Conducting a series of experiments in his makeshift home-lab, a skeptic IT worker tries to cure his harrowing hearing impairment. But where will his research lead him? "Masking Threshold" combines a chamber play, a scientific procedural, an unpacking video, and a DIY YouTube channel while suggesting endless vistas of existential pain and decay. Glimpse the world of the nameless protagonist in this eldritch tale, which is by no means for the faint of heart.

director
Johannes Grenzfurthner
cast
Ethan Haslam, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Jason Scott Sadofsky, Bronwynn Mertz-Penzinger, Caroline St. Clair, Pierre Emö, Ishan Raval, Kudra Owens, David Fine, Offerus Ablinger, Katharina Rose, Roland Gratzer, Matthias Ramon Jaklitsch, Harald Homolka-List
country of origin
Austria
production year
2021
language
English
subtitles
ESP
runtime
90
Picture of Johannes Grenzfurthner

Johannes Grenzfurthner

Johannes manipulates people to positively respond to his lies and made-up realities, and he feeds off these emotions. He is an award-winning artist, filmmaker, author, and performer. He is the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an internationally acting art and theory group and film-production company. Boing Boing referred to him as a leitnerd, a wordplay that ironically hints at his role in nerd/hacker/art culture. His last films were the feature-length documentaries Traceroute (2016) and Glossary of Broken Dreams (2018). He’s working on two more feature films, including the sci-fi comedy Je Suis Auto and the documentary Hacking at Leaves. Johannes is a lecturer on transmedia arts at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria, and communication theory at Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany. He is head of Arse Elektronika, a sex and tech festival in San Francisco, and organizer of Roboexotica, the Festival for Cocktail-Robotics in Vienna. Johannes has presented at SXSWi, O’Reilly ETech, FooCamp, Maker Faire, HOPE, Chaos Communication Congress, Google (Tech Talks), ROFLCon, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Influencers, Mozilla Drumbeat Barcelona, Neoteny Camp Singapore, Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, and more. He and his projects have been featured in The New York Times, Liberation, Der Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, Reuters, Slashdot, Playboy, Boing Boing, New Scientist, The Edge, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, ZDF, Gizmodo, io9, Wired, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, TAZ, CNet, the Toronto Star, Mental Floss, Rue Morgue, and more.

Filmography

Traceroute (2016), Glossary of Broken Dreams (2018), Masking Threshold (2021)

Crew

Screenwriter Johannes Grenzfurthner, Samantha Lienhard
Production Günther Friesinger, Julianne Gabert, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Jasmin Hagendorfer
Music Mathias Augdoppler, Tina Gruensteidl
Edition Johannes Grenzfurthner, Florian Hofer