Werner Jauk, 2021

Theoretical premises – in-sight from out-side & body-knowledge from being in it

The programming of the event in Belgrade has attempted to discuss Marica Radojčić’s work on Tesla as a work between science and art, a currently mostly unclear term that has also been attributed to her work. The attempt now is to narrow down a form of work between science & art in a definitional way, as it were – via their “commonalities” – “aisthesis” and its formalisation are at the centre.

Tesla and Marica Radojčić, both focus on the seeing perception. Marica Radojčić borrows the title of her work from Tesla, from the Illumination of darkness. This follows the myth of Prometheus, in general the idea of life-energy from fire, light and thus the illumination, clarification / elucidation, the mastering of life through knowledge.

For Marica Radojčić, the flashing of the Tesla coil is a metaphor for knowledge as an extension of the body in harmony with the illumination of the world; Tesla sees in the availability of energy in nature – the modern view of the world combined with humanistic thinking. From the constant availability of energy in nature, he derives the general availability of electricity in the age of electricity, a “democratic” thinking that McLUHAN similarly sees as cultural progress in the “all-at-onceness” of information of the media age (McLUHAN 1995). However, McLUHAN saw in the “all-at-onceness” of the world of networked information an auditory phenomenon of perception, selecting from the dynamics of what is present around the body according to its arousal value – according to in-tention as being in tension and not having Ab-Sicht[1].

“Aisthesis” means perception – science and art are based on perception and its formalisation.

This form of perception is dominantly committed to seeing, to making visible. Light means the extension of seeing, the making visible of the naturally invisible. Thus, at the same time the overcoming of nature: the illumination of the world, the illumination even of the “dark-side of the moon …”.

What is attempted to be “clarified” in myth, in religions, in art and science as different realities, has in Tesla a very pragmatic life side at the same time something that is incomprehensible to seeing and thus cannot be explained. It is the transmission of electric-energy within the paradigm of the enlightenment: the understanding outside of seeing through cognitions from embodiments of the mechanical body, which interacts with the environment through its own physical movement. After Tesla, however, fire is no longer physically carried from candle lamp to candle lamp to illuminate the city – energy flows “invisibly” and makes the city visible.

At the end of the 19th century, electrification, the illumination of cities, anticipated something that in the electronic and digital / post-digital ages will have brought increased irritations to the mechanistic system, ultimately its transgression (JAUK 2003).  We no longer go to the source of energy/occurrences, the information about it is present in the “all-at-onceness” (McLUHAN, 1995) and we seize this media of occurrences using extensions of our body from the net-space around our body according to their value of arousal, due to the hedonic needs of the body. In the post-digital age, we are now trying to merge the physical basis of life and all our knowledge with the all-at-onceness of virtualities as converged realities.

We have taken this image of the modernity of the world, according to the notion of Marica Radojčić’s work as an artist and mathematician (and thus?) between science & art, from the point of view of philosophy and natural science – finally transcending the one-sidedness of the in-sight of seeing as understanding to hearing as the whole-body involvement. Hence the title immersion into the noise (based on David TOOP, 1997) and thus media-theoretical aspects as extensions of sensory specificities in interaction with the environment as a process of cognition but also as a process of shaping reality in everyday life was to be experienced together in a symposium within the medium of “language”. The attempt to experience this participatively through bodily participation was attempted in the second part as an artistic way of reaching knowledge in the event Aufblitzen, Eintauchen – Nikola Tesla, Mastermind. Thus the reflection of knowledge between science and art is not only the content but also the method of the entire event.

1. Knowledge as illumination of darkness – immersion into noise

Opening up the narrowness of mediatisation of experience as in-sight

Velimir Abramović has – within his demand for a comprehensive philosophy beyond the sensory world – expanded the dominant understanding of insight (as the modern scientific image of physics) through a metaphysical experience, mysticism, the religion of “explanations” of being human for humans. Time is his central theme here, which Tesla in particular had snatched away from the physical embodiment of comprehensible transmission – “reducing” events in time to the moment (in perception).

Velimir Abramović focussed on overcoming the limits of the in-sight towards a meta-physical experience transcending the narrowness of sensory perception.

