26. Januar 2011 / Making-of ⟶
Experimente Erfahren
Experimente Erfahren : (the making of)
Kuratiert von Eric Ellingsen & dem Institut für Raumexperimente
“Experiments are elaborate filters set up in the space of phenomena.”
– Peter Galison, How Experiments End
Experimente werden immer erfahren. Etwas passiert. Vielleicht reagieren a+b und erzeugen Helligkeit? Vielleicht gilt: 2 + 2 = kalt. Ideen folgen Gefühlen. Wir sind mit Zeit und Raum verwoben. Unsere Wahrnehmung der Welt mäandert getrieben durch unsere Neugier, stolpert über unseren Intellekt und konzentriert unsere Aufmerksamkeit in Faszination, Verwunderung und Fragen. Warum ist dies passiert, und nicht etwas anderes? Wie können wir dies wieder geschehen lassen, oder nicht geschehen lassen, anders, oder genauso? Wie können diese Dinge die Kunst, die ich mache, präzise und kritisch beeinflussen? Wir fangen an zu experimentieren. Wie? Experimentieren ist ein Prozess, und dieser Prozess besteht nie aus sauberen Tanzschritten zwischen Machen und Denken. Wie soll man also weiter verfahren?
Isaac Newton sticht eine lange Schuhmachernadel, einen bodkin, hinter seinen Augapfel, um Druck auf seine Linse auszuüben und sie zu verschieben, um buchstäblich zu sehen, wie wir Farben sehen. Aber er glaubt auch an das Absolute (absolute Zeit und absoluten Raum) und die alchemistische Ausrichtung von sieben Farben. Inwieweit beeinflusst, was er sehen will, wie er sieht und seine Fähigkeit, zu sehen was geschieht?
Experimente Erfahren fragt, indem es unsere einfachen Fragen ausführt: Was sind Experimente, wie werden sie gemacht, wie werden sie erfahren, und inwiefern könnten experimentelle Methoden in der Produktion von Kunst wichtig sein?
Um solche Fragen zu aktivieren, werden wir das Semester um unsere Sinne herum organisieren: Sehen, Hören, Riechen, Fühlen, Schmecken, Bewegen. Wir behandeln den Körper als ein wissenschaftliches Instrument, wie Goethe sagt. Im wöchentlichen Wechsel werden jedem Sinn „Vorträge“, „Unterhaltungen“ und „Präsentationen“ gewidmet. Wir werden uns einmal pro Woche treffen, gewöhnlich (aber nicht immer) mittwochs von 11.00-13:30 Uhr. Der gesamte Kurs wird sich einen kurvenreichen Verlauf durch eine Geschichte der Naturdarstellung, Wissenschaft, Kunst, des Schreibens und der Wahrnehmung bahnen. Jedes Treffen wird einem Areal gleichen, das viele durchlässige Grenzen zu anderen benachbarten Workshops und mit den Inhalten des Instituts für Raumexperimente aufweist. Kritikalität und Wahrnehmung werden den gesamten Kurs untermauern. Wir werden viele Übungsexperimente durchführen und ein Publikation produzieren. Dieser Kurs verlangt einen gewissen Zeitaufwand, der sich aber lohnt.
Models Are Real
Experience Experiments: Models Are RealWith Eric Ellingsen
What is a model, the Latin modulus, as vs. is, the dangers and possibilities of, from Orreries to generative non-linear models; Observer Effect; the instruments role (technological, skill, experimenter as engineer with tacit knowledge); inert material, vs. world full of agency and emergence
Readings:
Olafur Eliasson: Models are Real
Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulation
Wallace Steven: Landscape with boat
Experiment by Heinz Isler (group meets that evening outside IfREX to make model)
Excursion to the cavitation tunnel of the Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau und Schiffbau
Experience Experiments: Modeling (Feeling your way)Mit Eric Ellingsen
What is a model, the Latin modulus, as vs. is, the dangers and possibilities of, from Orreries to generative non-linear models; Observer Effect; the instruments role (technological, skill, experimenter as engineer with tacit knowledge); inert material, vs. world full of agency and emergence
Readings:
Olafur Eliasson: Models are Real
Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulation
Wallace Steven: Landscape with boat
Experiment by Heinz Isler (group meets that evening outside IfREX to make model)
Besuch der Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau und Schiffbau
Experience Experiments: Abendessen im Dunkeln
Experience Experiments: Tasting the DarkWith Lynn Peemoeller, Lauren Maurer & Eric Ellingsen
Group experiment: just back from break, we will spend this class together in total darkness. We will all eat together and serve each other in a completely dark room, as well as hold our conversation.
