Ingeborg Reichle
Ingeborg Reichle (born 1970) is full professor at University of Applied Arts Vienna, teaching media theory and bioart. From 2014 till 2015 she was FONTE professor at the Institute for Cultural Studies at Humboldt-University in Berlin, Germany. From 1991 till 1998 she studied art history, archaeology, sociology, and philosophy in Freiburg i. Br., London, and Hamburg. 1993 founding member of kunstgeschichte.de. 1999 founding member of prometheus – Das verteilte digitale Bildarchiv für Forschung & Lehre. M.A. 1998, Department of Art History, University of Hamburg with the thesis: Die Camera di San Paolo des Correggio in Parma. Eine forschungskritische Untersuchung (Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Martin Warnke), 2005 she received her Ph.D. from Humboldt-University with the dissertation: Kunst aus dem Labor. Zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Technoscience (Springer 2005), Art in the Age of Technoscience. Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art (Springer 2009) (Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Horst Bredekamp). Her habilitation in 2013 dealt with the epistemology of images, diagrams and models in art and science: Bilderwissen – Wissensbilder. Zur Gegenwart der Epistemologie der Bilder. 1998–2005 research position at the Art History Department, Humboldt-University Berlin and the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik. 2005–2011 principal investigator at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, within the interdisciplinary working groups Die Welt als Bild and Bildkulturen. 2005 founding member of the „Junges Forum für Bildwissenschaft“. Since 2012 lecturer at the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik, Humboldt-University Berlin. She is co-editor of five books: IMAGE MATCH. Visueller Transfer, »Imagescapes« und Intervisualität in globalen Bildkulturen (Fink Verlag 2012, with M. Baleva and O. L. Schultz), Atlas der Weltbilder (Akademie Verlag 2011, with Chr. Markschies, P. Deuflhard, and J. Brüning, reprint 2013), Maßlose Bilder. Visuelle Ästhetik der Transgression (Fink Verlag 2009, with S. Siegel), Visuelle Modelle (Fink Verlag 2008, with S. Siegel and A. Spelten), Verwandte Bilder. Die Fragen der Bildwissenschaft (Kadmos Verlag 2007, with S. Siegel and A. Spelten). In 2010 she curated the bioart exhibition jenseits des menschen – beyond humans at the Berlin Medical History Museum of the Charite. Since 2000 she has been a guest lecturer at various international institutions including the School of Visual Arts, New York; the Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston; the Life-Science Lab, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg; Timbusu College National University of Singapore; SymbioticA at the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, University of Western Australia; School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong; Lomonosov Moscow State University and UNAM, Mexiko City.
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Ziel des Jungen Forums für Bildwissenschaft 2011 ist es, die Interdisziplinarität der Kategorie Farbe als Chance zu verstehen, disziplinenübergreifende Denk- muster und Kognitionsstrategien zu erkennen und über Fächergrenzen hinweg ein tiefgehendes Verständnis von Farbe zu entwickeln. Dieser multidisziplinäre Zugriff auf Farbe als kulturelles Phänomen intendiert, die Bedeutung der Farbe mit all ihren symbolischen Konnotationen, subjektiven Einwirkungen auf unsere Wahrnehmung sowie ideellen Präfigurationen unserer Bildung und Sozialisierung zu erfassen.
Phänomenologische, ästhetische, wahrnehmungspsychologische, medienspezifische oder neurobiologische Farbdefinitionen und Farbuntersuchungen zollen der Intermedialität von Farbe Rechnung und zeigen, dass Farbe immer im Konkurrenzverhältnis von visueller und verbaler Kognition wahrgenommen wird. Zugleich belegen Forschungen zu Farbe in wissenschaftlichen Darstellungen als auch in künstlerischen Äußerungen, dass Farbe Bedeutungen vermittelt, die nicht immer in Sprache abgebildet werden können und ihrer eigenen Logik der Sinnstiftung folgen. Während unsere exakte visuelle Wahrnehmung und unsere Fähigkeit der Unterscheidung multipler Farbtöne oftmals positiv herausgestellt werden, verfügen wir über ein vergleichsweise bescheidenes Vokabular zur Benennung der Farben. Die visuelle Kognition erscheint nicht nur exakter und vielfältiger als die Sprachfähigkeit und Sprachgewalt des Menschen, sondern setzt auch vor der Entwicklung des Sprachvermögens ein. Diese unterschiedlichen Funktionsweisen beeinflussen sich gegenseitig und konstituieren somit Farbkulturen in Kunst und Wissenschaft.