Werner Jauk was responsible for the whole theoretical concept reflecting illumination of darkness – immersion into noise by expanding the mechanistic view of the world through alternatives within methods of reaching knowledge in the overlapping area between science and art. In some kind of key-lecture he attempted to discuss an extension of and at the same time an alternative to insight into things (understanding, seeing through, comprehending) by hearing their movement on the basis of modern science and thus to relativise the dominance of seeing and thus the one-sidedness of the in-sight by hearing. This leads to some kind of acceptance of plural knowledge and plural realities extending the cultural focus of postmodern science by its base, by natural pluralism – by different sensory worlds.

Art expands explicit knowledge to include bodily experiencing at the paradigm of hearing. Understanding is phylogenetically emerging with seeing and the moving body, the under-standing by pre-standing and the mechanical relationship (“ratio”) of the body to the environment. Hearing is the arousal-based analysing of occurrences around the unmoved body because of their meaning for the body leading to an implicit body-knowledge – seeing is formalised in mechanistic understanding, hearing in hedonic experience (JAUK 2000).

The concept of sound-gesture (JAUK 2019) formalises this and makes hedonic experience both tangible and communicable today through body-related media technologies. Sound is an artefact of movement, the modulation of its colour conveys spatial movement. Sound-gesture is the imitation of imagined movement from listening to sound modulation. The meaning of this movement puts the body in tension and thus in motion, which it in turn expresses in movement; thus the body directly communicates bodily experience through “emotional contagion”. In a mediatised world, understanding is becoming increasingly irritated, and experience is increasingly at least being added as a form of knowledge.

Perception as hearing not only expands the modern image of knowledge as in-sight and “Bildung[2]“, as forming an image through seeing. Hearing thus has high cultural value in the transition from a modern culture to a post-modern culture, from a mechanistic world to a hedonic world. In this world, information is “grasped” from the “all-at-onceness” of information about occurrences around the body according to their arousal value. McLUHAN himself has already associated this concept with the auditory, the auditory space. The form of interaction in it identifies a hedonic culture of experience, regulated by the excitation of the body, as an “auditory culture”.

Tesla, with the transmission of energy, irritated the notions of time and space (as embodied cognitions of one’s own bodily interaction with the environment) in the electric age and thus anticipated the “all-at-onceness” – this is little noted. It is to pay attention to this turn to auditory culture and at least expand the mainstream of attention to the seeing and its cultural implications.

Tesla also had the idea of making this now distributable energy freely available – possibly as a generalisation of the physical natural law of the constancy of the energy present in the universe, of which we are all a part, to political / ideological concerns. Again this is a parallel to auditory space, the perception of existing occurrences / movements and not merely concrete occurrences generated by (one’s own) movement.

This is to be taken further into the information society, the dynamized wiki-society that collectively “produces” and distributes “knowledge” and makes it available to all – ultimately, so did the modern science claim.

Ana Trajković, following JAUK’s argumentation, merged auditory perception with “all-at-onceness”; further she continued the availability of energy and information into emancipation of any kind and especially of women’s emancipation formalised in a legal equality, thus uniting media-theoretical aspects with socio-political postulates within a plural worldview of postmodern attitudes.

What Ana Trajković addressed within media-theoretical aspects is continued by Aleksandar Protić in mass media production of images as reality in some kind of “religious” creeds in the power of the media in different cultures.

The attribution of genius can be “explained”, besides power-political things, by overcoming the mechanistic system of seeing through the irritation of what has been seen so far – by playing with the energy of fire …

Generally as a striving for “security” generated by insecurity, religious faith as knowledge of life, as an assumed projection surface for coping with longings as well as fears.

However, the attribution and cultural use / conventions of genius are also part of very “profane” claims to power – or “ways of seeing”. Tesla is appropriated as a genius to strengthen ethnic and political power, Tesla is appropriated to be an advertising medium for “new” technologies.

Tesla is considered a genius for his (altruistic) thinking, especially in his European / occidental origins – but in his life in the USA he is seen above all as a businessman of political / cultural innovation / change. Here, traditional humanistic bourgeois values collide with neoliberal economic political attitudes. Ultimately, both are creeds. Aleksandar Protić sent us a contribution on this from Paris.

1. Aufblitzen, Eintauchen – Nikola Tesla, Mastermind.

Body knowledge – “being in it” & Shaping environment by bodily participation

The artistic discourse of Marica Radojčić and Tesla’s relationship in Graz could be seen as determined by the transmedium of hearing. Music, participatory concerts as well as participatory installations are characterised by hedonic, bodily experience; in addition, documentations of participatory works were shown in an enveloping installation, some kind auf auditory space.

