Ziegfried Zielinski: Lecture 3

Professor Zielinski's thesis: Photography was invented by the Christian church in Spain.

Giovanna Fontana appr. 1420 wrote books on various technologies. "The Book of War Instruments." Self-moving automatons. Developed cryptology to write book.

"Battles of Images" Exhibition. Osnabrueck 2009.

[Technology reflects culture.]

Electronic TV stems from St. Petersburg, Russia.

Optics--> monasteries in Sicily.

An issue of excess to basics. Replacing energy with fire. Powering the internet with candles. Empty contemporary. There are different variants of Modern Ages. "Modern" as an attitude--> not testing and appropriating. Pure experimentation. What is "subversive work" nowadays?

The gesture of praising & not critiquing.

Destruction of everyday experience is no longer an avant-garde attitude. The world is something to be celebrated and not destroyed. A return of the "ceremonious".

3rd Element: Something Larger than the Individual. A return to the Divine. Otherwise all experimental efforts are in vain. The Digital Age is merging once again with the Divine.

Universal programmable control unit from Arabic Medieval 12th century would later already always be considered modern.

-Dani Karawan, Isreali sculptor. Memorial for Benjamin in Port-Bou, 2003.

Short Film: A Street Arab, Cairo-Egypt, 1898.--> Contemporary Breakdancing Culture in late 20th century USA.

[How can poetry embrace commercialism while still remaining avant-garde..]

To discover something new in the old. Why can't appropriation be a form of praise? Respect for the dignity of the other.

[Never stop asking where you are and what you are doing.]

[To be content with having one person as your audience.]

[There is no stepping outside of a culture. It can only be done through intellect and the imaginary while still being in it. To be outside it through intellect and the imaginary is vulnerable to violence.]

Art is a task to make others sensitive; the aesthetic praxis of this sensitivity is secondary. To grow exponential understanding for that which we don't understand. Technology provides the possibility for application of this innately human understanding inseparable from emotion.

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Arabic Optics

A Renaissance invention-->Leonardo da Vinci.
Objectivisation of seeing stemmed from ancient greek and roman knowledge.

Plaot (ca. 428-348) Timaios S 16.
Platonic---> Allegory of the Cave.
Plato defines the eyes as highest sense epistemologically.