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Europäische Akademie, Berlin, 25.-27.10.2001 Abstracts (english)
[Stand
23.10.2001]
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Arns (Berlin)
Considering the technically implementable movability, fluidisation and mobility of texts and images, one increasingly notes a “loss of inscription” in net art and net literature. Texts/works, so it is asserted, are characterised more and more by permanent change and fleetingness and no longer by materially established statics. My hypothesis is that the notion of “loss of inscription”, with its focus exclusively upon the surface text as the “text” of net art or net literature, is based upon the wrong formulation of the question. It is not sufficient, regarding the “surface effects of software” – the dynamic presentation of data by staging information and animation, to speak of a “performative turn” of graphic user interfaces (1), because this view limits itself to the performativity of those surfaces. One should rather assume the existence of two texts, a “phenotext” and a “genotext”, when examining net art and net literature projects. The surface effects of the phenotext, i.e. moving texts, are generated and controlled by other underlying “effective” texts, programming codes or source texts. (Linear, static) programming codes are illocutionary speech acts (2) insofar as “saying” and “doing” coincide and these speech acts with the “power to act” don’t merely describe or represent something, but directly affect, put into motion. This “coded performativity”(3) has direct, even political consequences on the virtual spaces in which we increasingly move: here the code is law. (4) The question of the performativity of code as the actual text that moves is much more interesting than the surfaces affected by it, because it is a more ambivalent and perhaps also more moving question. (1) Peter Matussek: Performing
Memory. Kriterien für einen Vergleich analoger und digitaler Gedächtnistheater.
In: Paragrana 10 (2001), H. 1, S. 291-320. [Teil A] http://www.culture.hu-berlin.de/PM/Pub/Kul/Perfo(A).html
Inge
Baxmann (Berlin)
The “Border Culture” that
has developed in the border region between Latin America and the US, notably
on the border of Tijuana and San Diego, has been stylised since the 1980s
as a model for identities in a “third space” between cultures, as an experimental
field for postmodern and transnational ways of life. In the 1990s, the
Border concept was expanded to include not just a specific territorially
localisable space but a proliferation of border zones, for example in architectural
spaces of North American and European metropoles. The border issue is only
part of a new politics of place where culture is deterritorialised, in
contrast to the obsolete notion of a correspondence between culture and
specific territory. Using border singer El Vez, migration films and festive
rituals of Chicanos in Los Angeles as examples, certain specifics of movement
cultures’ role can be reconstructed, movement cultures as a medium for
coping with life in the transnation and for developing an imaginary of
the transnation. Movement cultures not only comprise dance, but also gestures,
rituals, performance, even outfits and performative styles in everyday
life.
Florian
Cramer (Berlin)
Quirinus Kuhlmann’s 41st
Libes-Kuß
(Kiss of Love) about “Wechsel menschlicher Dinge” (Change of Human Things)
has become a classic, albeit an eccentric one, of the sonnet form. Its
words are interchangeable, thus generating a 117 digit number of text permutations.
As the poem’s title announces, change occurs not only syntactically through
the combinatory possibilities of its words, but also its semantic arrangements
and allegorical references. Is the poem’s text a fixed notation or mobile
sign material of the combinatory process? The fact that Kuhlmann wrote
the changeable words down not only in sonnet verse but also on a mechanical
“changing wheel” doesn’t make the issue any less complicated.
Natascha
Drubek-Meyer (München)
The hypothetical object of
my research is the cine(mato)graphies in the 20th century, i.e. literary
and theoretical writings about cinema, writings inspired by cinema or film
and filmic writing (cinécriture). The notion of film as writing
is old as the word “cinematograph” itself. However, my understanding of
the cine(mato)graphic is an ever-shifting concept that includes recording
movement (the classic “cinematograph”), moving recordings, recordings of
the recording process and of movement of the modes and localities of recording
as well as of the recording’s own reflection. Changes in the concept of
the Cine(mato)graphic implies an establishment of the theoretical within
film itself, but also the suppression of signals coming from film’s metalevel.
Perhaps these are communicative vessels: the less theoretical texts define
discourse, the more implicit metalevels are created in film itself. Stalin-era
Soviet cine(mato)graphy offers excellent examples of such hidden writing
in film. My paper will attempt to define the way these self-reflexive cine(mato)graphies
should be positioned between avantgarde and postmodernism, between Eisenstein’s
“intellectual montage” and Deleuze’s thinking images. Point of departure
is the graphy of movement, which moves through various media and types
of discourse, as a “metatheoretical challenge” in film theory.
