A&S S2021 — reinhart.media

Summer Semester 2021

Talking about “the digital” Once a student asked me whether I’m for or against “the digital” and this curious question somehow made me think. The more I reflected on the topic, the more it became evident that the alleged rivalry between “the analogue” and “the digital” ultimately is more an ideological than a technical question – but why? Could it… 2021S, Vorlesungen, 2.0 ECTS

Transdisciplinarity and Representation II

Conjurations and other ways of gaining new knowledge under the illusive cloak of magic, the curiosity of alchemists introduced a means for experimentation into the innate properties of materials. The transformation of raw matter into precious metals, the combination of hot sulphur and wet, cold mercury to birth the philosopher’s stone; to bring the inanimate to life, to vanish miraculously… 2021S, Vorlesung und Übungen, 4.0 ECTS

Experimental Studies II

The artistic experiment, unlike the scientific one, is not so much aimed at proving and repeating an assertion but is a strategy to expand one's own knowledge and abilities and to find new ways of expression. Using examples from art history, such experiments will be shown and encouraged in practical exercises. 2021S, wissenschaftliches Seminar, 4.0 ECTS

Experimental Studies IV

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Master Thesis Tutorial

This tutorial is intended to support all students in the preparation and execution of their master's thesis in theory and practice and thus help them to meet the highest possible standards. The tutorial will be conducted in a group setting as well as in individual sessions. 2021S, Konversatorium, 1.0 ECTS

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Zoom Meeting-ID for summer semester 2021: 408 156 7418

VIEWING ROOM – for all available movies click here

☆ ALGO-RHYTHM (Manu Luksch, 2019)

14min, original Version with English Subtitles

ALGO-RHYTHM , shot in Dakar with the participation of leading Senegalese musicians, poets and graffiti artists, probes the insidious but comprehensive threats to human rights and agency posed by the rise of the quantification and algorithmic management of daily life. Using hiphop, drama, street art and data-driven filmmaking, the work explores how our embrace of the convenience of machine intelligence, refracted through the slick interface of smartphone apps, makes us vulnerable to manipulation by political actors. Recognising the urgent need for a new visual language to illuminate this concern, Manu Luksch collaborated closely with Jack Wolf and Mukul Patel to develop a hybrid narrative form that unites photogrammetry and volumetric filmmaking with traditional approaches. Through its auratic and poetic use of computational imaging technologies, ALGO-RHYTHM scrutinizes the limitations, errors and abuses of algorithmic representations.

☆ Das Netz / The Net (Lutz Dammbeck, 2003)

115min, German version with English Subtitles

“The Net” is an independent film directed by Lutz Dammbeck and subtitled "The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet". The film explores the ideas and histories of groundbreaking artists Marshall McLuhan and Nam June Paik, hippie idealists such as Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, counterculturalists such as John Brockman and Stewart Brand, cyberneticists such as Robert William Taylor and Heinz von Foerster, and neo-luddite Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

☆ Dreams Rewired (Martin Reinhart, Manu Luksch & Thomas Tode, 2015)

87min, English version

A montage of films from the 1880s to the 1930s, many rare and previously unscreened, it traces contemporary appetites and anxieties back to the birth of the telephone, television and cinema. Its claim: that the social convulsions of today’s hyper-mediated world were already prefigured over 100 years ago, during the electric media boom of the late 19th century. Early electric media were as revolutionary as social media are now. They sparked a fervent utopianism in the public imagination; promising total communication, the annihilation of distance, an end to war. The technologies were to serve everyone, not just the elites. Through strengthening human relationships, increasing efficiency, and predicting the future, it would become possible to build a new world for all to share.

☆ Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrik, 1964)

The story concerns an unhinged United States Air Force general who orders a first strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. It separately follows the President of the United States, his advisors, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a Royal Air Force (RAF) exchange officer as they attempt to prevent the crew of a B-52 plane (who were ordered by the general) from bombing the Soviets and starting a nuclear war. The character of "Dr Strangelove" is an amalgamation of RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn, mathematician and Manhattan Project principal John von Neumann, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and Edward Teller, the "father of the hydrogen bomb". The film is loosely based on Peter George's thriller novel “Red Alert” (1958).

