Peter Weibel, Director of ZKM | Karlsruhe

With a retrospective selection of French filmmaker Teri Wehn Damisch’s short- and documentary films, the ZKM dedicated for the first time a unique, two-day film festival to her work in January 2013. The pinnacle of this was the film screening and world premiere of the new film by the director, who has received several international prizes. »Les Enfants Otages de Bergen-Belsen« is a film which thematizes the transportation of children to the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.

In dialogue with Peter Weibel, the literary scholar discusses how she has contributed to the success of the genre – above all in the area of the art- and artist documentary – and explains, for which reasons even historical content should be processed creatively if a lasting documentary is to be produced. Damisch offers her insight into her working method, which she details in order to describe how her films are created.

With the documentation »Les Enfants Otages de Bergen-Belsen« she does not merely create one of many works dealing with the Holocaust; rather, her film stands out from other films of its kind: using two cameras and a dual projection, she builds a dispositive in order to capture the evocative power of the moving and unmoving images. This method awakens memories among survivors that would not have come to light in a conventional interview. In this context, Peter Weibel and Teri Wehn Damisch also discuss the meaning of allowing the »mise en scène,« the director’s staging of the film, to speak for the work, and explore whether and how her oeuvre might differ from the works of other »Cinema direct« artists.

Text: Sarah Gröhbühl

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Following this motto, the ZKM, together with Cyberforum e.V. and their partners have been searching for the best works in App format since 2011. Awards are presented to advanced artistic applications, which have distinguished themselves by a high degree of innovation, interactivity and creativity.

It had already become evident at the premier of the AppArtAwards that the competition was being met with substantial international interest. App producers from fourteen nations submitted their digital works of art to us.

This year, the logical consequence of the worldwide interest in App Art as well as the mobility of this art form – “art to go”, for short – led to sending the AppArtAward on tour. First stop: Beijing.

In cooperation with the Goethe Institute Beijing, the ZKM will be showing “AppArtAward 2011/2012: Highlights” in the Chinese capital till March 17. Twelve works consisting winner Apps of the previous two years, as well as a selection of the best submissions are to be presented. The exhibition’s location, Post Mountain, is a multifunctional space for contemporary artistic approaches. Its organic form provided the perfect preconditions for the presentation of App Art works. The space is located at the center of the Grand MOMA, a kind of city within a city. Next to apartments and office rooms, the Grand MOMA also provides space for creative activities. Thus, there are diverse rooms for exhibitions, performances and concerts.

The opening celebration took place on March 5 as part of an anniversary: The Goethe Institute in Beijing has been promoting intercultural dialog between Germany and China for the last 25 years. In addition to Johannes Ebert, General Secretary of the Goethe Institute, and Peter Anders, Director of the Institute in Beijing along with representatives from the press, many students were also on-site as viewers and to try out the creative potential from Europe. “How do Western artists use the possibilities of mobile computing?” was one question which visitors found particularly interesting.

For the ZKM, the presentation goes hand in hand with the appeal to Asiatic App producers to submit their own works to the competition.

The next stops for the AppArtAward exhibition are Art Beijing, as well as the cities of Seoul, Montréal and São Paolo – each in cooperation with the respective local Goethe Institutes. We are looking forward to the events and to the numerous submissions from all around the world. Submissions may be made via the application form under www.app-art-award.org.

App Art Goes Global.

Text: Julia Jochem

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At the center of the Berlin show is a documentation which presents four thematic areas of the globalization process as focal points in the world of art, such as: art exhibitions that juxtapose the theme of globalization as an artistic practice; the world-wide boom of museums of contemporary art; or the so-called alternative spaces, with the question of which of the various concepts can be realized. In a third chapter, the international art market will be analyzed and finally a fourth section visualizes the rapid, worldwide spread of biennials which define the new art regions and serve as “relay stations for a worldwide distribution of art” (Hans Belting). The panorama projection “trans_actions: the Accelerated Art World 1989-2011” by Stewart Smith, Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Bernd Lintermann, developed at the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media, uses comprehensive data to analyze the time lapse and the geographic spread of the global practice of art. These structural changes also correspond with the formation of a new critical practice in the arts. With their personal view of the geopolitical and cultural changes, fifteen selected artworks expand the panorama.

