In the interest of providing a window on to contemporary German theory, we
are publishing a series of translations of reviews first published in the Dutch
periodical Mediamatic. These reviews were written by the media
theorist Geert Lovink. Lovink as part of the collective BILWET, and has recently
written: Medien Archiv published in German by Bollman.
Review: On Justifying The Hypothetical Nature Of Art
On Justifying
The Hypothetical Nature Of Art And The Non-Identicality Within The Object
World, Robert Fleck, E.A. (ed.) Walther Koenig bookshop, Koln 1992, ISBN
3 88 365 166 9, German/English text, 186 pp. DM 34
Geert Lovink
The catalogue of the Peter Weibel's interactive computer installation in the
Tanja Grunert gallery in Cologne (June to August 1992) contains a number of
interesting pieces. Besides a description of the installation, made at Weibel's
Staedel Professional Media Academy in Frankfurt, and a history of Weibel's
contribution to Viennese 'aktionism' in the sixties, it contains an examination
of VR by Virilio. He claims that "the conditions of necessity for direct,
sensual, sensory experience" and our "presence here and now" are menaced. For
Avital Ronell, too, the (virtual) world after the Gulf war is not the same as it
was. In Support our Tropes II, she claims that cyberspace is "west
of the west, a memorex cowboy frontier." The clean cyborg soldier is the
expression of revulsion for the body, "the bloody mess of organic matter," as
Marvin Minsky once called it. To Lanier's "assault on the passivity of the
contemporary subject" she opposes "a space of repose and reflection, a space
that would let the other come." This space would have to respond to the
justifiable wish, expressed in VR and other circles, for a new community. But no
single place exists for Bataille's "community of shattered egos" to gather. "Can
there be an atopicality of the community that nonetheless gathers, (...) where
the control towers come tumbling down, and where the other is genuinely
anticipated?" Slavoj Zizek comes to the same conclusion: VR excludes the other,
especially women, "the other par excellence." The book closes with an interview
with Friedrich Kittler by Peter Weibel. Instead of increasing numbers of
media/multi-sensual applications, Kittler finds that computers "should make
their own processes of calculation more accessible."
Translated by Laura Martz.
Geert Lovink is a writer and journalist living and working in
Amsterdam. He is a member of the editorial board of CTHEORY, and has written
extensively on nomadism and digital culture.