What happens when images cast off and acquire an autonomy of their own? While we usually think of images as having always propelled imagination, it seems that today they do the opposite: the positivity of technical image-handling threatens to dry out vivid and quick imaginative capacities and capabilities. Images are no longer generous. Lets not complain and instead invert the vector of consideration: If, indeed, there is an objective and material efficacy to the positivity of images, there ought to be one proper to their negativity as well. How to think about a manifest kind of absence of images?
This seminar is an exercise in imagination. It will be looking at the question of images from a new materialist point of view: with the concepts of positive and negative entropy, information theory has introduced ways of treating negation and affirmation in a manner that qualifies what it affirms or negates. From a classical epistemological point of view, this is quite scandalous. Yet with regard to an interest in a "material" (photometric) nature of images, this opens up interesting new questions in which images come to be related to code, currency, and money.
The main reading will be Peter Handke's book "Bildverlust" (literally "the loss of images", although the publisher for the English translation chose a different title). It introduces us a a world beyond "hyperobjects" (where simulacrae count as copies without original) and asks once more about notions like world, selfhood, power, authorship, intimacy, influence, authenticity, familiarity, debt, love, in a poetic and abstract, but also entirely theory-jargon-free language.
The weekly meetings entail:
- readings of approx. 30 pages
- lectures by Vera Bühlmann that contextualize the readings to a larger interest in thinking about the digital
- presentation of secondary texts by students and group discussions
The seminar is conducted as a joint course with PHD candidates from ETH Zurich. It can be joined either actively (with the rewards of 3 ECTS) or passively (as a listener, without credit points).
Primary Reading: Peter Handke, Bildverlust (Suhrkamp 2003) / engl. version: Crossing the Sierra de Gredos: A Novel (2007)
Secondary readings include:
- F. Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography (Urbanomic, 2011)
- Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds.), Digital Light (Open Humanities Press, 2015)
- Erasmus von Rotterdam, On Copia of Words and Ideas (trans. D.B.King 1999, Marquette University Press)
- V.Buehlmann, "Negentropy" in R.Braidotti et al., The Posthuman Glossary (London: Bloomsbury, 2018)
- V. Buehlmann, "The reciprocal double-articulation of »sustainability« and »environmentality« or The mode of »insisting existence« proper to the circular." (Metalithikum Conference V, Bibliothek Werner Oechslin, Einsiedeln Schweiz 2015)
- B.Rottmann, Signifying Nothing: the Semiotics of Zero (Stanford UP, 1993)
- u.a.
Tuesdays 5 - 7.30 pm, ATTP Main Space