„realistisch“ gestaltete, plastische Modelle bzw. Repliken eine Rolle, die nicht stark genug hervorgehoben werden kann. Modelle können einige Quadrat meter groß sein und es liegen Ferngläser bereit, um sie im Detail betrachten zu können. Gearbeitet wird mit einer Konkretheit des Darzustellenden, die in Europa kaum zu finden ist. Die modellierten Szenen (Häuserzeilen, Straßenszenen, Dörfer en miniature) sind selbst Kunstwerke, die direkt und überzeugend wirken und doch zu gleich hochgradige Interpretationen sind. Aufgrund seiner hervorragenden Modelle gilt das Stadtmuseum von Tokyo, das kaum historische Originalobjekte beherbergt, heute als „mokei no hakubutsukan“ („Museum der Modelle“). In Museumspublikationen werden Grundannahmen, Vorlagen und Umsetzung der Modelle und Inszenierungen genauer erklärt. Der Workshop fragt vor diesem Hintergrund nach den kulturübergreifenden wie kulturspezifischen Aspekten der modellhaften Darstellung historischer und kultureller Räume im musealen Vermittlungskontext. Dabei sollen Inszenierungstechniken in japanischen Museen im Mittelpunkt stehen.
In einem Hauptvortrag wird Ichikawa Horiaki Ursachen für die Bedeutung von Modellen in japanischen Museen und ihre didaktische Wirksamkeit darlegen. Für ihn sind Museumsmodelle Hypothesen, Ergebnisse ausgedehnter Studien von Historikern, Architekturhistorikern und Archäologen, die sich durch schrittweise Verbesserungen den Tatsachen annähern.
The educational system‘s approach for this programme represents an answer to transformation processes that our globalized societies face today. To be able to deal with complex and global dynamics as well as differing realities, courses designed to give an overview offer
interdisciplinary knowledge and provide insights into strategies and methods from a number of areas of knowledge. Basic principles of art, philosophy, natural sciences, engineering and the humanities are an integral part of the curriculum in order to familiarize students with various perspectives and epistemologies. In addition, basic knowledge regarding the challenges of an increasing fusion of man and machine will be imparted, with particular focus on the growing automation that is due to the refinement of artificial intelligence and progress in the area of genome editing.
The interdisciplinary approach of the programme aims at developing future-oriented work methods and the conveyance of new strategies designed to reach far beyond ordinary educational concepts, thus opposing the growing specialization and fragmentation of knowledge. This approach represents a contribution to shaping the future of our societies: Fragile social fabrics in a quickly changing world that are confronted with global challenges to an unprecedented extent are to be addressed: demographic change, migration, the protection of human rights, social injustices and poverty, climate change, or redefining human work in the era of robotics and digitalization.
Systematic and interdisciplinary courses provide students with insights into current strategies of relevant technological developments, into new economies and finances, as well as into political discourses of contemporary societies. The programme is supplemented by reflections accompanying the course of studies. Artistic strategies and practical knowledge are both significant learning objectives and basic work methods. These goals are conveyed in modular study units and enhanced through forms of complementary and collaborative teaching; they include artistic strategies like abstraction, ambiguity, alienation, destruction or performativity. The architecture of the study programme offers a new and innovative learning environment which combines theory and practice. It is supplemented by practical experience in various studios where students become familiar with a broad spectrum of media and materials.
