Christian Jankowski

Born in Göttingen, Germany, 1968; lives and works in Berlin

What language will we use in the future when we talk about love, death, and shenanigans? This is the question addressed in Christian Jankowski’s new work Silicon Valley Talks. Jankowski’s performances and video installations explore the often surprising intersections of contemporary life, media culture, and art. He frequently engages members of the public as collaborators, making them “coauthors” who participate in shaping his work. For Project Los Altos, he invited some of Silicon Valley’s most visionary entrepreneurs, programmers, thinkers, and doers to write talks on everyday topics they feel passionate about — such as “falling in love” or “holidays” — and perform them for the Los Altos community and SFMOMA audiences in a storefront installation on State Street.

The installation’s colorful objects, taken from symbols of digital communication, double as sculptures and practical furniture or display support, and offer a space for talking and listening. In their recorded performances, the speakers fill empty, green chat bubbles with more and more jargon — as if they were giving TED talks — yet they never directly promote or address their actual businesses. Jankowski’s claim is that they are already speaking the language of a future when avant-garde tech speak will have entered common conversation — not only in this region but everywhere in the world. The result is a performative collage of topics the audience knows very well, composed of words they might not know at all. Some subtitles translating from English to English help the audience catch up. And who knows, generations after us might be equally thankful for the subtitles in these recordings of a futurist language. Oscillating between the serious and the humorous, the Talks’ tech speak emerges as a potential global reality and as testimony to the artist’s belief that art is being produced while we talk.

Rudolf Frieling
Curator of Media Arts

Interview