Abstract
Johanna Bruckner uses performance and collaborative performative design as an organising principle for social practice, reflection, and new propositions. She has been producing a series of work in the HafenCity in Hamburg, Germany, in an urban area that was once a thriving commercial harbour zone, became abandoned when the container age took over, and is now being redeveloped as a flagship urban district mixing heritage with flexible economic models. The following reflection, which runs parallel to her performative scripts and films, investigates abstract and virtual micro-agencies engulfing the bodies of workers and inhabitants alike in the redeveloped district of the harbourcity. In particular, Bruckner unveils the circumstances linking manual labour tomacro-data and technological progress from the perspective of automation and the floating fluxes of algorithmic finance at the core of the twenty-first-century portcity.