These forms of “artistic” contributions based on music are intended to make the auditory world not recognisable, but experienceable, and thus also to extend epistemological questions of knowledge to experience as knowledge. The participatory concert The magical tension of the number “3” by Werner Jauk, however, “only” wants to initiate this experience: to create an experimental situation that makes it possible to experience the physical immersion into noise. This immersion is an analysing behaviour according to the arousal value, each time shaping the noise environment anew, together in interaction. The shaping interaction does not take place through information transmission (through media of whatever kind, e.g. from sign-like language to digital code), but through direct physical communication for the shaping not only of music for and by every body.

The making-in-sight in the ratio of the body to the environment, which is bound to its own movement and light, and thus the synthesis of reality, is transcended in the hedonic experience of the body of occurrences around it and their analysis according to their arousal value for the body as a form of survival.

The modern world in the culmination of digital culture, which has transcended the body through its mediatisation as a distance from its corporeality, becomes in relational post-modernity and post-digital culture, the bringing together of the body (according to its hedonic needs) with (plural individual) worlds created from codes.

In the dynamic of bodily acting, art – like science its knowledge – leaves the notion of the “work” as the final formalisation as externalisation of experience and seeks the provision of settings for experiencing, the initiation of perception and its immediate bodily formalisation – the paradigm is the sonic performative.

After the “forward back” extensions of the modern concept of knowledge as knowing in mysticism and religion, but also as a turn away from seeing understanding into hearing experience, the artistic part of the overall event in Graz attempts to differentiate this experience. Accordingly, the following comments on the works presented here are not descriptions, by no means evaluations. They are an attempt to pursue approaches to the sonic performative and thus an alternative aesthetics and science from hearing as a theory-based form of knowledge between science and art in these works.

After the “simple” listening formalised in music, the solo piece Bug by Bruno Mantovani, performed by Johannes Feuchter, clarinet, the participatory concert The magical tension of the number “3” by Werner Jauk attempted to experience the “harmony” in the sonic performative in the collective and collectivising creation-process (JAUK 1999) of interacting bodies in a participatory concert.

In the participatory installation Balance, a self-experience experiment by Gertrude Moser-Wagner primarily attempted the bodily experience in search of homeostasis of the body and its knowledge – not only as a metaphor of balance through understanding, but negotiated as bodily balance.

Selman Trtovac’s E-Line seeking the “truth in art” is finally of an epistemological interest transcending the visual world by “flowing” visuals. Although he works with drawing-series on paper, his E-(ndless)-line is some kind of transposition of hearing to seeing, from the formalization of the perception, the frozen energy of the state to the dynamics of living energy – creating just a cut of its endless life-time.

Doris Jauk-Hinz contrasted the media representation of a religious symbol with the physical experience of the presence, recognising as experiencing. In the hot apple, the heat of the vital “media” that is necessary for the survival of life is brought back from the cultural symbol to its primary meaning for the body in a way that can be experienced.

The project C2M cloud to memory by Milica Lapčević and Vladimir Šojat ,started with Marica Radojčiċ, measures light and approaches the form of perception of hearing: intensities are measured, i.e. the transmission medium for the visual perception of the environment and not its shape. The “affordance” is measured, the intensity of light as a physical stimulus and thus arousal as the primary meaning for the body – albeit with the self-irony of physical exactness of material-focused natural sciences, which hardly corresponds to perception and experience.

The video Streaming II by Daniel Rothbart and Milica Lapčević  thematises the networking of electrical energy and information as energy worldwide, made possible by Tesla’s work but also his ideological attitude of free availability, and thus a democratisation within the experience paradigm of auditory space. Finally, the avant-gardes of electronic net-art have also elaborated and defined this on the paradigm of the collective and collectivising shaping of music-making (JAUK 1999) and its objectification of the “we” in music (ADORNO 1958).

The following contributions are based on deconstructivist methods and work on “images”, on media-induced “realities”, the myth of mass-media. In Baskets of Energy Werner Schimpl works on the “shine” of knowledge and its “creator”. He extracts the playful aspect from Tesla’s coil and thus exaggerates the incomprehensibility of scientific insight into the violence of nature and it´s taming in public reception and thus the distortion of cognition into image magic.