Mirjam
Goller (Berlin)
My paper will present two
variants of de-formation:
Sabine
Gross (Wisconsin-Madison)
Text is unthinkable without
time, time unthinkable without movement of bodies in space. Every text
is a record of movement, as the fixed trace of the activity in which it
originated. For readers, it provides a score for their psychophysical movement
through the text.
Sabine
Hänsgen (Bremen)
The train motif forms one
of the origins of cinematography. Particularly the Lumière film
“Arrival of a Train at Ciotat” sparked a debate about a new experience
of the visual in Russia’s traditionally literature-centred cultural awareness.
The development of a film-specific visual language can be traced
in train sequences of avantgarde cinema. In the 1930s, the visualisation
of movement had to take backseat to the use of the train motif as a means
of portraying Soviet mythology. The train symbolised the country’s modernisation,
the spatial expansion of the home frontier as well as the creation of a
standardised centre-periphery structure.
Aage
A. Hansen-Löve (München)
Gudrun
Heidemann (Bielefeld)
As a sign, writing is always
predetermined, even when it is transportable and reports movements. In
the face of progressing technical (including also transportation) and medial
acceleration, the limitations of the “graphostatics” of writing become
evident to literary authors. These limitations need to be compensated,
for example with cinematographic narrative effects which not only introduce
the “rival” medium film into a literary context, but also set signifying
processes in motion. Predetermined written signs “shift gears”, as they
allow semantically and medially reflected acceleration and deceleration
to occur. At the beginning of the last, speed-determined century, this
was especially true of depictions of train journeys, since these are characterised
by velocity changes and interruptions. For both the writing and reading
passenger, the passing landscapes, train stations and cities are reduced
to appearances. This passive point of view sets the captured moments in
motion and immobilises them, allowing meanings to be (“de-“/”re-“)generated.
This paper will demonstrate, on the basis of train journeys described by
Boris Pasternak in his 1929 “Safe Conduct” (“Ochrannaja gramota“), how
that author shifts meanings like gears with locomotive narrative strategies.
Guido
Heldt (Berlin)
Ennio Morricone’s scores
for Sergio Leone are usually remembered as static rather than moving -
Morricone’s unabashedly obvious musical figures, clichés distilled
into uniqueness, as well as the frozen visual tableaux from which the music
cannot be separated.
Anke
Hennig (Bochum)
Inspired by Soviet-style
dialectics which universalised motion and change, J. Joffe proposed a classification
of the arts in the 1930s and examines formations which emerge within a
historical system of styles. Joffe uses art terminology and history according
to the principles of mobility and mutability.
Stefan
Hesper (Fröndenberg)
Every event is positioned
in a time in which nothing happens. From “Logique du sens” (1969) onwards,
Gilles Deleuze has continually quoted this observation by Bernhard Groethuysen.
[1] What doesn’t anything happen during an event? In his fundamental
treatise on narrative theory, Groethuysen demonstrates that an event is
both an interruption and a new beginning of a sequence of actions. The
event suspends the time of movement and action. For him, the art of narrative
lies in reinstating openness and contingency through the act of narration,
but under the precondition that the narrator´s past and present don´t
mix. However, Deleuze adds, there is a second dimension of events, the
vertical dimension. In the vertical (or traumatic) dimension, the event
corresponds to others regardless of differences and dissimilarities – like
a window of coexistence of times and possibilities.
1 „De quelques aspects du
Temps. Notes pour une phénomenologie du Récit.“ (1935/1936),
in: Bernhard Groethuysen, Philosophie et histoire. Edité
par Bernard Damdois, Paris, 1995, 217-270.
Ernö
Kulcsár-Szabó (Berlin)
Within the framework of this
conference, I will restrict my paper to a single aspect of the theme proposed
in the title and focus on a poetry-historical issue, the question of temporal
detectability in lyrical texts using kinetographic techniques between High
and Late Modernism in the 1930s. Of central methodological interest is
the question whether the examination of textualised “images of movement”
is relevant within a possible historical paradigm of Modernist literature
or whether the insights gained can also be operationalised in terms of
grasping the (contradictory) way of being of the poetic image per se.
Verena
Olejniczak Lobsien (Berlin)
Taking as its systematic
starting point the concept of "translative", i.e. allegorical, discourse
in the special sense articulated by the 16th-century English theorist George
Puttenham, this paper will try to describe and distinguish varieties of
translative writing in texts by Shakespeare (As you like it, 1599),
Nashe (The Unfortunate Traveller, 1595), and W.G. Sebal (Austerlitz,
2001). It appears, that the chronotope which has the greatest affinities
with the type of imagination presupposed by this concept is that of travelling
- albeit a kind of travelling which, in some of its most impressive literary
realizations, paradoxically combines movement and standstill in a deeply
melancholy configuration.
