voi Cesand inventions that followed in the age of enlightenment and in the nineteenth
century – the founding years of the new media – use this instrumental relational quality.
Technical rationality breaks into the world of the imaginary, into artistic production.
artists are obliged to acquire investigative approaches because, confronted by the new
demands, they would otherwise sink into oblivion.
art through media means that the artistic process, or the artistic work, is essentially
realized by going through a technical medium or array of technical media. This became
possible with the advent of the artificial generation of electricity. in the enlightenment
the forces of nature like electrical storms were tamed by technology. With the discovery
of the physical and chemical principles of electricity, from the 1730s to the 1790s a very
rich culture of experimentation developed between london, paris, and st. petersburg.
scientific discoveries were demonstrated at spectacular performances in which weak
electric current was sent through the bodies of heavy monks or lightweight boys and
girls floating in the air. salon experiments, like the ‘Kiss of Venus’ in which visitors at
soirées touched the lips of an electrified beauty, were the early sensations of bourgeois
techno- culture. With the various models of tableaux magiques, upon which electrical
sparks described awe- inspiring figures, devices were created for instruction and
entertainment that generated images in a new modus; namely, in the modus of time.^4
The figures only became visible, or could be felt when touched, when the current was
on. georg Christoph lichtenberg (1742–1799) froze such contemporary images; Ritter
thought them through to the dramatic climax of ‘fire- writing’, which over 120 years
later became legible as an electroencephalogram on the monitor of an oscillograph.
since that time we can watch when people think.
art after the media does not refer to experimental praxis that dispenses entirely
with technical media; this is no longer feasible in science, cultural studies, or the
arts. Rather, this relational quality draws attention to the fact that we seek an art
of experimenting which no longer requires the application of media as a legitimation
or as sensationalism, but at the same time does not close its eyes, ears, and mind to
the media. Just how art after the media will develop is, at the beginning of the third
millennium, already foreseeable in certain concrete cases, but is not yet a foregone
conclusion. my anthropology, too, represents a modest attempt ‘to think the trend of
art through from its history’, as Ritter formulated it for physics.
Before the ideas, concepts, and notions existed which pushed forward to become
the generalization media that denoted a special area of theory and praxis (which only
happened over the last sixty to seventy years), art did not do without media. in the
two and a half thousand years between 1000 before and 1500 after the Common
era, a multitude of optical, acoustic, magnetic, and combinatorial sensations were
developed, which can only be subsumed under the umbrella term of media through the
coercion exerted by the context of our contemporary perspective. in their own time
they did not press forward in the direction of any generalization; indeed they had no
need of it. The modular grids and strings with which the ancient egyptians calculated
and constructed the ideal body proportions for their sculptures of the gods (presas
i puig 2004), from which the pythagoreans probably derived their geometry- based
concept of harmony, the shadow optics of the Chinese mohists of over 2,300 years
ago, the theatre of automata of heron of alexandria (20–62 ce), which corresponds
wonderfully with the mechanical and hydraulic treasures of arabian engineers