Readings:
Diane Ackerman: A Natural History of the Senses: “Taste”
José Saramago: Blindness
Franz Kafka: A Hunger Artist
View programme PDF
Experience Experiments: Abendessen im Dunkeln (Geschmack von Dunkelheit)Mit Lynn Peemoeller, Lauren Maurer & Eric Ellingsen
Programm PDF
Experience Experiments: Akustische Räume
Experience Experiments: Hearing Things
Phantom words & sound experiments (by Diana Deutsch); Louise Lawler – Bird Calls; Steve Reich; Cymatics ; „Drip Music“; Cage “water walk”; William Labov, socio linguists in American malls (where is the laboratory); qualia
Reading:
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?, Guy Deutscher (Article link, New York Times)
Sleights of Mind, George Johnson (Article link, New York Times)
Experiment: (Website link, Diana Deutsch)
Visit to acoustic rooms: Institut für Strömungsmechanik und Technische Akustik with Eric Ellingsen
Experience Experiments: Akustische RäumeBesuch des Akustikraums im Institut für Strömungsmechanik und Technische Akustik mit Eric Ellingsen
Making Experiments Experience
Experience Experiments (Making Experiments Experience)
Production of knowledge; what is an experiment: from observation to making; thinking doing; Hobbes boil’s at Boyle; if you can spray them they are real; ‘members account’, ‘strangers account’, and making a book about experiments; intervene in the world; creation of new phenomena; and how the ship gets in the bottle
Video to watch in class: Ant Farm: Inflatables, 1971
References for introduction:
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer: Leviathan and the Air-Pump
Peter Galison: How Experiments End
Ian Hacking: Representing and Intervening
Intuition, Jumping Around, and Other Methods
Experience Experiments (Intuition, Jumping Around, and Other Methods)
“The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.” Hume, 1739
I. Morning
Empiricists; Frei Otto partners with matter; presuppositions; a role of theory; Doubt & Descartes; Epic Theater (Brecht’s rules of); double blind; Pepsi challenge; Tuskegee; MilgramExperiments; Sackett’s 56 biases; social psychology’s ‘will you go to bed with me’; mad scientists
Readings:
Gilles Deleuze: Bergsonism: „Intuition as Method“; „A Return to Bergson“
Michel Serres with Bruno Latour: Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: “Method”
Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life?: “The Naïve Physicist’s Approach to the Subject”
Experiment: soap films
II. Afternoon
History of Nature lecture: Aristotle 4 causes, observation to experiment, Galileo, Bacon, Christopher Wren kills dogs, Linnaeus, Buffon, le Notre, Darwin, Smithson, Self-organization, far from equilibrium
Readings:
Raymond Williams: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
Daniel Botkin: Discordant Harmonies: “A View From a Marsh: Myths and Facts about Nature”, 3-13.
Bruno Latour: Introduction to We Have Never Been Modern
Experience Experiments (Intuition, Jumping Around, and Other Methods)
“The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.” Hume, 1739
I. Morning
Empiricists; Frei Otto partners with matter; presuppositions; a role of theory; Doubt & Descartes; Epic Theater (Brecht’s rules of); double blind; Pepsi challenge; Tuskegee; MilgramExperiments; Sackett’s 56 biases; social psychology’s ‘will you go to bed with me’; mad scientists
Readings:
Gilles Deleuze: Bergsonism: „Intuition as Method“; „A Return to Bergson“
Michel Serres with Bruno Latour: Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: “Method”
Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life?: “The Naïve Physicist’s Approach to the Subject”
Experiment: soap films
II. Afternoon
History of Nature lecture: Aristotle 4 causes, observation to experiment, Galileo, Bacon, Christopher Wren kills dogs, Linnaeus, Buffon, le Notre, Darwin, Smithson, Self-organization, far from equilibrium
Readings:
Raymond Williams: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
Daniel Botkin: Discordant Harmonies: “A View From a Marsh: Myths and Facts about Nature”, 3-13.
Bruno Latour: Introduction to We Have Never Been Modern
Poetry Experiments & The Artist’s Book
Experience Experiments (Poetry Experiments & The Artist’s Book)
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book; Species of Spaces; Exercises of Style; 0-9; constraints and rules; artsy-fartsy
In class we will play around/make experiences in UbuWeb.
Readings:
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 1978 — 1981: Bernadette Mayer: “Experiments”
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 1978 — 1981: Bruce Andrews: “Text and Context”
Read together in class: Daniel Spoerri; An Anecdoted Topography of Chance; Vito Acconci
Experiment: Everybody picks one: Please spend some time before the class finding one video, poem, or recording on UbuWeb which you can play for the class.