Bettine
Menke (Erfurt)
According to Jean Paul, the
reality of sounds, regardless of their power to affect, lies in their non-presence.
This applies not only to a “Romantic metaphysics” of sounds, but
also determines acoustics. For the ear, sound exists through precisely
its non-presence, provided it is movement in time. Ernst Florens Chladni
defined sound as “audible vibrations of an elastic body”, as “a trembling
movement”.
“This movement alone is what affects hearing under the conditions which
shall indicated later.” Sound exists only as a notification of movement.
Chladni’s “acoustic figures” transposed vibrations and the undirected movements
that make up sound into two-dimensional figures and presented “simple
types of vibrations not just audibly, but also visibly.” This new analogue
sound recording is based upon the oscillation (which sounds are) and excludes
precisely this motion from the figure. Resonance should manifest itself
as a (paradox) “shape” (to use a term of Clemens Brentano’s) of uncertainty
and as that uncertainty’s dis-solution in the surgence. The acoustic figure’s
constitutive paradox has (already) captured the images as (excluded) flowing
movement. In this painting (in the verse novel Godwi), motion itself has
seemingly become “visible”: “Everything disappears...The colours are movable,
they flee...and seem to surge as the sound fades.” The image itself is
phantasmasised as an “acoustic image” that can only be moved by sound because
it doesn’t remain an image “of something”: “the eye becomes sensitive hearing
in front of its images...:it is as if waves of soft iambs surge through
the painting”- so that this is not (yet) an image but is still becoming.
In “quiet surgence”, it is an always missed, dis-solved and (only momentarily)
given image.
Brigitte
Obermayr (Salzburg/Berlin)
The narrative function is
losing its functors, / its great hero, its great dangers, / its great voyages,
its great goal.
You know, I could write a
book. / And this book would be thick enough to stun an ox. / ‘Cause I can
see the future, and it’s a place. / About seventy miles east of here, where
it’s lighter.
My paper’s point of departure
is the multiple meanings of the word “trip” commonly used in the German
language. The word can mean a cool short journey; a hallucinatory absence,
specific perceptions of space, time, colour, speed, or self after
drug consumption or other addictive substances or habit- forming media
(TV junkies); or a short-term, intense enthusiasm and identification-forming
interest in something. In this sense, “trip” can be understood as the distillation
of journey, adventure, flight, emigration, speed, simulacrum and polar
inertia. Recent Russian literature is marked by the conspicuously intensive
use of recurring motifs and themes of temporary loco-motion or unusual
spatial and temporal relationships in various types of literary solutions;
these motifs are called “trips”. In this context, M.M. Bakhtin’s definition
of chronotopos as a determining characteristic of the novel is heightened
and at the same time fragmented. The criterium for “trips” is not so much
the speed leading to polar inertia as a measurable vectorial quantity (according
to Paul Virilio, speed and mobility phenomena renew the category of place
– places become indifferent, the subject or passenger becomes identical
to the vehicle and the transit space); rather, the criterium is a
kind of flimmering bedingung of any state and condition.
Vladimir
Papernyj (Los Angeles)
In the early 1960s there
emerged a group of young Russian artists and designers under the name Kinetism
(sometimes also called "Dvizhenie"). The two most prominent figures of
the group were Lev Nussberg and Francisco Infante. Paintings, models, installations
and performances of the group stressed the idea of movement, changes, transformation.
Each painting was understood as a single frame of some future grandiose
movie. Each photograph represented some future grandiose mass performance.
Winfried
Pauleit (Berlin)
This paper is based on my
dissertation on Film Stills. Passages Between Art and Cinema which
discusses stasis and movement in art and cinema and, in a second step,
also examines the formation of theory. I would like to present as an example
an (artistic) work by John Baldessari from 1976 that uses an “anonymous”
film still. Baldessari’s work Violent Space Series: Two Stares Making
a Point But Blocked by a Plane (For Malevich) is not only dedicated
to Kasimir Malevich but also revisits Malevich’s examination of the representability
of the experience of movement in art.
