Das audio-visuelle Zeitalter

by Jürgen Claus, editor
Hatje-Cantz, Ostfildern, Germany, 2008
DVD-Video (PAL), € 19.80
ISBN: 978-3-7757-2117-2.

Reviewed by Frieder Nake
Informatik, University of Bremen
Bremen, Germany

nake@informatik.uni-bremen.de

One accusation must be raised against this DVD of a total length of 160 minutes, and it may be good to do this immediately to get over with it: with one exception, text and spoken language is in German. Distribution of this collection of historic documents will, therefore, be limited. For those who understand that language, the record is to be recommended even if only one or two of the documents should catch your interest. The English community still gets Xenakis in conversation with Jürgen Claus, and several video clips where language plays no role.

Jürgen Claus has for decades been contributing to media art himself, always reaching out as far as possible: down into the sea, up into the skies. Many will know him and his work, part of which is books, interviews, and participation in artistic events. It must have been easy for him to select for this edition seven audio and five video contributions from his files.

Under the auspices of ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, all the interviews and, perhaps to a lesser degree, the film documents were put together, edited, and technically prepared. Their common theme is the question, how close really are science and art, and how close could they possibly come. The desire for the union of the two great capacities of human creative being-in-the-world has been with us for decades, and has recently been felt particularly strongly. Beautiful examples exist of equally strong contributions from both sides to unite in one work. Here we see and listen to some.

The title of the volume may sound a bit exaggerating: The age of audio-visual. Not that our times could not be called an audio-visual age. But the DVD does certainly not cover the spectrum of audio-visual works that one would have to present in order to justify the "age" in the title. What you get for your money is a very personal selection of works by artists the author is or was friends with.

The audio section starts with a text collage of quotes from other artists, and words, associations, concepts, and statements by Jürgen Claus. The expansion of art is his concern. The document is from 1969, and it is since then that the artist has been thinking art in a global and cosmic context.

A wide spectrum of concerns is opened by Claus when he talks with computer art pioneer and physicist, Herbert W. Franke (in 1971). Claus insists on issues of technology and human culture, and draws Franke's attention to a skepticism that by the time had started to be raised pressingly. Franke, however, in his eternal calm and unerring tone, defends a radical belief in technology's necessity. We have no choice, he says, but to apply technology in order to work against the negative effects of older means of technology. Claus' plea for a totally new way of thinking in our relations to animals, to the oceans, and generally to life on earth does not shake Franke's technological optimism. Of course, human kind should keep in mind its responsibility to preserve the environment. But Franke does not see any escape from having to adapt to technology.

This audio tape is more than 35 years old now. Not too many people were already then concerned about the environment. On the other hand, Claus’ questioning, coming from a mind that was never in opposition to the use of late technology, shows how far back in history first doubts were levered against the furor technologicus.

The two artists exchange their convictions against the background of, then, the early years of computer art. We should remember that Herbert Marcuse was still a popular and strong warning against technology by the time, and the ecological movement was in its earliest manifestations in Germany against nuclear power plants. Listening to the two artist-scientists and their, admittedly, very general positions that do not explicitly refer to contemporary political movements, is a moving experience.

A wonderful series of conversations with five very different minds unfolds in the sequel, first with grand old Herbert Bayer (still very strong in 1976) about photography and its use for advertising as compared to artistic intentions. The next interview is with Iannis Xenakis (1979, in English) about the relation of architecture to music and to light as a means of architecture: will this lead to a science/art synthesis? The architect Frei Otto (1984) cannot but turn to the natural sciences, to biology in particular, in his search for forms that cannot further be improved. Form to him is the process by which it is generated, as well as our interpretation, which can come only afterwards. Clearly, science and art must move closer towards each other, but no easy compromise must be allowed, Frei Otto maintains. We must always remain masters in our acquired field and uncompromisingly only try to understand a bit of the other field.

