voi Cespractises poetry exclusively and in conformity with this propagated unity of art and
science, of aesthetic and epistemological research.
This position, which i formulate here at the outset, is programmatic and runs
implicitly and consistently through my text. When i speak of art, i am referring to a
theory and praxis that as a matter of principle is affected by science and technology.
and when i speak of the sciences and their special ability to experiment, i envisage
a concept that is porous and exhibits a marked curiosity about the arts. if these
prerequisites are not given, there is no point at all in reflecting on the importance of
research for the arts (and sciences). if our focus is on the arts, then we do not need
just any kind of science. We need science that is poetic and with the capacity to think
poetically; we need science that is capable of imagining art, science that can even take
on experimental forms itself which might be characterized as poetic.
Within such a system of coordinates research can assume the status of a third party,
and in the true sense of the word be a medium, the process that mediates between the
arts and sciences. The experiment is the practical expression of such research. The
culture of experiment and experimental art are mutually dependent. in a society that
understands itself as a test department, however, this reciprocity does not work.
For the past twenty years i have been exploring and elaborating with my students,
and theses and dissertations the epistemological power of artistic images, machine
programmes, sounds, and texts. The Romantic idea of unity touches this approach
just slightly, but at the same time it tries to avoid the trap of a compulsion to think
universally, into which the historical movement has fallen. We decide on a case- by-
case basis which form we choose, and not on the foreground of generalizable ideological
opinions.
and yet the renewed attempt is always worthwhile, for ‘to the person who cannot
truly conceive anything as a unity’, wrote adorno in his essay on ‘punctuation marks’
in connection with semicolons and dashes, ‘anything that suggests disintegration
or discontinuity is unbearable; only a person who can grasp totality can understand
caesuras’ (adorno 1991 [1958]: 93).
an operational anthropology of the arts (of knowledge)in Hymns to the Night novalis was communicating indirectly with a man of his
generation for whom he entertained great affection and admiration, and with whom he
knew he had a great affinity. The young man in question was Johann Wilhelm Ritter
(1776–1810) from zadamovice, which today again is part of poland. in 1796 Ritter
went to Jena, which at the time was an east german hot spot for encounters between
the arts and the sciences, and for several years Ritter was a cult figure for the Romantic
poets, scientists, and philosophers. i am focusing on this exceptional intellectual, this
genius of scientific experimentation, because he embodies the idea of research as a
living microcosm, as an art which is realized through technical media.
Ritter dedicated his short life to a single idea. he wanted to demonstrate that
the world we know does not contain anything that is dead, that everything around
us is alive. he wanted to prove that everything that exists is in a state of perpetual
oscillation. he did not allow himself much time. he died when he was just thirty- four,
after making his own body his laboratory. Without a care for the effects on his health,