Valerij
Podoroga (Moskau)
This paper centres on a comparison
of Aleksej German and Aleksandr Sokurov, two leading directors of contemporary
Russian auteur film. The paper will focus primarily on their most recent
films, German’s Khrustalev, mashinu! (Khrustalyov, My Car!) and
Sokurov’s Molokh (Moloch). In these films, two distinct politics
of image are negotiated, renewing the fundamental oppositions in the “Petersburg
Text” of Russian Imperial culture. (The phenomenon of the “Petersburg Text”
has been examined by V. Toporov, Ju. Lotman and other followers of the
Tartu- Moscow culture-semiotic school.). The analysis will be based on
the comparison of two presentation techniques of image systems (or “visual
worlds”) in the work of German and Sokurov. Of utmost importance is the
order and the “exactness” of the chosen oppositions which will enable us
to discern irreconcilable differences in the aesthetic strategies of both
artists and to gain insight into their philosophical world views.
Stefan
Rieger (Konstanz)
Kinetographic space is determined
by media and disturbances. Only with the help of technical means of recording
have all types of movement become negotiable and it is therefore possible
to discern when a movement seems efficient, graceful or disturbed and thus
pathological. Especially cybernetics, which have found application in every
area as a science of controlling technical aspects, became the space in
which theories and concepts of human movement were negotiated. Technical
and anthropological knowledge forms a control circuit whose object in turn
is other control circuits. All references which could be subsumed under
the term feedback comprise, in different states of reciprocal awareness
and penetration, physiology, neurology, biology, technical circuit control
and not least of all philosophical anthropology. Regarding this, theories
of human movement become virulent which are enabled by the technology itself.
Discussion about how humans organise their bodies, execute movements or
simply assume certain postures are indebted to this technological discipline.
Michail
Ryklin (Moskau)
Thomas
Schestag (Frankf./M.)
The paper will discuss a
scene late in Proust’s Recherche in which the death of the author
Bergotte is certified by the authority-wielding narrator whose authority
regarding the dead author is encapsulated in the following sentence: il
était mort. This certification not only of the author’s death, but
also of his authority – obviously the authority of an author - verifying
the death of the author, is eroded in the next sentence (and sentence following
the next): “Mort à jamais? Qui peut le dire?” The emerging doubts
about the authority of the sentence “il était mort” and doubts as
to the authority of he who utters this sentence fragment the attention
paid to the word “mort” and enlarge the ruptures in the outline of the
word’s interpretation as a signifier, revealing a mobility in the word
mort which no sentence replaces or immobilises in or beyond the word (back
before the word).
Harro
Segeberg (Hamburg)
The Lumière Brothers
ended the experimental phase of early filming devices with the serial production
of recording and production equipment called kinemato- graphs or movement
recorders; indeed, one of the first films, acknowledged as early as 1896
by Russian writer Maxim Gorky in Nishnij-Novgorod, depicts the Arrival
of A Train at La Ciotat of the film’s title. Film has been assigned
the task of recording and reproducing movement and speed ever since, and
the Holly- wood thriller Speed (1994), by European director Jan
de Bont, fits into the context of this speed-oriented history of cinema.
Indeed, that film asserts that the essence of modernism and the essence
of cinema coincide within the recording of explosive (in every sense) motion.
Thus, Speed doesn’t merely discuss speed, the film itself is an
explosively edited speed-generating machine. My paper will explain the
construction of this speed-generating machine using selected clips, and
my guiding premise will be that cinema comprises not only moving images
but also audiovision. In other words: Through the film’s mise-en-scène,
editing and montage, Speed, too, is characterised by its construction
from heterogenous semiotic material, unlike the homogenous letter text
of literature.
Anton
Sergl (Berlin)
In Antiquity, countless theories
about the effect of art were developed. Except for two, all are esoteric.
Among the exoteric theories, biodynamics, especially Aristotle’s catharsis
theory, has played a prominent role in theatre. This paper, however, will
discuss the Epicurean notion of “moral movement”. Cicero thoroughly elaborates
and controversially discusses this “kinetic ethics” in some of his texts
(Discussions at Tusculum and De bonum et malorum). Unlike
Epicure, Cicero justifies “kinetic ethics” also in non-pedagogical and
non-aesthetic contexts. Cicero considers “kinetic ethics” within the tradition
of Lucretian Atomism for a given of nature which can be grasped quasi analytically
and which should be considered as a condition of human existence. In common
language usage, “kinetic ethics” is used especially as an aesthetic category.
Everyone who shows himself “moved” by a work of art uses this category.