In his talk with light artist Adolf Luther (1984), Jürgen Claus keeps returning to the question of the computer and computer art. Luther is aware of early uses by artists of the computer. But he doesn't see anything new resulting from such experiments. Claus' remark that now, with the help of data processing, the energy aura surrounding a human may be made visible, leaves Luther skeptical. The world to him exists as matter and energy. The computer cannot generate either one. Results of computer art are only visible images; they do not pertain to our other senses.

Twenty years after first appearances of digital art, this is a revealing position. The artist concerned with technology himself (processes of light) does not recognize the conceptual power of algorithmic approaches. Artists don’t necessarily have the great vision only because they are assumed to be creative.

The final interview is with the grand master of German informel painting, Karl Otto Götz. It took place in 2006, when Götz was already 92 years old and almost blind, but still fresh and active in his mind. He reminds us of film experiments he did back in the 1930s with abstract materials. In the 1960s, he called his research—and research it was—„electronic painting“. This interview together with a short video showing Götz and his wife, the artist Rissa, in front of one of his exceptional paintings, constitutes the highlight of the DVD

Götz has done hundreds of abstract expressionist paintings and prints. Between 1959 and 1964, he was engaged in a series of raster images that are sensational (and almost totally unknown or forgotten). He had the canvas divided up into small squares—we would now call them „pixels“. The entire area, which was huge in some cases, was organized into large fields of equal size. Each large field consisted of 16 small fields. Each of them was again subdivided into 16 building blocks before each of these became a 2 by 3-element. There were then frequencies assigned to the various fields for black and white, and students randomly colored the elements according to the prescribed frequencies.

Götz did these experiments in the context of his studies of perception and Shannon's information theory. It is fascinating to now hear him talk again about this research: he clearly recognized that the reception of information theory in the philosophically oriented information aesthetics of the time was wrong in principle. Those philosophical aestheticians, Götz maintained already in 1966, when we met, did not see the difference between probability and frequency. The latter is empirical, the former theoretical.

In Götz we have an artist, who is more of a scientist than some of those who now do a lot of talking about interdisciplinarity and art/science synthesis. Frei Otto, on a different level, must be seen as another such case. As an architect and artist of the most phantastic light forms, totally relies on practical results of mathematics where Götz only needs theory.

The DVD contains another document by K.O. Götz, a video documentation of very early raster image production and primitive animation. This 8 mm film material is worth the DVD. Thanks to ZKM and Jürgen Claus for having made this available (it has no sound and only a few explanatory lines of text, beautifully hand-written. (This historic film material makes the DVD interesting for the English speaking world, too).

Two videos clips by Ulrich Herzog and one by Jürgen Claus, plus a set of 40 hand painted slides by Claus, complete the disc. Sub Art by Herzog has sound of German words, but you cannot understand 90% of them, and they are not meant to be understood. So this is good for the English community, too, as are the other two video clips.

All these are abstract films. But Sub Art by Herzog is special. It is an almost totally abstract film resulting from concrete action much of which is dealing with the construction material, concrete. A group of artists is going underground in Munich in 1968. They change the world in one of Munich's new subway stations, then still under construction. The artists arrange blocks and carry out various actions. One of them is taking film shots with an extremely shaky camera and a later not less shaky cutting process. Through this technique, sub art creates a plethora of black and white moving images of which we know that their sources are human activities and operations. But they are dissolved into faint indications of traces.

Jürgen Claus in a live performance uses a large set of his slides to generate large projections showing art as organ, as material, and as space. Expansion of art remains his topic. Across the Atlantic, Gene Youngblood is writing his book, Expanded Cinema, at around the same time. Some of the audio interviews are in a very low voice only. All audio tapes are accompanied by still photographs or computer generated art (from later times). It is a pity that no real booklet is included. The cover gives very short indications of the contents only.

This DVD is an important historic document. It belongs to the growing set of such examples that will eventually become the material of the early history of digital media.