Since 2006, the research project Global Art and the Museum (GAM) has dedicated itself to this question with numerous events at the ZKM | Karlsruhe including conferences, workshops, summer academies, and three publications. The ZKM exhibition “The Global Contemporary” was a first account taking of 2011/12. In March 2013, the publication “The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds” appeared, which summarizes the research results of GAM and documents the exhibition “The Global Contemporary.” The well-known magazine “Publishers Weekly” introduces this new MIT press publication in its recommended publications for Spring of 2013. The volume sketches how the geography of the arts has changed since the end of the Cold War. Today, contemporary art no longer has to be defined, exhibited, interpreted, or acquired according to a blueprint created in New York, London, Paris or Berlin. The art world has become art worlds. Especially with the emergence of new art scenes such as those in Asia, the Middle East, or the explosion of biennials, globalization of the arts is comparable with that of the greater world economy. The book presents in detail a new cartography in light of the globalization process as well as the increasing significance of contemporaneity in the last twenty years. Available at the ZKM | Shop.

Text: Andrea Buddensieg

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Alex Murray-Leslie, Kiki Moorse and Melissa Logan met at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich in the mid-90s. The “Chicks on Speed”, as they called themselves from that time on, became a multi-national collective dedicated not only to the fine and performing arts, but to music as well. Following early performance projects at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, they soon turned away from conventional attitudes in artistic practices and towards pop. With their self-made instruments, costumes, objects mindmaps and sound installations, they continue until today to deconstruct established roles and stage compositions. From pop, ready-mades, performance and fashion there rapidly emerged art events directed against conventional norms, which may be characterized as non-conformist, feminist, participative. Musically, Chicks on Speed are affiliated with the electroclash genre. Their “performances”, which are consistently marked by improvisation, are characterized by a mix of electronic beats, visual art, choreography and fashion.

In this sense, the performance at the ZKM amounted to a controlled chaos with pop-attitudes – from an elaborately prepared stage ensemble and improvised live show – all making the performance in the ZKM_Cube as attractive as it was unsettling. They left behind them both stage and audience; the apparently evoked “anarchist” chaos became the driving force behind their Gesamtkunstwerk, thus further dismantling the borders between museum, studio and stage. In addition to a concert in the Cube at the ZKM | Karlsruhe, Chicks on Speed (Alex Murray-Leslie, Melissa Logan, Anat Ben-David) gave insights into their current work during a discussion with Ludger Brümmer. Among others, what then emerged was a cover version of Peter Weibel’s “Sex in der Stadt” from 1983.

“Is it art or is it fashion? Does it matter? Not if it makes you think. And what I think when I see this: what a good idea.”

Vanessa Friedmann, Fashion Editor, Financial Times, London

Text: Philipp Baumgarten

Further information on: http://www.chicksonspeed.com/

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The political ideology of Western capitalism and the rhetoric of the Cold War, not aesthetics, served as a foundation and legitimation for the success of modern art. Realism in art was banned as a characteristic of totalitarian systems such as communism and fascism. Therefore, during the decades of the Cold War, modern art was protected by an ideological bubble, defending it from any criticism. But now, with the effects of globalization and the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall marking the end of the Cold War, also a critique of modern art from a perspective beyond Euro-America seems possible.

Now we recognize that there is a new cartography of art as an effect of globalization. New continents and countries, from the Asian to the Arab world, enter the art world. But with this shift  in attention, we experience not only a remapping of the cartography of art, but also a rewriting of art itself. The canon of modern art, linked more or less to the West, to the European–North American axis, is loosening. It may be, as the eminent art historian T. J. Clark has declared, that we are saying farewell to the epoch of modern art at the threshold of the twenty-first century (Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, 1999).

We can observe and name at least several transformations of modern art. The starting point of these transformations is the evidence that in the global art world the keyword is not any more ‘modern’, but ‘contemporary’. From the museum names to auction catalog titles, the word “modern” is substituted by the word “contemporary.” With a fine nose for the Zeitgeist, artist Tino Sehgal instructed his performers, the attendants of the German pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia 2005, to sing for every visitor: “Oh, this is so contemporary!” They did not say: “Oh, this is so modern!” We cannot claim that all the art now produced in Asia or Africa is modern, according to the canon of the West. But it is clear that this art is contemporary. To speak about art as contemporary art and not as modern art is already an effect of global transformations.

