Claudia Tittel Former Research Fellow

Claudia Tittel
April - September 2018

Vita

Claudia Tittel studied art history, cultural studies, and architecture in Berlin as well as Université Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne and Ecole d'architecture de Belleville Paris. She received her PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin. From 2009 to 2011, she was Assistant Professor at the department of Media Art at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, from 2011 to 2015 of the chair of Media History and Aesthetics at the department Art History at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Since 2015, she works as Assistant Professor for the chair of History and Theory of Cultural Techniques at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. She has held numerous teaching positions at institutions including the Berlin University of the Arts, the University of Potsdam, and the University of Music and Theater in Hamburg. Her curatorial projects include, amongst others, the festival Re-*. Recycling_Sampling_Jamming. Künstlerische Strategien der Gegenwart (Academy of Arts, Berlin, 2009) and the exhibitions "Editing Spaces. Reconsidering the Public" (Academy of Visual Arts and National Gallery of Vilnius, 2011), Imaginary Landscape. Hommage à John Cage (Kunstverein Gera, 2012), "Serielle Materialität. Imi Knoebel und Peter Roehr" (Kunstverein Gera, 2013), "Tilde. Die Anwesenheit der Abwesenheit" (Klinger-Forum Leipzig, 2013), "Karl-Heinz Adler. Zeitschichten. Werke 1957-2017 (Museum für Angewandte Kunst Gera, 2017), "Migration der Dinge" (Schloss Belvedere Weimar, 2017). She is currently preparing the exhibition "Intermedial Experiments. Kurt Schmidt and the Synthesis of the Arts" for the Bauhaus anniversary.

Dated from 2018

Fields of research

contemporary art, media and art history, media and art theory, curatorial studies, sound studies, theory of photography, contemporary photography, media architecture

IKKM Research Project

The Art of Re*-Production. Strategies of Repetition in Photography, Film and Contemporary Art

Filled archives, constant availability, permanent production of information and images and their continuous availability have created a system of cyclical recycling based on constant repetition and recreation. Especially in the digital age, the production of images does not seem to stop. Digitalization not only produces (image) data continuously, it has also made it more changeable, more widespread and volatile, so that the question of its usability, the operational chain of images and their relationship to one another arises anew. How do these mountains of image data, which we encounter in ever new social, political and aesthetic contexts, operate? How and where do they approach us?

In the visual arts, diverse aesthetic concepts and techniques respond to this system of constant availability and cyclical recycling: Artists quote, recycle, sample, collage and jam; they repeat, line up, arrange, structure, take up existing procedures, transfer them into new contexts and develop new aesthetic concepts and strategies from them. The cultural techniques of reproduction are based on the common practice of cultural appropriation, recycling, but also object and image (new) construction. Recursification, i.e. the reference to an original or to a predecessor, is just as immanent to these practices as the creation and construction of something new from the existing: given or (pre)found material is transformed into another state by reproduction, reflection, restructuring and decontextualization, formed into new aesthetic structures and thus receives new connections of meaning. However, these constellations of repetition produce not only new aesthetic forms and orders, but also conflicting elements.

But it is not only since digitalization that repetition and seriality become a concept of a new aesthetic. As early as in the 19th century, as a result of progressive industrialization and mechanization, products were manufactured in series at high frequency and, above all, on a large scale, resulting in new production chains, which also led to new image operations. Images are not only produced in large quantities in print media, but combined in new ways. From the very beginning, reproduction and repetition have been inscribed as aesthetic principles in the new technical medium of photography. Since Impressionism at the latest, serialism has also been discovered in painting as an aesthetic concept of a juxtaposition of time events. Seriality and repetition are not new phenomena of the digital age, but digitalization makes us rethink and reflect on concepts of seriality and reproduction techniques. While after the Second World War Minimal Art deals with the aesthetic principles of (Re*)production and American Pop Art transfers the capitalist production system to art, the question today is how digitalization affects the aesthetic production of images.

The research project examines how contemporary artistic strategies are related to digital phenomena and their reproductive possibilities, and how old serial concepts are taken up again and reinterpreted. While the accumulation of data and images leads to restructuring and examination of the accumulated knowledge and thus suggests the creation of new knowledge, the question is which new aesthetic constellations arise. It is no longer just a reference to the original, but the creation and invention of new processes and procedures of reproduction. The question is where and how today, in the face of digitalization, images are appropriated, and how the question of the ontology of reproductive techniques is reflected in them.

Recent publications

Edited Books:

Migration der Dinge. Kulturtransfer und Wissenszirkulation in Zeitaltern der Globalisierung, Schriftenreihe des Internationalen Kollegs für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie, Bd. 31, Weimar 2017.

Karl-Heinz Adler. Zeitschichten. Werke 1957-2017, Ausst.kat. Museum für Angewandte Kunst Gera, Berlin 2017 (gemeinsam mit Sabine Tauscher).

Serielle Materialität. Imi Knoebel und Peter Roehr, Ausstellungskatalog Kunstverein Gera e.V., Jena 2013 (gemeinsam mit Babett Forster).

IMAGINARY LANDSCAPE. Hommage an John Cage, Ausstellungskatalog Kunstverein Gera e.V., Jena 2012.

Articles:

Touch me! Berührung als subversive Geste in der Performancekunst, in: Steffen Haug und Tina Zürn (Hrsg.), Don’t touch. Touch Screen. Das Bild, der Blick und allerhand Formen taktiler Wahrnehmung und Erkenntnis. Festschrift für Michael Diers, Berlin 2018.

Times Square 2.0. Der Platz als mediales Spektakel, in: Alessandro Nova, Brigitte Soelch (Hg.), Platz-Architekturen. Kontinuität und Wandel öffentlicher Stadträume vom 19. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart, München: Deutscher Kunstverlag 2018, S. 299-310.

Magnetic Attacks. Christina Kubischs Arbeiten mit elektromagnetischer Induktion, in: Positionen. Texte zur aktuellen Musik (114) 2018, S. 43-46.

Der Verdacht. Benjamin Heisenbergs Film Schläfer (D, 2005) als Portrait einer verunsicherten Gesellschaft, in: Verena Krieger (Hg.), BrandSchutz. Aktuelle künstlerische Strategien zu Mentalitäten der Intoleranz, Weimar 2018, S. 145-163.

Der blinde Fleck. Anmerkungen zu Günther Selichars Serie Who´s Afraid of Blue, Red and Green? im öffentlichen Raum, in: Günther Selichar. Who’s Afraid of Blue, Red and Green? (1990-2015), Wien 2017, S. 185-216.