☆ Faceless (Manu Luksch, 2007)

50min, English version

In an eerily familiar city, a calendar reform has dispensed with the past and the future, leaving citizens faceless, without memory or anticipation. Unimaginable happiness abounds – until a woman recovers her face… FACELESS uses CCTV images obtained under the terms of the UK Data Protection Act as ‘legal readymades’. Legislation requires that the privacy of other persons be protected when data is released – for CCTV recordings, this is typically done by obscuring their faces – hence, the faceless world.

☆ In the Mirror of Maya Deren (Martina Kudlacek, 2001)

The feature-length documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren reconstructs the exciting biography of the legendary artist Maya Deren. Born in Kiev in 1917, she was to become a central figure of the American avantgarde after WW II. Best known for her ground-breaking work in experimental film, she was highly active in various other political and cultural fields - a poet, a dancer and, above all, a renown ethnographer and practising Voodoun devotee. Following the traces of this important woman pioneer of the 20th century, the film visits the places and people of her life drawing the picture of a modern myth.

☆ Pandoras Box (Adam Curtis, 1992)

Pandora's Box, subtitled A Fable From the Age of Science, is a BBC television documentary series by Adam Curtis looking at the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. It won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series in 1993. Curtis deals with, in order: Communism in the Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy of the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana in the 1950s, and the history of nuclear power.

Part 2. To The Brink of Eternity

This episode outlines how the United States government and its departments attempted to use systems analysis and game theory to develop strategies to control the nuclear threat and nuclear arms race during the Cold War, and, more specifically, to manage the "loss of control" crises encountered during events such as the Space Race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. Focusing on the men of the Cold War on whom 'Dr Strangelove' was based. These were people who believed that the world could be controlled by the scientific manipulation of fear – mathematical geniuses employed by the American Rand Corporation. In the end, their visions were the stuff of science fiction fantasy.

☆ Sanctus (Barbara Hammer, 1990)

Sanctus is a film of the rephotographed moving x-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson and his colleagues. Making the invisible visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as it protects the hidden fragility of interior organ systems.

☆ The Halfmoon Files (Philip Scheffner, 2007)

86min, English Version

A film on the complex relationships between politics, colonialism, science and media. The starting point of this quest are voice recordings of colonial soldiers that were made in a prisoner camp in Wünsdorf near Berlin during the First World War. In his experimental documantary Philip Scheffner follows the traces of these voices back to the origin of their recording. Like a memory game – which remains incomplete right until the end – he uncovers pictures and sounds that revive the ghosts of the past. His protagonists’ words intersect along the concentric spirals the story follows. Those who pressed the record button were the ones to write official history. Mall Singh and the other prisoners of war of the Halfmoon Camp disappeared from this story. Their spirits and ghostly appearances seem to play with the filmmaker, to ambush him. They pursue him on his path, to bring their voices back to their home countries. Yet the story of these ghosts escapes the control of the narrator.

☆ The Matrix (Lana and Andi Wachowski, 1999)

136min, English version

Thomas A. Anderson is a man living two lives. By day he is an average computer programmer and by night a hacker known as Neo. Neo has always questioned his reality, but the truth is far beyond his imagination. Neo finds himself targeted by the police when he is contacted by Morpheus, a legendary computer hacker branded a terrorist by the government. As a rebel against the machines, Neo must confront the agents: super-powerful computer programs devoted to stopping Neo and the entire human rebellion.

☆ Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943)

Meshes of the Afternoon is a 1943 American short experimental film directed by and starring wife-and-husband team Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied. The film's narrative is circular and repeats several motifs, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper–like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook and an ocean. Through creative editing, distinct camera angles, and slow motion, the surrealist film depicts a world in which it is more and more difficult to catch reality.

