Kulturtechnik

Medientheorie und historische Medienwissenschaft sind seit geraumer Zeit dabei, einen Schritt zu tun, der sie hierzulande zumindest teilweise in historische und systematische Kulturtechnikforschung überführt. Die Möglichkeit existiert, dass die Medien als Referenz eines Wissenschaftsparadigmas, das gerade dabei ist, die Forschungs- und Lehrstrukturen dieses Landes zu erobern, sich bereits im Zustand bloßen Nachlebens befinden.

The cinema is, as a photographic medium, an art form of light. But the mastery of lightning and the ‘dark’ side of his rhizomatic, interactive net have led very early to the configuration of shade and shadow and refer, ergo, to something which is perpetually related to all forms of figurative art.
To lm, ‘night’ means, however, something different, as it brings the configuration of
the skies in a state of darkness with it. This is in disagreement with his usual depiction. It entails embarking on a singular figurative project, which approximates a contradiction in itself. This project demonstrates the autonomy of the configuration process precisely through this contradiction.

Since the times of Rousseau, education has repeatedly been put forward as a parallel world detached from the state. This insistence on an autonomous education system disregards not only that the imaginary parallel world disaffiliates itself from the state, but that it is disposed indeed, to supplant it. It is a natural consequence of the self-perpetuating dynamic of the term education, emancipated since the time of Rousseau, that, under the exigency of the separation of State and edu- cation, that very State’s logic is frequently reproduced, which, in the name of autonomous education, one had presumed to counteract. The essay pursues this dynamic force by means of the conception of a Pedagogic Province, in Goethe’s ‘Wanderjahren’, which, in itself portrays a sort of miniature State, in which goods are produced by people having a coherent life-style.

Eadward Muybridge’s 1887 photographic atlas Animal Locomotion is a curious mixture of art and science, a polysemic text that has been subject to a number of readings. This paper focuses on Muybridge’s technology. It seeks to understand his commitment to making photographs with a battery of cameras rather than a single camera. It suggests reasons for his choice of apparatus and shows how his final work, The Human Figure in Motion (1901), justifies the choices he made.

The modalities of the production, archiving, distribution (marketing) and societal assimilation of digital photography are producing a new economy of form and perspective. When digital photos become physical surfaces and blogs are organized into active archives, the collective public memory is transformed in the tension between two divergent poles: Privatization and standardization of photo- memory in the photo data banks of large agencies on one hand, and, on the other hand rhizomatic interlacing, proliferative network memory, which, during this process, evolves into a virtual, imaginary museum. Digital photos, at this point, participate in the production of the political entity.

Die Technologie als die Wissenschaft von den Produktivkräften ist noch weit davon entfernt, als autonome Wissenschaft anerkannt zu sein und den Rang einzunehmen, der ihr zusteht.
Konsultieren wir die Enzyklopädie Larousse, so lesen wir dort, dass die Technologie die Wissenschaft von den Handwerken und Gewerben im Allgemeinen sei: Sie verwende gleichermaßen die Methoden der physikalischen Wissenschaften, die sich mit der unbelebten Materie, wie der Naturwissenschaften, die sich mit dem Leben beschäftigen; sie erstelle zunächst eine möglichst fein diff erenzierte Klassifi kation der Produkte sowie der Methoden, die zu deren Entwurf und Erzeugung verwendet werden, sodann beschreibe sie diese mit großer Genauigkeit und unternehme zuguterletzt eine kritische Untersuchung eines jeden Verfahrens, wobei sie die Gesetze der mathematischen Disziplinen, der Physik und der Chemie einsetze. …

1964, das Jahr in dem André-Georges Haudricourt seinen programmatischen Text »La technologie, science humaine« in der marxistischen Zeitschrift La Pensée publiziert, ist nicht irgendein Jahr in der Geschichte der Kulturtechnikforschung. Haudricourts eher lapidaren Ausführungen stehen zwei opera magna gegenüber. Denn es ist vor allem das Jahr, in dem Marshall McLuhans Understanding Media und Technique et langage, der erste Band von André Leroi-Gourhans Summa Le geste et la parole, erscheinen. …

The contribution re-establishes Marcel Mauss’s concept of body functional techniques: the social-anthropological basis, the theoretical technical position and the systematic programming of this term. According to Mauss, modern body functional techniques and their media inventions can be interpreted in different ways: as strategies for the reduction of the body and as a project of a reciprocal, psychosomatic, ritualistic and medial intensification.

Cultural technologies are practices which are committed to the framing of cultures and collectives and conveyed by means of the media and educational institutes.This concept is not limited to the so-called elementary cultural technologies (Reading, writing, arithmetic) but also technology of the body, representational processes and other creative technologies. In contrast to a pedagogic understanding of cultural technology, media-scientific cultural technology research is not concerned with the mediation of high culture, education or art, but fundamentally with the analyses of cultural communication, in so far as it can be described as a technical process.

The article attempts to portray architecture as a spatial medium and to analyse the process- ing and storage of information, objects and persons. In doing so, architectural space be- comes not only the effect of these medial operations, but it also forms and materializes these processes at the same time. Openings are characterized as fundamental elements of architectural media. Also, in this regard, such classic elements as doors and windows in the sense of a room perceived as a perforated membrane, acquire a new medial quality.

Doors are mediums of architecture as an elementary cultural technique, as they process the key differences of architecture from within and without. The door is a machine, through which the symbolic was materialized in architecture. This contribution describes, by means of examples from cultural, literary and art history, the monologic, epistemic and social aspects and paradoxes of the door as an analog and binary medium. With the obsolescence of the door knob, engendered by the invention of the automated revolving door, the analog door has bid farewell to society and is now mutating to a bio-political instrument which no longer addresses mankind as ‘persona’, but as a major perturberence.

The text mirrors a theory of cultural technology, which takes culture at its word and the technology of (cultural?) cultivation reclaims the word ‘colore’. Cultural technology always asserts a predilection to symbolic order, but it not only institutes symbolic order, but contradicts it as well. After all, the conductors and media of cultural technology dare to put into question the presumption of a sovereign subject which is the master of the constituative processes for culture. Rectitude is challenged to respond to this break-down of the classic sovereign teachings of symbolic order and allow the conductors and media a position other than that of only a means to a legitimately sanctioned end.

The church cleric Gregor von Nyssa celebrated the evolution of the hand as a bequest to the mouth and lips. Liberated from the compulsory, primordial pursuit of food, it can now devote itself to the functions of speech and rationality. The modern age has set about disencumbering the hand in an ever- expanding machine park. Elation, however, has been muted. If the hand no longer serves the mouth but the machine, isn’t the association to the state of being human lost? The modern age in conspicuous insistence, rejects the storm of technology, evolution and the animality of the human prerogative by meditating on the future fate of the hand.

Residual categories such as »not elsewhere categorized« densely populate modern information systems. This article roughly categories two types of modern information surveillance and notification systems, statistical and event-based. It examines the nature of residual categories arising from each, and proposes some methodological considerations for how these impact moral order within information infrastructure. The article concludes with comments about how the inclusion of lived experience might ameliorate a sort of moral gridlock often encountered today in large-scale information systems.