Tesla’s scientific work based on the experiment is transferred by Gerda Lampalzer and Manfred Oppermann in their artistic research project Tesla’s High Frequency Colouring System in a whimsical way to image-creating “colouring” of their advertising poster – according to the principle of how sound colouring colours the emotional mass mood, the image of a product.

In her installation What would Ted Kaczynski’s daughter do…? Kathrin Stumreich slips into the fictional character Chrystal Tesla, daughter of Ted Kaczynski, and thus intensifies the image construction(s) of people between genius and madness/crime with a view of Tesla through media work but also through his self-dramatisation.

The artistic works thus explore knowledge between science and art. Their methods can be classified between experience in the sonic performative, the scepticism of controlled interaction in experiments and the generation of reality through interaction – ultimately not the targeted illumination of darkness, but rather the empathetic immersion into noise.

The participatory concert is not only intended to make it possible to experience collective and collectivizing creation, but art as a process in general. In this case the process is based on an algorithm of artificial intelligence enhanced with artificial emotion, which was generated immediately beforehand in a sound based communication between man – machine. Then, the system is transferred to the audience becoming participants: this makes it possible to experience what art means as a process, the “initiation” of which is not only thematised but becomes behaviour.

Borrowing experimental settings from the empirical sciences for self-observation leads to a return of mediatisation to immediate physicality as the “medium” of communication. Art, like science as a process, is the opposite of the “work”, the provision of experimental settings for bodily experience and its immediate communication. Culture is no longer the dogmatic depiction and codification of a way of life, but a process of initiating culture as a plural self-creation.

Art and science thus becomes a Kulturinitiative, a cultural initiative! After the disciplining of the body and the cultivation of seeing and the mastery of the nature we saw and finally after the mediatisation of its mechanical forms of interaction creating a robot-human, art and science become a cultural initiative for a body-oriented and thus human culture. While seeing in its generalisation as feasibility led to the transgression of the rational culture of seeing, this cultural initiative stimulates a body-culture of hearing. Hearing is a sense that brings together the so-called “lower senses” (phylogenetically developed before the body’s own movement), which are determined by a form of interaction from the needs of the body.

Thus, after the transgression of the mechanistic system and the mechanical body through mediatisation, through dynamization and digitalisation (JAUK 2003), a human culture is initiated as an “auditory culture” (JAUK 2009).

References:

Adorno, Th. W. (1958). Philosophie der Neuen Musik [1947]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Jauk, W. (1999). Gestaltung durch kommunizierendes Verhalten: Musik und Net-Art. In: J. Stelkens & H. G. Tillmann (eds.), Forschungsbericht Klangforschung 98. Symposium zur elektronischen Musik (pp. 163-173). München.

Jauk, W. (2000). The Auditory Logic: An Alternative to the ”Sight of Things”. In: H. Nowotny, M. Weiss & K. Hänni (eds.), Jahrbuch des Collegium Helveticum (pp. 321-338). Zürich: Hochschulverlag Ag an der ETH Zürich.

Jauk, W. (2003), The Transgression of the Mechanistic Paradigm – Music and the New Arts. In: Dialogue and Universalism, 8-9: pp. 179-186.

Jauk, W. (2009). pop / musik + medien / kunst. Der musikalisierte Alltag der digital culture. Osnabrücker Beiträge zur systematischen Musikwissenschaft. Band 15, Bernd Enders (ed.), Osnabrück: epOs.

Jauk, W. (2019). Sound-gesture und post-digital culture: von der symbolisch zeichenhaften “forward back” zur stimulativ signalhaften körperlichen Interaktion von every body. In: Gesten – gestern, heute, übermorgen. Ellen Fricke, Jana Bressem,, (eds.), pp. 144 – 149). Chemnitz: Universitätsverlag Chemnitz. 

Mauthner, F. (1923), Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Leipzig, pp. 201–203

McLuhan, M. (1995). The global village: der Weg der Mediengesellschaft ins 21. Jahrhundert (Übersetzung: C. P. Leonhardt, Einleitung: D. Baake). Paderborn.

Toop, D. (1997). Ocean of Sound. Klang, Geräusch, Stille. St. Andrä-Wördern: Hannibal.

[1] The German word shows the turn from the early meaning in greek / latin language during enlightenment (see MAUTHNER 1923).

[2] education, in engl. is derived from “e-ducare” meaning lead-out, in German “Bildung” is derived from “sich ein Bild machen”, visualizing something by creating a picture.