant object. In the process, you learn a lot about the organizational structures of institutions and companies, as well as about their own uncertainty regarding responsibility and structure. When you actually speak or write to someone, it is completely unclear at that point whether that person can or wants to help. This could be a cleaning staff member in a foreign fertility clinic or the head of the engineering department at an elite university. It requires a certain amount of adaptability, contextual knowledge, vehemence, and honesty. Money is usually not helpful in gaining access to the relevant objects, but also to knowledge, assistance, or information. Rather, it is important to convince others of your own idea, question, or opinion and to build trust. In doing so, you often talk about art and what it is and can be.

To reach Norddeutsche Seekabelwerke, my path led from Singapore via Milan and Düsseldorf to Nordenham, through various employees, until I was finally able to track down Mr. O. . Eventually, a shipping company delivered a large pallet to the studio's yard, while many other efforts had come to nothing.

[Note:] I regard the concept or terminology of research within the arts with a certain degree of skepticism. In the sciences, it is, in my view, already well situated. What I do there possesses its own specificity and, I hope, an epistemic quality. I do not wish to define a research object in a cool, detached manner.

Your works often address control, surveillance, and the impact of digital technologies. What motivates you to reflect on social and technological interrelations through art?

I wouldn't say that the topos of surveillance and control is at the center of my thinking. Mere paranoia toward the technical seems unproductive to me; it often distorts the actual circumstances. Even Marx, on the basis of his reading of Shirley, the bourgeois social novel by Charlotte Brontë, denounced the Luddite movement of the nineteenth century as superstitious and diagnosed in it a reactionary hostility toward progress. Yet their machine-breaking was grounded in a differentiated and nuanced reflection on the alienating effects of new technologies on their ways of life, which justified their object-oriented violence. I work with and against technology.

Without fear of incompetence or isolation, my interest is not confined to the “digital” or so-called high/deep tech. Tribological contacts alone account for roughly 20% of global energy consumption through friction, while data centers are estimated to claim only around 1.5% of worldwide electricity production. Even a future fusion reactor remains indebted, in its energetic yield, to the operating principle of the steam engine. Historically speaking, never before has so much wood been burned as in the present. From this arise, ultimately, movements that are timed and controlled at a cadence decoupled from our perception of time, as well as electrical currents that must be shaped so as to be readable as numerical vectors; while the notorious struggle against the fear of corrosion will never come to an end.

The technological lives off its narration. Genrich Saulovich Altschuller, a Soviet patent office employee from Baku and inventor imprisoned by Stalin, published his theory of inventive problem solving in 1954. A matrix with which one could always achieve the solution to a technical problem by means of forty different principles; in other words, a perpetual motion machine of innovation. This prophetically styled methodology experienced its renaissance around the 2010s in the prevailing technology industries, which simultaneously showered us with hopeful postulates about our "liberation through innovation." The sources are not entirely clear, but Altshuller likely expanded the list in 1973 by ten principles, among them number 46: the use of explosives.

In my perception, the parousia of the recent past has run its course. Now, the decisive actors are already contextualizing themselves as a private-sector Manhattan Project. I think it makes sense to approach this field as an artist, also under the auspices of beauty and sensuality.

Jonas Roßmeißl, Shredder XL, 2025, Foto: Roman März (not part of the Stadler Collection)

In some of your works, flashes of humor or irony appear. To what extent do you use these as tools in your artistic practice?

I don't like telling jokes and feel a certain unease about ritualized forms of collective “exuberance,” such as the German carnival as a command for laughter. Nevertheless, I enjoy laughing very much. Accordingly, humor on my part is not explicitly intended, though I do welcome it as a byproduct. Reflecting on this, I notice nuanced bugbears that are inherent to the works and may appear with a kind of severity that evokes humor as a place of refuge. The contrast between complexity and triviality described above may also contain a certain form of comedy.

How does a work typically come into being for you? Does it begin with an idea, a search for material, or an observation?

At the beginning of an undertaking there is a longing for understanding. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly how a work begins. I simply do not know. It is certainly not an open process, even if external constraints lead to unpredictable circumstances. My handwriting and what my hand produces with a pen alienate me. I therefore work without, or with only minimal notation. A work should be allowed to remain in the mind for as long as possible. Revision there is much more efficient and usually more comprehensive. Only when it becomes indispensable for realization, contact, or materialization do planning images, a command to the machine, or a descriptive form emerge. This generates less waste. The material arises from itself and the need for control. I prefer to think recursively about an action rather than defining a movement of hand and tool through repetition. I already grind enough for that; within the dialectic of master and servant.

What occupies you outside of art? Do you have any hobbies or other interests that influence your artistic thinking?

No, unfortunately I don't have any hobbies. The term “hobby” nowadays often implies a tendency toward professionalization. This contradiction is disconcerting. That said, I do enjoy hiking, if only rarely.

I am susceptible to a form of excessive information intake. Orienting oneself within this compulsive oversaturation, structuring it and positioning oneself epistemically, does not necessarily promise any gain in knowledge. However, under certain circumstances, a contrasting image may remain from the overexposure. I have no desire to romanticize this way of dealing with information, since perception is a highly vulnerable and finite resource. While the continued existence of art is, in my view, not in question on the account of overproduction alone, it remains open whether and in what way it will still be perceived "sensuously" in the future. The increasingly technology-assisted outsourcing of perception and judgment processes may open up new possibilities, but at the same time it can induce a reductionist mode of aesthetic thinking.

Jonas Roßmeißl, Spiegel I [rechenbasiert], 2022, Photo: Max Johnson (not part of the Stadler Collection)

Is there a particular object that is personally very dear to you and perhaps even plays an important role in your work?

A lovely question, since certain objects matter to me not primarily on account of ownership, but because of their sheer existence, a kind of testimony they carry, and the challenge of gaining access to them. Most of the time, the ones I've been able to access also find their way into my work. However, another object is particularly close to my heart, a saying of my grandmother, who originally wanted to become a nun. I do not wish to denounce her as generally distant from art, yet her main point of reference to the field in which I work was the television program Kunst & Krempel (Art & Junk) on BR (Bavarian Broadcasting). In a conversation about what I do, she once said, quite virtuously: “Then make art, not junk.”

Are there any upcoming projects or future plans you would like to share with us in closing?

I am currently working on a topology: mediating bodies that are meant to take form in order to harmonize antagonistic mechanical forces. To what extent can the conventional materiality of cast sculpture [e.g., bronze] absorb asymmetrical force relations and produce an apparent equilibrium within the smallest possible spatial extent? This undertaking moves between classical questions of sculptural form and, for instance, the possibilities of anisotropic structures from the field of mechanical metamaterials. I hope physics will show itself merciful toward me ;)

Interview by Sophie Azzilonna

February 2026