In the 18th century, “kinetic aesthetics” was incorporated into the Theory
of Emotion. The cathartic theatre of conventional tragedy and comedy was
contrasted by the melodrama which had an entirely different effect and
explored the conditions of “kinetic aesthetics” not only formally but also
in its content. Especially in 19th century Russian literature, “kinetic
aesthetics” has left marked traces, surely most prominently in the prose
(or dialogues) of Gogol’, Tolstoj and Dostoevskij. The “Cicero” content
of these works, in terms of the potential of their aesthetic self-reflection,
is probably their least discussed aspect. “Kinetic aesthetics” as an aesthetic
category has been rediscovered after Russian realism in Western literatures.
I would like to introduce Rilke’s late text Urnaht and compare it
to its “discursive forbears” in the works of Cicero and Tolstoj.
Cornelia
Soldat (Berlin)
After the independence of
the Polish state, the nationalist tendencies of Polish literature began
to yield to the theories of the European Avantgarde. In newly formed groups,
painters, graphics, writers, and poets began to work towards new aesthetics
of avantgarde art in poetry, painting, art, and architecture.
Sven
Spieker (Santa Barbara)
My paper will examine the
nexus between the avantgarde notion of shock as a speed phenomenon and
the bureaucratic archive. In this context, I would like to discuss modern
office media as catalysts for the concept of memory in the historical avantgarde,
especially in regard to the connection between perception, recording and
velocity. The paper centres on Le Corbusier’s discussion in The Decorative
Art of Today of mechanical office filing, which he considers the mnemonic
counterpart to the mechanical limbs of war disabled. He seems to argue
that the modern office is part of a bureaucracy of the subconscious for
which Freud literally provided the blueprint.
Susanne
Strätling (Berlin)
The paradox of kinetography
coalesces into allegorical expression with the written-up statue. The entwining
of immobilising mortification and dynamic revitalisation thus becomes a
figure of literary-iconic sculpting, oscillating between the hand, the
eye and the word in the following ways:
Henning
Teschke (Osnabrück)
Since Zenon argued that movement
and change don't really exist at all, metaphysics have sought the superior
being in an immovable realm called idea, form, essence, spirit, concept
or whatever. Bergson was the first to rethink the relationship between
presence and representation, matter and mind, inner and outer world in
pure terms of movement, resulting in a half mystical, half materialistic
theory of freedom. To think of movement not in terms of an invariable,
underlying substance requires an idea of man as an essentially creative
one. Philosophy and art offer outstanding contributions to this bustling
movement of life. The complex ontology of indeterminations and differences
strives for new ways of thinking, new kinds of feeling, new forms
of perceptions, for a new society, tout court. It was up to Deleuze, Benjamin
and Simone Weil to unfold the aesthetical, Marxist and messianic consequences
of the metaphysics of movement.
Heike
Winkel (Bochum)
Georg
Witte (Berlin)
My paper will examine a production
spiral of speed and imagination in sentimentalist travel literature. Speed
produces imagination (vertigo and vortex effects), but speed is also an
effect of imagination (imaginative techniques of acceleration). Coach travel
becomes the condition both of a prosaic-rendering, boredom-inducing deceleration
as well as of a hallucinogenic excess of rhetorical-poetic ”Pegasoi”. Writing
performs a function in this spiral: writing makes things fast, and writing
must be made fast. The journey becomes a chronotopos of accelerated literalness.
Travel correspondence invents its own kinetic state (second-order correspondence
which adds dynamics; skipping of epistolary intervals, letter artefacts
as traces of movement; writing motion as a performative substitute for
transport) The paper will cite examples from Russian literature (Radišcev,
Karamzin, Nevzorov, Murav'ev, Galinkovskij).
Peter
Zajac (Berlin)
Dmitri
Zakharine (Konstanz)
The term “kinetographies“ will be used in the following paper in the context of systematic and historical behavioural studies. The paper will focus on the parallel study of verbal, kinetic and proxemic sign systems and their role in public communication. Firstly, proxemic relationships, that is body distance, are represented symbolically, notably in how the socially superior maintain distance in every society through special regulations and distance markers such as the dress train, the group of bodyguards or the long desk. The second normative difference refers to kinetic signs, primarily body movement and poses. Thirdly, the verbal sign system, especially spoken language including its phonetic differentiations (voice register, tone and speech accompanying signals such as coughing, tongue clacking etc.), constitutes a behaviour model subject to rules which determines several mechanisms for switching between different social norms. Thus every society’s symbolic order contains typologically constant differentiations such as “spatial order – movement order – language order” which manifest themselves in various periods as historically determined sign configurations. These configurations are shaped by both transformation over time (continuity) and contextual differences (discontinuity). In the latter case, the comparison between Western European, Eastern European and non-European cultures seems relevant. [last updated 23 October
2001 by webmaster]
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