17

ThinKing aBouT aRT

aFTeR The media:

ReseaRCh as pRaCTised

CulTuRe oF eXpeRimenT

Siegfried Zielinski

Translated by Gloria Custance

Points of departure

in the relations between the arts, sciences, and technologies there have been just as
many hot phases as ice- cold ones. according to my observations, the temperature
of these relations describes a wave- form that propagates approximately every 200
years. in the early modern era, for example, there was a period of high tension in
these relations, from 1600 to 1800, in which the modern- day separations and division
of labour developed. after this period, one of the most severe cold phases in recent
european history was, to my knowledge, at the end of the eighteenth century. a poet,
whom we admire but do not necessarily associate with the technological arts, Friedrich
von hardenberg known as novalis, wrote his poem Hymns to the Night in 1799, which
is located at the very centre of the theme that i shall elaborate in this chapter. i shall
quote only a few lines of this inimitable poem, which is at the same time a discourse; it
is a mixture of poetry and analytical reflections: a depiction of research.

The old world was in decline. The pleasure garden of the young race withered

away – and up towards freer, desolate space the unchild- like, growing humans

aspired. The gods vanished with their retinue. Alone and lifeless stood Nature.

It was bound with an iron chain by dry Number and rigid Measure. Like dust

and air the immeasurable flowering of life crumbled into words obscure.^1

after the period of violent separations in the age of enlightenment, in which
lightning was tamed and artificial electricity developed as the soul of the newer media,
novalis attempted to put the unity of the world on the agenda again which the poetizing
natural philosophers among the pre- socratics had conceptualized so elegantly. novalis
never tires of emphasizing that the sciences must be poeticized, and that he himself