Excursion to barbara wien bookstore/gallery & Fluxus (Dieter Roth) collection
Feeling Your Way
Experience Experiments (Feeling Your Way)
Mapping; without a compass; measure; all the old ways about; you are the other too; agency of mapping; Fake-estates; non-sites; the map is not the territory; a dip in the lake; psychogeography ; Situationist International; geography & psychogeography; walk ways; Ian Sinclair; omnidirectional treadmills; haptic feedback; John Wylie: „A single day’s walking“
Readings:
Michael de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life: “Walking in the City”
Jorge Luis Borges: „On Exactitude in Science“
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings: „A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites“
Group experiment: Berlin blind map experiment
Experience Experiments (Feeling Your Way)
Mapping; without a compass; measure; all the old ways about; you are the other too; agency of mapping; Fake-estates; non-sites; the map is not the territory; a dip in the lake; psychogeography ; Situationist International; geography & psychogeography; walk ways; Ian Sinclair; omnidirectional treadmills; haptic feedback; John Wylie: „A single day’s walking“
Readings:
Michael de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life: “Walking in the City”
Jorge Luis Borges: „On Exactitude in Science“
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings: „A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites“
Group experiment: Berlin blind map experiment
Your Sense of Timing
Experience Experiments (Your Sense of Timing)In preparation for Three Days of Making Time: Revisiting the Debate between Bergson and Einstein
Einstein Bergson debate; waterfall illusion; thought experiments; Laplace and irreversibility
Readings:
Henri Bergson: selections from Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution
Jorge Luis Borges: „The Garden of Forking Paths“
The Bergson/Einstein debate
Seeing Things
Experience Experiments (Seeing Things)
You as a scientific instrument; ‘first perceptions’ experiments; consciousness; experience; interference; prisms; experimentum crucis; some enlightenment
Readings:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “The Human Being is the Most Exact Instrument” & “Delicate Empiricism” in Goethe on Science
Richard Dawkins: Unweaving the Rainbow: „Bar Codes in the Stars“
Jonathan Crary: “Visionary Abstractions” in Surroundings Surrounded
Experiment: reenact Goethe
Watch: rotorelief films of Marcel Duchamp
Feeling Emotional, How Touching
Experience Experiments (Feeling Emotional, How Touching)
Proprioception; sustained spatial accuracy; body schema & body image (precept, concept, affect); embodiment; fixed frames of reference; expression of emotions in man and animals; the Molyneux question; kiki/bouba effect; throwness
Readings:
Erin Manning and Brian Massumi: Coming Alive in a World of Texture: For Neurodiversity
Shaun Gallagher: How the Body Shapes the Mind (excerpts)
Recommendations:
Jules Verne: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Ian Hacking: Representing and Intervening: “The Creation of Phenomena”
Table-top experiment (group): alien hand syndrome; inverted mirror hand tracing experiments; inverted expressions; von frey hairs
Seeing Things Double Again
Experience Experiments (Seeing Things Double Again)
Albers; Gestalt rules; visual intelligence; after images ; steoposis; blindspots; seeing illusions; constraints; inattentional blindness (Link: Visual Cognition Laboratory)
Readings:
V. S. Ramachandran: Phantoms in the Brain: “Do Martians See Red?”
Jonathan Crary: „Historical Readings on the Afterimage“ in Olafur Eliasson: your colour memory
Simon Ings: The Eye: A Natural History: “The Commonwealth of the Senses”
Look reading together: excerpts from Donald Hoffman: Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See
Experiment: seeing into you blindspot walk
Video excerpts from Werner Herzog: Fata Morgana, 1971
Sensible Movements
Experience Experiments (Sensible Movements)
“The is experience at ground level … It’s experience grasped at the level of the setting in which your body moves, the gestures it makes, all the ordinariness connected with your clothes, with food, with traveling, with your daily routine, with your space.” George Perec
Seeing what you’re feeling; Étienne-Jules Marey; experimental filters; control and choice; truth-to-nature, mechanical objectivity, trained judgment; center of movement; drips; snow-flakes; pick-pockets on tours with neuroscientists; calder’s circus’; personal space
Readings:
George Perec: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces: “The Work of Memory”
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus: “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…”
Group experiment : Beckett, WATT walk & Chladni plates +
You Smell
Experience Experiments (You Smell)
3rd order connections & spatial temporal context of noses; odorama; smell-o-rama; WWII doctors and health; pheromones & the pits; sensory humunculus
Reading:
Gregory Bateson: Mind and Nature: Introduction
Diane Ackerman: A Natural History of the Senses: “Smell”
Thomas Worm: „More Than Just a Passionate Nose“ in Dufttunnel / Scent Tunnel