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However, globalization did not start in the 1980s as many believe. Globalization happened all the time since 1492 with the discovery of America. The first manifesto against globalization is the communist manifesto by Marx and Engels (1848):

  “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle   everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production   and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it   stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction   becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the   remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter I)

Colonization as a part of globalization led to the discovery of ethnic art, especially in the nineteenth century. As a consequence, the attention and the interest of artists in the visual vocabulary of tribal art rose. Books such as Negerplastik by Carl Einstein (1920) and others from the same period, for example frikanische Plastik (1921) and Afrikanische Märchen und Legenden (1925) show how this interest influenced the rise of modern art from cubism to expressionism and surrealism. Another source for the genesis of modern art was the obscure spiritualism (see the catalogs of the exhibitions Traces du Sacré, Centre Pompidou, Paris [2008] and The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, Los Angeles County Museum of Art [1987]). The result of these influences was the end of representation, the end of classical art and the beginning of modern art.

Around 1913 the classical program of art, as defined by Leonardo da Vinci, to “render visible the universal essence of things” by means of the science of painting using line, point, plane, volume, shadow, and light, was disbanded. The end of representing the world of visible things was declared. One school banned the object entirely from painting and just represented the formal elements of painting (lines, points, planes,…). This representation of the means of the medium painting, starting with Kazimir Malevich and finding in Wassily Kandinsky’s book the programmatic title Point and line to plane: contribution to the analysis of the pictorial elements (1926), is what we call abstract art and it dominated painting and sculpture in the twentieth century. But another school declared just the opposite: this school, starting with Marcel Duchamp, introduced the real object into the art system. The representation of reality was declared to be at an end. Instead, two different, even opposite strategies of representation followed: the representation of the means of art and the representation of things. The object as painterly representation was banned; instead the real object was introduced. Between this bracket, between this binary opposition, modern art happened and developed. Everything that formerly had been representation was substituted by reality: painted landscapes became land art; painted still lifes became collages, assemblages, installations, environments of real things; painted portraits became body art; genre paintings became performances, events, happenings; painted waterfalls were substituted by ‘real’ artificial waterfalls; painted fire was substituted by real fire. Real air, real earth, and real animals were exhibited and, finally, real people. The classical program of art, representation, came to an end with modern art. Representation was completely substituted by reality, by the reality of the elements of representation or the reality of things.

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Slowly a third school arose in the twentieth century, beginning with photography – the reality of media. This school was in conflict with the doctrine of modern art, because photography, film, and video were still media of representation, although they could be combined with real things and real people in installations. Therefore, media were very fitting to transform the doctrine of modern art. Media art rewrote modern art by bridging the gap between representation of artistic means and representation of objects. They created a new reality: media reality.

It is evident that the most influential paradigm in twentieth century art was the covert hegemony of photography. Famous painters such as Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter, or Andy Warhol have painted photographs or have derived their paintings from photographs. From Constantin Brancusi and Man Ray to Erwin Wurm, sculptors have been influenced by photography. Photographic documents are the remnants of land art, performance art, and other genres. Photography was the beginning of a long chain of new technical media of images: film, video, television, computer. The new paradigm of twenty-first century art is the global web, especially since the Web 2.0 revolution: access by all to all media at all times. “Anybody anything anytime anywhere” is the imperative of the new, digital age (see: the publication of a series of books by Cynthia Davidson under the titles Anywise [1996], Anybody [1997], Anyhow [1998], Anytime [1999], Anymore [2000], and Anything [2001]). The media experience has become universal. “Understanding Media” (M. McLuhan, 1964) is the prerequisite for understanding the world. We experience the world through media. “Whatever we know about society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media.” (N. Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, 2000). With an iPod, everyone can make his own radio program: podcasting instead of broadcasting. With video casting everyone can make her own TV program: with the Net everyone has become a sender.