In order to educate professionals who are able to navigate in a globalized and interconnected world and who possess the necessary qualifications to handle complex and global dynamics, the study programme offers new teaching and learning methods and action strategies. These promote collaboration and teamwork and enable the planning, creation, implementation, analysis and inspired leading of dynamic projects – an important contribution to providing critical and well thought out foundations for meaningful and sustainable decision processes.
The classic self-portrait differs from other types of artistic representation above all in that a relationship between the image of a person and that person’s physical existence was definitely intended. The classic portrait always refers to an existing element of reality in the form of a living person. The relationship of similarity between “original” and “likeness” was already a subject of discussion in antiquity, and stood on the one side for what the genre of the portrait achieved, and on the other constituted the precarious status of this genre. The portrait shows but one side of a person and is an art form oriented on the body, which first and foremost depicts the corporeal reality of a person. In art theory, this fact frequently led to depreciation of the portrait compared to other art genres, as the portrait merely copied, mirrored, and duplicated nature.
The same arguments were also advanced in the portrait’s favour, for it is precisely this similarity that asserts presence between original and likeness, and endows the portrait with an effect that other art genres cannot achieve. It is similarity that, beyond the dialectic of presence and absence, is able to transform actual absence into the fiction of familiar and authentic presence of reality. For a very long time the portrait was closely tied to concepts of “reality” and “truth”, and this established the special status of the portrait. From this commitment to veracity developed the special authority of the portrait and its creator, the artist. The portrait, which not only represented a likeness of the sitter but also showed a true image of the sitter’s self; a portrait that — particularly in the case of a self-portrait of the artist — is more like than the artist’s own face. In the age of modern art, however, the representability of an individual person increasingly came under scrutiny and was recontextualised. It is against this historical framework that the workshop will engage with contemporary artistic strategies, which, in the age of genome sequencing and genome editing, interrogate new concepts of the self.
The collaboration project aims to initiate and develop a debate about the relationship of ontology and aesthetics in the age of technoscience from the perspectives of art, science, and philosophy: During the twentieth century science and technology acquired a dominant role in redefining the concept of life. Tech- nology-driven science and research rendered the basic physical and functional unit of heredity, the gene, accessible to human manipulation, thus turning biology into technology. The genetic code and computer code became interchangeable, opening up new possible constellations for designing the biological sphere. Simultaneously we saw big shifts in the developments of the sciences in the least two decades, when fun- damental principles and ways of doing science and research in the field of biotechnology began to erode, like the reproducibility of experimental settings. Today research processes are getting more and more out- sourced, away from the laboratories of scientific institution to new start-ups, turning the research process into a black box for the scientist involved. On the other hand we see with the growing DIY movement cutting-edge technologies getting into the hands on non-professionals, and new genome editing techno- logies like CRISPR cheap and easy to use revolutionizing the question about the ontology of life.
This ground-breaking development went unnoticed in the art world: it was not until the 1990s that artists began to make increased use advanced technology to explore and create new art forms, such as digital art or bioart. Science-based art emerged, enhancing progressive encounters with science and technology and shifting the terrain of art towards cutting-edge technologies and the technosciences. With the rise of bioart, a variety of new materials, such as DNA, bacteria, cells, tissue cultures, and transgenic organisms, entered the art world as a means of artistic expression. Obviously, this also made it necessary for artists to get acquainted with new epistemologies and a new logic of producing reality within the techno-scientific re-
gime. By bringing their artistic endeavour with cutting-edge technology to the public’s attention, science- based art has provoked greater reflection on the limits of manipulating and/or creating life with biotech- nology, highlighting the new genome editing technologies like CRISPR and new approaches in the field of synthetic biology. Therefore, it is high time to shed some light on the relationship of ontology and aes- thetics in the age of technoscience by focusing on the production of art that is related to techno-science; not only because of the technologies it uses — and recently also biotechnologies — but most importantly because from this relationship a model emerges which is fruitful for understanding and interpreting reality. Therefore, the question “What is art?” needs to be posed in the light of an ontology that deals with tech- noscience and the production of reality within biotechnologies. The philosopher Maria Antonia Gonzalez Valerio will frame the workshop with her introduction and investigation about the revival and reappraisal of natural philosophy in the light of biotechnology. Her approach, which she calls “the ontology of immanence” engages above all with predominant traditions that seek to answer the question as to the essence of nature and its relationality either with reference to language or to history. In the twentieth century these lines of thought have resulted in nature being subsumed under culture, and this is why it has repeatedly been deemed necessary to try to close off and dislocate parts of nature. In recent decades the remnants of nature left over from the grasp of culture have tended to be made over to philosophical anthropology, which does not offer any solution to the philosophical issues involved. A revival and renewal of natural philosophy must engage with the recent findings of the technosciences and biotechnology and relate them theoretically to the novel aesthetic ontologies that now seek to interpret the world of sensate organisms (plants and animals including humans).