☆ Sanctus (Barbara Hammer, 1990)

☆ The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006)
130min, English version

In the end of the nineteenth century, in London, Robert Angier, his beloved wife Julia McCullough, and Alfred Borden are friends and assistants of a magician. When Julia accidentally dies during a performance, Robert blames Alfred for her death, and they become enemies. Both become famous and rival magicians, sabotaging the performance of the other on the stage. When Alfred performs a successful trick, Robert becomes obsessed trying to disclose the secret of his competitor with tragic consequences. The film is based on the brilliant 1995 novel by British writer Christopher Priest.

☆ The Singularity is Near (Ray Kurzweil, 2010)

79min, English version

The 21st Century begins an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil presents an inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny. NOTE: I personally dislike this documentary for ideological reasons. Also it’s a poorly made film. It’s just here, to to give an example of cybernetic totalitarianism.

☆ The Trap (Adam Curtis, 2007)

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom is a BBC television documentary series by English filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other documentaries including The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. It originally aired in the United Kingdom on BBC Two in March 2007. The series consists of three 60-minute programmes which explore the modern concept and definition of freedom, specifically, how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom.

Part 1. F**k You Buddy

The 'inflammatory' name of this episode refers to a game invented by the mathematician John Forbes Nash, whom they actually draft in here, which at first I thought lent it authority, and later on I decided was just because, well, he's mad, innee? "Frankly, as interesting as game theory is, and it is interesting, I couldn't help thinking, 'Hold the front page! Paranoid schizophrenic thinks rest of world is out to get each other!' A number of other game theorists were wheeled out. They're all pretty old now, and they pause for so long you think the telly's on pause. I kept thinking the dog was sitting on the remote. 'That dog is probably out to screw me,' I thought. 'It will serve him better, in the long run, than cooperating with me.'

Part 2. The Lonely Robot

This Episode reiterated many of the ideas of the first part, but developed the theme that drugs such as Prozac and lists of psychological symptoms which might indicate anxiety or depression were being used to normalise behaviour and make humans behave more predictably, like machines. This was not presented as a conspiracy theory, but as a logical (although unpredicted) outcome of market-driven self-diagnosis by check-list based on symptoms, but not actual causes, discussed in part one.

Part 3. We Will Force You to Be Free

The final part focusses on the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin. Curtis briefly explains how negative liberty could be defined as freedom from coercion and positive liberty as the opportunity to strive to fulfil one's potential. Tony Blair had read Berlin's essays on the topic and wrote to him in the late 1990s, arguing that positive and negative liberty could be mutually compatible. As Berlin was on his deathbed at the time, Blair never got a reply.

☆ Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982)

96min, English version

Hacker/arcade owner Kevin Flynn is digitally broken down into a data stream by a villainous software pirate known as Master Control and reconstituted into the internal, 3-D graphical world of computers. It is there, in the ultimate blazingly colorful, geometrically intense landscapes of cyberspace, that Flynn joins forces with Tron to outmaneuver the Master Control Program that holds them captive in the equivalent of a gigantic, infinitely challenging computer game.

x-x-xx--x--gewobenes Papier (Michel Klöfkorn, 2014)

6min, no dialogue

I wanted to make a film about de-weaving … aren’t things here much too confusing complicated complected? I sent huge posters into the document shredder to have them cut into strips.

READING ROOM – for all available e-books click here

Baker, David. The internet is broken... (2017)

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project (1982 posthumous)

Burton, Robert. The Anatomy or Melancholy (1883[1621])

Evans, Henry Ridgely. Magic, Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography (1897)

Flusser, Vilem. Vampyroteuthis infernalis (2012)

Golding J., Paganelli M., Reinhart M. (Eds.) Data Loam. Sometimes Hard, Usually Soft. The Future of Knowledge Systems. (2021)

Hochadel, Oliver. Zauberhafte Aufklärung. Etienne-Gaspard Robertson zwischen Schaustellerei und Wissenschaft (2006)

Luksch, Manu. Prediction (2021) Info

Marx, Karl. The Fragment on Machines (1857-8)

Nail, Thomas. Lucretius I. An Ontology of Motion (2018)

Payne, Rodger A. Grappling with Dr. Strangelove’s Wargasm Fantasy (2016)