The advent of new media, new materials, and new technologies has had a tremendous effect on contemporary art production. Beyond the market and the museums a huge generation of young artists, designers, and architects all over the world have created a new culture, new visual and acoustic worlds in a new architecture. These productions are normally suppressed by art institutions and therefore the general public has no idea what contemporary art is really about. Contemporary artists all over the world, from Chile to China, work in all media. It would not be correct to neglect one medium (painting) at the expense of another (computer). An exhibition on contemporary art should include all media, all genres, and all disciplines – from sound art to performance art, from installation to painting, from sculpture to Net art – all contemporary forms of time-based and space-based art, because contemporary artists have expanded their vocabulary in all directions and into all media. The equality of materials and media is the artistic equation of our time. This media justice could also be defined as the post-media condition, since today everything is a medium, from a car to a painting. The triumph of media is not the existence of a new media art, but their influence and effect on classical art, from painting to sculpture (R. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, 2000). The postmedia condition is defined by two phases: the equivalence of all media and the mixing of media.

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At the end of the twentieth century, after a battle of one hundred years, the equivalence of the media was finally achieved. Media art, from photography to film, became accepted as a genuine medium of art by collectors, curators, and museums. In this phase each medium has unfolded its own intrinsic material and conceptual qualities and possibilities. Painting has demonstrated the intrinsic value of paint by flowing and dripping techniques. Photography has demonstrated its ability to portray the object world realistically. Film has demonstrated its narrative capability. Video has demonstrated its critical subversion of the mass medium of television. Digital art has demonstrated its powers of imagination in virtual worlds. This phase is more or less completed.

The second phase, which is happening now, is the mixing and crossing of the media. Video, for example, triumphs with the narrative imagination of film by using multiple projections instead of one screen, and telling a story from many perspectives at the same time rather than from just one perspective. Video artists establish a strong relationship to the mass media. They refer to Hollywood stars and Hollywood genres. The mass media play a new role in video art. The border between art and film has blurred. Art as film and film as art has created a new genre. With the availability of new digital cameras and graphics programs, photography is abandoning the realistic world and inventing unseen, virtual worlds. Sculpture can consist of a photo or a videotape. Sculpture can be articulated in any medium: photography, video, or language. Language on LED screens can be a painting, a book, and a sculpture. Video and computer installations can be a piece of literature, architecture, or a sculpture. Photography and video art, originally confined to two dimensions, achieve spatial and sculptural dimensions in installations. Paintings refer to photography or digital graphics programs and use both. Computer graphics programs are called paint programs because they refer to painting. Film is proving to be increasingly dominant in documentary realism, which takes its critique of the mass media from video. The Web supplies dialogs and texts for all media in its chat rooms. The web can produce self-generative pictures and words.

This mixing of the media has led to extraordinary major innovations in each of the media and in art. No single medium is dominant any longer; instead, all of the different media influence and determine each other. The array of all media forms a universal medium. Most artistic practices are not subordinated to the task of representing reality, but instead make references to media. Most artistic productions use media in reference to other media.

References have replaced reality. Naturally, the effect of this tendency is also a counter-reaction: a reenactment of reality, a remaking of historic events, a reentry of history into the present. The reality check is also part of contemporary art practices.

These new arts no longer depicted reality in the way that a map depicts land; they rather create the land and construct the reality. If the predominant equation for twentieth century art can be expressed as: “Machinery, Materials, Men,” then the title of a lecture in 1930 by the architect F. L. Wright, presents the equation for twenty-first century art: “Media, Data, Men” (P. Weibel). The self-representation of the means of representation is as obsolete as the self-representation of things. Media art as an interface between people and the world constructs a world comprised of variables, a world that people can change and influence. The work of the artist now comes close to that of a natural scientist. Like the scientist, the media artist presides over a specific area of competence, such as the surgeon, the chemist, mathematician, physicist, that differentiates him from the amateur. The rise of the amateur, propagated by the dadaists and others, has been realized. Amateurs occupy the field of politics and popular culture. In the era of Reality-TV, the program of reality art sinks into oblivion. The forms of abstraction have fallen from the heroic and the sublime into the patterns of fashion. Thus, in mass culture as well as in art, (as a result of the bifurcation into abstract and realist art), we see the ubiquitous romanticizing of the banal and the trivial (A. C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 1981). It is uniquely media art that has taken on a renaissance approach, has changed and expanded the arts again into a field of individual knowledge, that finds a second clarification in branches and areas of knowledge, as is necessary in an increasingly bureaucratized, globally networked world whose crises, from financial to climate, bear witness to a high degree of incompetence at the core of our civilization.

