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Fabian Förstner
vor 6 Jahren
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1 Algorithmik & Ästhetik: Wurzeln digitaler Medien. Medienwissenschaften 2 Frieder Nake»Digital Humanities«8 Juli 2013 Zum Ende dieses Sommersemesters 2013 möchte ich Euch auf ein Buch, eine geistige Bewegung oder einen Diskurs aufmerksam machen, die sich in den letzten wenigen Jahren zuerst in den USA entwickelt haben, inzwischen aber auch in der BRD angekommen sind (und vermutlich auch in anderen Teilen der Welt). Ich tue das, obwohl der Diskurs keinen unmittelbaren Zusammenhang mit unserem Seminar hat. I tue es, weil ich denke, dass Ihr als Studierende einer traditionellen akademischen Einrichtung hiervon Kenntnis nehmen solltet (wenn das nicht schon der Fall ist). Da ich das gleichzeitig auch einem Master-Seminar mitteile, möchte ich es in Englisch tun. I have offered two seminars this term that are different in many ways. One was for undergraduate students of Digital Media, at HfK, a required course for second semester. It came under the title Medienwissenschaften 2. Algorithmik und Ästhetik: Wurzeln digitaler Medien. We actually studied various facets of two art exhibitions (and other events) that took place at the same time in 1968 in London (UK) and Zagreb (Croatia). The background of our studies was the thesis that Digital Media have their driving force in the dialectics of algorithmics and aesthetics. Furthermore, I maintain that roots of Digital Media can be found in early algorithmic art of the 1960s. The second seminar had the title Computability and Interactivity. The Two Paradigms of Computing. It was announced at the university in the Master-pogramme of Informatik, but was open to students of Digital Media (from where it actually drew more students). Its founding assumption was that Thomas Kuhn s old idea of paradigms has constitutive power for a scientific discipline, and that disciplines develop as such as they establish ideas as paradigms. Besides the two mentioned in the title, we took short looks at connectivity and performativity as well. Though different in many ways in their weekly meetings, the two seminars overlap in contents. What is algorithmics in one, is computability in the other; and aesthetics corresponds to interactivity insofar as interactive use of software is, to a large extent, a matter of sensual perception, i.e. of aesthetics. The proximity in their contents motivated me to make both groups of students aware of a book that has appeared recently: Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, Jeffrey Schnapp: Digital_Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (It s in the library: a inf 033 e $.) Jointly written by five well-known authors from the fields between computing and humanities, the book asks, what it means to be a human being in the networked information ge. The authors suggest that the humanities in their traditionally critical approach to the changing reality should transform themselves into something they (and others) have come to call digital_humanities (purposefully written with the underscore). The term intends to express more than mere application of computational methods to typical areas of humanities research. In particular, they think higher than a statement like everything now must be expressed digitally would indicate. The transformation that Peter Weibel (and others) call the algorithmic revolution is meant. It should be clear to us in the two seminars that algorithmic thinking is the topic, in its new tendencies and limitations, in its cultural excitement and its frightening control, in its democratic potentials as well as its devastating destructions. My hint is meant as an invitation to critical reading. Frieder Nake nake@informatik.uni-bremen.de (0421) Linzer Str. 9a, Raum 3015 Sprechstunde Donnerstag 10 bis 12 Linzer Str. 9a oder Montag nach Absprache an der HfK

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