Medien der Natur

Das Editorial der vorliegenden Ausgabe verfasst von Lorenz Engell und Bernhard Siegert.

This article deals with the mediality of empty chairs in the works by Vincent van Gogh, Richard Weiner, Egon Schiele, Joseph Kosuth and Eugène Ionesco. These empty chairs are explored as aisthetic-affective figures pervading historical periods and cultural boundaries that offer a specific portrait of absence, which is able to intensify the subject despite its physical non-presence. The argument is based on the dialectic process of dis/appearing, posthermeneutics and the theory of the supplement.

The stain asserts its autonomy as a spot or patch of colour different from the ground. It exists in and of itself. The stain tells us what it means to be the medium of visibility. Hence, every stain is a Metabild, a particular image that explains something about the image as a phenomenon. These properties make the stain a paradigm for the visual medium per se. In this essay I will deal with five factors that could have led to this powerful model: the stain as prototype, Veronica’s stain, the psycho-energetic symptom, Echo’s camouflage and finally, the stain as le désir mimétique.

The paper focuses on the literary genre of utopia and science fiction as empirical and historical material. With reference to selected texts from the 19th century, it outlines which future media, media practices and human life forms are discussed in an often anticipatory way. The thesis is that time utopias act as a model and source of innovative (media) technologies and have a specific power to design new worlds.

The legal system assumes that human beings – and only human beings – are natural persons. That is erroneous, argues Malte-Christian Gruber, because legal subjectivity isn’t founded in humanity alone. It is moral autonomy that makes man into a “subject whose actions are capable of attribution” (Kant) and thus into a person. Personhood is not identified with being human as such, but by the attribution of actions and legal ownership. Besides human beings, such a functional concept of legal subjectivity can in principle also be applied to other autonomous agents as holder of rights and obligations, e.g. technological artifacts and other non-human agents. Christoph Menke in turn points out that the invention of new rights was the actual law of motion of political emancipation in modern times. This began with the bourgeois revolutions and is still the general model with which politics and theory operate to claim new rights for non-human creatures and artifacts. Just as in the 19th and 20th centuries, the legal emancipation initially led beyond the limits of bourgeois subjectivity and invented social and cultural rights, so should we make a further consequent step and break with the dependence of juridical recognition on the category of human subjectivity. Also bio- and artifacts are to be reconstructed as independent legal entities. However, they lack something that was absolutely fundamental in the emancipatory struggles of the past: to be a subject of rights meant to have demanded rights, indeed, to have been a fighter for rights. One could not be a legal person and holder of rights without having been a political subject as fighter and thinker of rights. To suspend the dependence of legal personhood on human subjectivity so that there may be bio- and artifact-rights also means to dissolve the unity between legal personality and political subjectivity that once defined the modern idea of rights.

Wenn der Mensch mit regsamem Sinne die Natur durchforscht, oder in einer Phantasie die weiten Räume der organischen Schöpfung misst, so wirkt unter den vielfachen Eindrücken, die er empfängt, keiner so tief und mächtig als der, welchen die allverbreitete Fülle des Lebens erzeugt. Überall, selbst am beeisten Pol ertönt die Luft von dem Gesange der Vögel,…

Der über zweihundert Jahre alte Text von Alexander von Humboldt eröffnet eine proto-ökologische Sichtweise auf natürliche Prozesse (Klima) und Gestaltungsformen (Pflanzen), die genuin ästhetisch und medienästhetisch hergestellt ist. Auch besitzt der Text kulturwissenschaftliche Implikationen, die im Folgenden angerissen werden sollen. …

Domestication can be defined by a nucleus of three technical activities: controlled reproduction and nutrition as well as protection of animals and plants from damage. If one applies this definition to a comparison of cultures and collectives, two surprises arise: Without being in touch of any kind of domestication, hunter-gatherers develop a ritual domestication or a mythological understanding that their world already is domesticated. And in modernity, possible naturalization arises at the side of technical domestication. The paper draws some conclusions from this typological comparison.

In addition to industry, digitalization has also taken hold of nature. The fact that thousands of animals are provided and monitored with GPS transmitters allows to speak of nature 4.0 by way of analogy to industry 4.0. This internet of animals changes our idea of nature. Most of all, it transforms the perception of nature as something fundamentally other. Beside the many cultural problems that the internet of animals implies, it can also outline a new, not at all esoteric planetary post-digital culture that is about to change the human condition.

The Ozeanium and the Vision NEMO are two opposing proposals on how to present the sea and the marine life in a zoo. The Ozeanium is working with conventional large aquariums, in which real fish are swimming, while the Vision NEMO employs the latest transmission and projection techniques to show animated images of fishes. In both projects, media play an important, but also very different role. There is, however, one thing that both projects have in common: They assume that media are an exclusively human affair. Thus, medial processes in the marine animal kingdom don’t come into view.

Wildlife observation in life sciences is media based and operates in dependence on infrastructures that are normally not visible or not noticed. On the basis of laboratory examples from Zurich, Austin/Texas and Helgoland, configurations of human and non-human actors are studied from an aesthetic perspective. The material contexts, in which work with digital data is involved, are brought into focus as well as the question of how they can be experienced and negotiated artistically in a “scientificized” society.

Much has been written about media, but the medium of all media has not been studied so far: I am referring to slime. Not just any slime, but the protoplasm of all life, the scientific mystery, which is still regarded as unsolved. And another mystery remains be solved, namely the peculiar coalition of slime and technical media. According to science, slime is not only the origin of the human species, but also the future of technology.

Ecology is a term that is much discussed in recent media and cultural studies. This raises the question of the use, the potential and the historical and medial constitution of different concepts of ecology and their respective understandings of nature, organism and relationality. This paper presents an analysis of Ernst Haeckel’s General Morphology and his Sarcodes-experiments and elaborates different models of (inter-)relationality, especially relations between organisms and environment, in ecology.

Speculative Realism starts out from a critique of Correlationism. Its theoretical advantage supposedly is its ability to rethink the ancestral, i.e. that which was before it could be stated as Being. This paper argues against this approach by showing that Speculative Realism is precisely not able to employ the existence of fossils as a metaphysical proof. Subsequently, a neorealist ontology of facts is introduced as a superior alternative and questioned in view of its concept of nature.

The paper reconstructs the historical genesis of political ecology in the 19th century by the example of the zoologist Karl Möbius. The population debate around 1800 is elaborated as a decisive paradigm of its emergence. Against this background, the political-ecological perspective arises through the transfer of classical economic principles on animal com- munities and their retransfer back to a human world that is now understood in zoological terms.