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Modern art, the modern world and the capitalist world economy stand in a logical relation to one another. Immanuel Wallerstein described the formation of the “modern world system” and the “capitalist world economy” in several books (World Inequality. Origins and Perspectives on the World System, 1975; The Politics of the World-Economy, 1984; The Modern World-System, 1974-89; Historical Capitalism, 1983). The modern global system is a capitalist world economy as a result of European expansionism. The capitalist global economy arose in the sixteenth century in Europe on the back of the accumulation of capital, mechanisms of inequality (unequal exchange), and the division of labor. It is immensely important – if the global economy ought to function – for the world labor force to be ethnicized, for a correlation to be established between ethnicity and economic role; for example, at the international level by imposing low wages on non-European, Asian, or African workers, or at the national level, on immigrants. The visible classification of labor power and ethnic groups provides the index for income distribution, often justified by appealing to “traditions” that were in reality socially constructed. This institutionalized racism (and it goes beyond xenophobia) is one of the most significant pillars of historical capitalism. Racism serves as an all-embracing ideology to justify inequality (W.E.B. Dubois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, 1899).

The second key ideology that serves to maintain capitalism is that of universalism. “The belief in universalism laid the foundations for the ideological vault of historical capitalism.” While the ideology of racism as a mechanism served to control the direct producers (the laborers) worldwide, the ideology of universalism shored up control of the bourgeoisie. The concept of a neutral universal culture, which the ruling cadres of the respective countries all tended to deploy, functioned as the pillar of the global system. The ideology of progress and modernization supported this collection of ideas in forming a universalized whole. Universal culture, a knowledge of the same languages, literary and visual works all became the fraternal signs by which the capital accumulators of the world recognized one another. This universal culture was something that one needed to assimilate to, and historically it aided the expansion of capitalism worldwide. It guaranteed global sales markets for standardized goods, including those of the entertainment and culture industry, for example the worldwide distribution of American movies. In other words, universalism served colonialization and servitude.

Modernism and modern art were part of a European expansion, part of the expansive universal ideology, part of historical capitalism’s ideology of progress. Eurocentric culture as a part of the capitalist world system, beginning in Europe around 1500, is increasingly called into question by colonized countries. Contemporary art in the global age explores the possibilities of a progressive transformation of capitalist world system culture and the difficulties and contradictions that result from it, as well as the possibilities for developing an understanding of other cultures and their egality.

Text: Peter Weibel

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In 1946 journalist and publisher Tony Godwin opened a bookshop at Charing Cross Road 92-94 in London, to which he gave the name »Better Books«. At the time, Godwin had already acquired a certain renown within the world of avant-garde publishing. Together with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a recognized publisher of the Beat-Generation, Godwin augmented the exchange between smaller publishers, and initiated the trading of otherwise out of print or censored books of the London counter-culture.

The cultural revolution, which London underwent during the 1950s and 1960s, transformed perspectives on established culture, and »Better Books« was to soon become the meeting point of a broad spectrum of artists, poets and musicians, but also of writers, filmmakers, and activists of the post-war era. In the process of alienating themselves from the previous generation, they started out in search of new ways of disentanglement, began questioning contemporary art and, in their works, initiated a radical reformulation of artistic creation.

In the show »Better Books: Art, Anarchy and Apostasy« the ZKM presented hitherto rarely exhibited photographs, work of art, films and poems, which testify to this period of upheaval and new departure. The presentation provided deeper insight into the scene in and around »Better Books« which was to evolve into a collecting point for culture critics and become the birthplace of creativity. Along with an insight into the exhibition room, the video shows the curator Rozemin Keshvani who explains the importance of the bookshop for the avant-garde movement in London.

Text: Stefanie Jakob

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On Open Day many visitors used the opportunity to visit the exhibition »Sound Art. Sound as a Medium of Art« for the last time. This expressed itself, among others, in the somewhat anarchic, eight-hour sound concert, drown out by the vivid “dong” of the favorite work of art “Life counts death” by Werner Reiterer.

In addition to those who visited the exhibition by themselves or were equipped with sheets for the museums rally, many visitors joined the free guided tours. During these, visitors not only listened and tested, but themselves even set new music and performed creatively, such as in the Action guided tour “Sound Comic”, in which participants made the works speak and sound with colorful “comic bubbles” or assumed the role of a curator, holding speeches and providing answers on works of art.

