Johannes Grenzfurthner is a happily subversive artist, filmmaker, author, and performer. He's based in Vienna, Austria. He's founder and director of monochrom, an international art and theory collective. He'll be premiering his latest film, "Masking Threshold," at Fantastic Fest in Austin (coming soon to a brainstem near you!). In this interview, we discuss nerd culture, context hacking, sex and technology, cocktail robotics, and his new film.

Johannes Grenzfurthner: "It definitely happened, I guess, sometime in the 1990s that suddenly the nerd was almost like a procreation of hate speech, in a certain way. You take a term, and wear it as a badge of honor, and turn its meaning on the head. I think that definitely happens. The term is also not that old. I mean, I did some research for 'Traceroute,' my film about nerd culture. And the first time that 'nerd' has been used by a wider population is in the late 70s and early 1980s."