With plastics and plasticisers as well as noise pollution in the oceans, we now have relatively new, emerging phenomena that defy the regulatory definitions of pollution. Accurate definitions are lacking also because modern waste, like plastic pollution, is fundamentally different from its predecessors. The sciences involved in tracking, analysing, and understanding the ecological crisis of marine ecologies face severe epistemolo- gical problems, because the methods used hitherto are failing: The emerging phenomena are both novel and occurring on an unprecedented global scale. The entire extent to which plastics and plasticisers are floating in the oceans and seas is not visible to the naked eye because a great deal floats below the surface in the form of microparticles. Plastics are not biodegradable, but they are gradually broken down into smaller and smaller particles in the ocean through wave action and intense irradiation from sunlight. Ma- rine organisms confuse these microplastics with plankton; this means that plastics (and the toxins they contain) are increasingly entering the food chain, irretrievably and irreversibly. Around 70 % of plastic waste deposited in the oceans sinks to the sea floor, but in 1997 scientists observed for the first time that an enormous amount of tiny plastic particles were collecting on the surface of the water in the vortexes of ocean currents, also known as gyres. The discovery of the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch made it clear that millions of tons of plastic garbage are drifting in the oceans. Since the discovery of high concen- trations of microplastics in other gyres as well, it can no longer be denied that a new ecosystem has emerged in which artificial and natural aspects are inseparably connected.
The symposium will provide a spectrum of artists’ responses to the current transformation of our oceans at the dawning of the Plasticene age, where our oceans are turned into a plastisphere, a human-made system in which the natural and the artificial are no longer distinguishable and speculative biologies evolve. Col- laborative projects will be presented that identify unnatural noise in the oceans as a further environmental issue, especially the effect of noise on microscopic organisms such as plankton, for example. Noise Aquarium — a project which seeks to raise attention about the current loss of marine biodiversity introduces a col- lection of accurate 3D models as a resource for scientific and artistic research. Another artistic project Aquatocene — Subaquatic Quest for Serenity will present the efforts to make recordings using hydrophones in different locations around the globe. Underwater noise has an impact on a great number of marine life forms, which depend on the sub-aquatic sonic environment to survive. Despite the availability of popular aquatic sounds, there is hardly any awareness that the underwater soundscape is as rich as the one heard by terrestrial creatures above water.
Navigation ist eine an Räume gebundene Kulturtechnik, die visuell strukturierte Wissenssysteme generiert. Die hierfür wesentlichen Begriffe Visualisierung, Räumlichkeit und Navigation spannen ein Feld auf, in welchem der sehende und lesende Mensch über Strategien der Konstruktion, Entwicklung und Erfahrung räumlicher Ordnungen verfügen muss. Hierbei gilt es zu reflektieren, wie die physischen und technischen Instrumente dieser visuellen Orientierung beschaffen sind.