In the media workshop, a colorful and very creative public were busy with animations. On a trail between the Media Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art captions were printed on 60 meters of unprinted newspaper. Meanwhile children of all ages – inspired by the presentation of  “Giselas Logbuch” [Gisela’s logbook] – could design their own elaborate popup-cards.

Visitors were able to take a break in the homely reader’s corner installed in the HfG artrium – with almost 11.000 visitors, a coffee, a comfortable seat and a normal, analog Sunday newspaper between activities really does some good!

Text: ZKM | Museum Communication

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During his lifetime Friedrich Kittler’s works were the subjects of fierce debates that ranged far beyond the horizon of academic teaching and self-teaching. When the media philosopher died in Berlin on October 11^th of last year (in 2009 he had stated, “I’d rather be just a philosopher of course, but things aren’t so simple anymore”), the scientific bad boy image was still prominent in the news announcements and obituaries surrounding his death. His friend Jürgen Kaube wrote in the FAZ obituary of the “thirteen points of advice” that should be considered. “They didn’t even want to give him his doctorate when he was Assistant Professor in Freiburg,” in 1982. In short: the debate over Friedrich Adolf Kittler’s dissertation Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 became just as legendary as the work itself – so much so that others also read thirteen points out of the original nine points  - and as a result Kittler turned his back on literary science. Emerging from Freiburg’s 1970s poststructuralist German scholars, the engineer / computer programmer took self learning to its highest heights in the 1980s and, finally, in his later years, became the image of a 19^th-century German professor, completely dedicated to the mythology of Greek Antiquity. His program was often described by his thesis of the “expulsion of the liberal spirit from the liberal arts” (“Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften”); in 2001 he wrote: “How is it that people in Europe love learning but do not learn to love?”

Friedrich Kittler’s theses, his programs, claims, methods, techniques, his lively eclecticism, and his exuberant intellectualism, shaped (at least) a whole generation of researchers, artists, and those who recognized liberal spirits.

Some time before his passing, Kittler had already planned his exit from the academic stage – with a last symposium. This was meant to be a shotgun blast, his (scientific) legacy. The title he gave it:  Of Gods and Scripts Around the Mediterranean. At this event, once again all of the lines that he cast in the fields of media studies, linguistics, cultural studies and literature were meant to come together, to cross paths, and open up perspectives. This event took place not long ago at ZKM | Karlsruhe (Fri–Sat, 19–20 October 2012) in a highly impressive way, with the supplementary title: In memoriam Friedrich Kittler.

The ZKM_Media Theater offered the ideal location for the symposium’s venue and the dim blue light recalled Gottfried Benn, whom Kittler so admired, and his love of this color: “Blue, what pleasure, what pure adventure …”. At the same time the parallel-running exhibition at ZKM “Sound Art. Sound as a Medium of Art” corresponded uncannily with the work and life of the sound-engineer and rock music lover, Kittler. Noises, sound fragments, language, these ultimately also shaped Kittler’s cosmos.

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Kittler spoke once of the “gods who live in machines.” The quotation could hardly be more apt in connecting the content of the first and second symposium days. While Friday’s theme investigated ancient Greece, the mythological world of classical Antiquity, and the emergence of scripts and language, the peculiarities of cuneiform writing and hieroglyphs, the development of vowels, consonants in the Mediterranean area (and beyond, from that perspective), Saturday’s theme was the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century and the new gods, the “Machines, machines [that] conquered the Earth’s crust” (Kurt Pinthus, Die Überfülle des Erlebens; 1925). Gods were what ultimately fascinated Kittler for many years and inspired his creativity. Wasn’t he himself the kind of “priest in a white laboratory coat” whose existence he claimed was responsible for animating and blessing the inner life of machines?

One question that the symposium left unanswered (or had to leave unanswered) was: Is it possible to speak in a way that is not fragmentary about Kittler, whose methods were so fundamentally shaped by the characteristic of fragmentarism? A mixture of “precision and messiness,” commented Tania Hron, cultural studies scholar and a long-term assistant to Kittler, described his unique system, his technique. Consequently, this comprised only notes, exclusively fragments.