Mit der zunehmenden Erschließung virtueller, global vernetzter Datenräume haben solche Fragen an Brisanz gewonnen. Die oft beschworenen Utopien eines körperlosen Cyberspace und die hiermit einher gehende Rede von einer restlosen Virtualisierung des Raumes erweisen sich indes als rhetorische Gesten. Wir bewegen uns nicht allein in virtuellen Datenräumen, sondern noch immer auch an konkreten Orten. Sich in solchen konkreten wie virtuellen Räumen zu bewegen heißt, ein vielfältiges Ensemble von Texten und Bildern, Karten, Piktogrammen und nicht zuletzt digitalen Medien als Instrumente der Orientierung zu benutzen.
Anlässlich der Tagung soll nach dem Zusammenhang verschiedener Modelle von Navigation im Raum, mit einem Akzent auf zeitgenössischen Medien, gestellt werden. Worin bestehen die Gemeinsamkeiten, worin die Unterschiede von Suchstrategien in geographischen Räumen einerseits und Datenräumen andererseits? Wo durchdringen sich die verschiedenen Strategien navigierender Raumerfahrung? Unter welchen Bedingungen verliert eine solche Unterscheidung ihre Geltung? Wo lassen Prozesse der Navigation die Möglichkeiten visueller Erfahrung hinter sich?
Dem Forschungsprogramm der interdisziplinären Arbeitsgruppe „Bildkulturen“ entsprechend diskutiert die Vorlesungsreihe „Fluchtlinien der Bildkultur“ jene Aspekte, die der eher intuitiven Rede von der „Beliebigkeit“ und der „Entsicherung“ von Bildern entgegenlaufen und diese im Lichte kulturhistorischer und bildwissenschaftlicher Paradigmen relativieren. Mitglieder der IAG stellen in unterschiedlichen Feldern die unauflösbare Rolle von Bildern für menschliche Orientierung und Sinnstiftung dar. Aufgezeigt werden aktuelle Einsichten der historischen oder theoretischen Forschung, die die tiefe Einbettung von Bildverweisen in kulturelle Räume und Praktiken anzeigen und dokumentieren. Einen Fokus bilden dabei alle Implikationen von „Perspektive“: von Fragen nach der Darstellung von Raum und seiner perspektivischen Konstruktion im Bild bis hin zu jenem zunehmend transkulturellen Austausch von Bildern als Grundlage für die Selbstverortungen kultureller Akteure.
Die scheinbare Verselbständigung und Autonomie der Bilder und Bildwelten wird somit rückgebunden an „Bildkulturen“ und deren gesellschaftliche und kulturelle Referenzräume, die weit in die Geschichte und die Grundverfassung des Menschen als Bilderproduzenten zurückreichen.
The engagement of art with science ranges from artists’ iconological handling of scientific imaging to research projects executed as artistic endeavours by artists working in the laboratory. In the last two decades we have seen a number of ar- tists leave the traditional artistic playground to work instead in scientific contexts such as the laboratories of molecular biologists. Such artistic interventions in ge- netics and biological forms have made possible new means of artistic expression and art forms, like ‘Transgenic Art’ and ‘Bio-Art’. The use of technologies from the field of current research in the life science by artists ranges from tissue enginee- ring to stemcell technologies and even transgenic animals, a phenomenon that raises ethical questions with regard to both scientific and artistic endeavours. Visual illustrations have always been used in the natural sciences to make visible scientific relationships, to visualize theories, or to graphically capture the results of scientific experiments. Today the visualizations in modern Life Sciences range from advanced image technologies that offer evermore detailed views of the mi- crostructures of the organic world, to imagebased computer simulations that are no longer based upon a physical-biological reference system and that open up a new biotheoretical space, to representations become life, such as transgenetic animals and clones.
With contributions by Dianna Cohen, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Regine Rapp, Christian de Lutz, Mary Maggic, Robertina Šebjanič, Brandon Ballengée, Victoria Vesna, Martina R. Fröschl, Alfred Vendl, Reiner Maria Matysik, Ingeborg Reichle, Thomas Schwaha, Stephan Handschuh, María Antonia González Valerio, Rosaura Martínez Ruiz, Pinar Yoldas, and Michael Sauer.