“Why was Jesus crucified?” Friends of Kittler reported of his passionate interest, during his last years, in the history of (early) Christianity. Kittler’s original thesis casts Jesus as a “media striker,” as a “media rebel,” and his murderers are the rabbis, the literate men. He makes the Torah readable for poor people, and shifts them away from the idea of “cryptography,” and writes vowels. Jesus was thus a “heretical rabbi, who puts vowels to / vocalizes Hebrew” and therefore also makes the Torah understandable / readable for the Aramaeans; this is the language of the poor. Jesus reads Hebrew; he is the “Hebrew-literate prodigy” – there is no need for the scribe any longer; only “idiots remain with the consonants.” The Berlin cultural studies scholar Gerhard Scharbert collects the pieces of Kittler’s fragmented literary estate into a complexity and forms a grisaille window of great transparency and beauty in the blue-light saturated media theater. He does so above all in Kittler’s characteristic style of being “enraptured” through the love of the subject, which also knows and tolerates “speculation, […] errors, autodidactic exaggeration and unsubstantiated claims” (Kaube). Ludwig Morenz elaborates: “Misunderstandings often lead to cultural promotion!” which is as true today as it was then, one might add. The creation of language, written language, the alphabet, states the Egypt scholar from Bonn, Morenz, is in fact only conceivable as multi-causational, which was an important result of the discussions on the first day. Not one or two aspects, but a whole mix of the most diverse historical, economic, geographical, political, religious, and cultural aspects had a constitutive effect.

“Through thought, a new language,” describes the cultural studies scholar Peter Berz of the Humboldt University in Berlin, the way in which Kittler himself forms (with and in regard to Martin Heidegger) a “mixture from which the unpredictable emerges” and which one must be able to follow when speaking “about things from ideas” (Siegfried Zielinski; University of the Arts, Berlin).

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“A literary science professor is worthless if he has never himself written poetry,” is a statement that is likewise attributed to Kittler. A media archeologist is worthless, if he can’t bury himself in his medium, one might think as a correlate, with regard to Friedrich Kittler’s passionate synthesizer creations. He bought parts from all over the world, had building instructions sent to him, screwed, soldered, glued parts together. Sebastian Döring (media archaeologist, Berlin) and Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag (artist, composer, theorist, Berlin) pursued the question: Can Kittler’s synthesizer be read like a black box? How is the anatomy of the five magic boxes created? In film and sound installation, it is asked what writing hidden within the devices could be read, for it is forbidden for them to sound. The German Literature Archive Marbach, the “schwäbisch-deutsche Gedächtnisanstalt,” does not allow it. The resulting sound could, however, never reproduce that of the late 1970s’ and early 1980s’ early synthesizer generation; these represent an analog wonderland, always “off pitch.” The slightest change in room temperature or humidity have an effect on the sound.

What ultimately comprises Friedrich Kittler’s legacy? What does it consist of, essentially? Along with the writing he left behind, excerpted sentences, notes jotted down, circuit diagrams, chess sketches on TypoScripts, he leaves behind above all the hardware / source code: sound tapes, hard drives, diskettes, CD-ROMs, note card boxes. Much research on the unwritten / yet to be written books was contained in his system, which could only be entirely understood by him (precision vs. messiness). Over many years he researched color ascription in literature: “But this life is not long enough” [F. Kittler]. From the nicotine-yellow-clouded legacy, suddenly something personal: pictures of his mother, father, and brother. School grade report. Friedrich Adolf Kittler: the saxophonist of a school band.

Paul Feigelfeld, information scientist and cultural studies scholar in Berlin, told of Kittler’s panicked nightly calls. Once it was a melted graphics card (in fact one of the highly appraised “KATASTROPHE(N)!”), once a problem that could be easily resolved by turning the computer off and back on again. A solution that one can repeat until either the device, or the operator, gives up (c.f. Synthesis by Peter Weibel, 1967). Feigelfeld creates an image, illustrates the memory: Kittler at his Linux machine all night, smoking, in his office – how he organized, wrote, programmed: “The way that Kittler wrote programs is not done by anyone anymore: without a programming environment and the like, often weeks-long” [P. Feigelfeld]. In his “manic ecstasy of signifiers” the User_Ich goes to the borders of his hardware, his board (a “lively, epistemological thing”). And each Thursday in his office he gathered around him the followers, the youths, to smoke, experiment, discuss mathematical problems and Greek gods, the radio operator Guderian, and the color theories of Goethe.

Kittler was present, manically so, whether he wanted it or not. “Being, as it was sent by Europa, was the state of being constantly present – what is transient, such as roses, butterflies, and people, appeared to be nothing in light of him,” he wrote approximately 10 years ago. People do indeed come and go. What remains? First, the nostalgic memory of this symposium. And how Erika Kittler laughed so beautifully when she tested the sound installation “Rain Dance” by Paul DeMarinisso, using her umbrella, on the ZKM square. Sometimes a lifetime is not enough.

Sven Gringmuth studied media studies, history, social pedagogy, and social studies at the University of Siegen. He wrote his dissertation on the principle semantics in Diedrich Diederichsen’s early works and he works at the University of Siegen as teaching staff for special tasks in the area of new German literary science and cultural science.

Text: Sven Gringmuth

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[Quote by F. Kittler] This comes from his long-term assistant Tania Hron, who reported it in the context of a symposium lecture. Kittler was said to have sighed, when looking upon his comprehensive note card system, that he had still wanted to write so many books, put so much to paper, “But this life is not long enough …”.

[Quote P. Feigelfeld] Paul Feigelfeld, information and cultural scientist in Berlin.

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As the son of Japanese parents, Hiroshi Kawano, was born in Fushun, China, in 1925. He moved to Japan in 1935. In 1948 he began studies in philosophy with a special emphasis on aesthetics at the University of Tokyo. Kawano, who had learnt German at school, initially dedicated his studies to neo-Kantianism before turning to semiotics and finally to information theory, a model emerging from communications engineering. It was in the writings of the Stuttgart-based physicist and philosopher Max Bense, that Kawano discovered elements of existentialist and pragmatist thought, above all, however, the possibility of connecting semiotics, information theory and aesthetics. Bearing in mind Bense’s Programmierung des Schönen [Programming of the Beautiful] (1960) Kawano taught himself programming in the autumn of 1963. As early as September 1964, he published the first computer graphics in the Japanese IBM Review, which he calculated with the aid of the OKITAC 5090A. Further experiments in the field of computer generated poetry and music were to follow.

Hiroshi Kawano taught at numerous universities, among others, at Nihon University, Tokyo, the Tokyo Metropolitan College of Air-Technology, the Metropolitan College of Technology, the Metropolitan Institute of Technology, the Nagano University, the Tohoku University of Art and Design, and the Tama Art University. In 1986 he gained his PhD from Osaka University. In addition to teaching, he wrote and published continuously: fourteen monographs and almost three hundred articles have appeared since 1954.

In 2010, Hiroshi Kawano donated his entire archive and all the works remaining in his possession to the ZKM | Karlsruhe. But this is only one of the reasons why our institution is committed to his work. For the philosopher not only presented the ZKM with precious artifacts. During his visits in 2010 and 2011, he gave us the opportunity to meet him in person. His intellectual independence, his curiosity and warmth, fascinated and touched us and our visitors.

Speeches held at the opening of exhibitions are commonly accompanied by a nervous murmuring among the public. In 2011, when Hiroshi Kawano took the microphone at the ZKM Foyer to talk about his life and work, a hush came over the public; this silence was sustained through to the very last word.

Text: Margit Rosen

Image: Hiroshi Kawano at the ZKM in June 2010

© ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

Photo: ONUK

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The moving image, whether film or video has a unique history especially in the East: “In the previous century, we became accustomed to the idea that the first techno-avant-garde of art originated in Western Europe and North America. This idea is wrong. Almost all the foundations for the development of electronic image and sound worlds were discovered and invented in the East.” (Siegfried Zielinski)

During the communist era, the moving image was a common art form, which was mostly used for propaganda purposes; today, it functions primarily as a decisive force for critical artistic expressions. The utopian claims of early socialism proved themselves redundant during the struggle for survival and the experiences of a commercially and economically ruined society. Hence, for the purposes of the exhibition, focus was placed on the image as a medium of expression. For the exhibition a selection was made of those artists who worked primarily with the moving image. What they all share in common is their reflections on contemporary social conditions, whereby the exhibition provides an overview of the artistic ecosystem of those Eastern European countries that managed to step out of the shadow of demise then underway within the Soviet Union.

Text: Dominika Szope

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