Tilman Hornig - Proposal for Narrative Techniques
The narrative theory remains one of the most important approaches to the analysis of fiction. One example appears in "The White Elephant" or in Tilman Hornig's group of work "Proposal for Narrative Techniques".
Before we consider this too carefully, it is essential to understand that the scientific connections of collective consciousness are such things as, the motif, the subject, the figure and the plot, the style or structure, the scenery and the point of view. In addition, abstract methods are best understood by combining one of these components.
The following, obviously false quote from the czech philosopher Vilém Flusser, summarizes how we can use these elements effectively: "We are creatures of reflection and speculation. So we can do something that the caveman was not able to do: develop a philosophy of misunderstanding. And this process of realization, appears to us in the form of a steadily growing collection of opportunities...“
If you think that you should have access to this quote, please contact your librarian.
Of course, not all intentions are focused on a narrative. For example, Minecraft: the title is more about the possibilities of your predictive power than sending players on a fixed route or explaining their surroundings. Firemaking in familiar surroundings - making fire to familiarize yourself with an environment. Both possibilities form an objective picture and the same tradition of reception. Each thesis on the individual narrative is thus in harmony with the perception of the cavemen.
So what? In the story of Cinderella, we learn that Cinderella's father lost his wife and married another woman who has two other daughters. In the meantime, he realized that he could not enter into any dialogue with the elephant at all. This is important for us to understand how the dialogue of subjective perception and individual partiality does not function in the simultaneous interpretation process.
But is there a particular moral, intellectual and emotional consistency that could be real or imaginary? No. "Proposal for Narrative Techniques" shows us an objective picture which appears as a reflection of the feeling that something is the case - but not hidden.
Tilman Hornig - GlassPhone
2014 - ongoing
The GlassPhone is a piece of glass rounded at the corners and shaped in a familiar aspect ratio. The object is an stand-alone physical sculpture and the key image of the GlassPhone photo series. Since 2014, numerous forms of presentation and variations of the object have been created. In addition, the photo series has grown to include new motifs and settings.
GlassPhone Museum
Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, 2021
Exhibition Text:
Seeing_Through_Looking_Through_Gazing: Tilman Hornig’s Alienation Strategy
Photography reproduces the seen and the given: that is the straightforward, commonly-held opinion. As is well-known, however, it has long been possible to manipulate photographic images if they are to serve journalistic, political or perhaps also ideological interests. By now, there are software programmes in existence that enable even any private individual to erase from his or her holiday photos–and thus from materially manifested memory–persons who have dropped out or been cast out of their lives, or deliberately forgotten. And the respective advertising wipes the former partner off the screen, making possible, as it were, autobiographically retrospective image manipulations that extinguish elements of a curriculum vitae and hence of life experience. Consequently, photography has long become manipulable for everyone and anyone on an absolutely day-to-day basis. It thus needs to acquire a new methodology for the establishment of truth and new strategies of assertion–both for the medium’s own self-assertion and for asserting the truth of what is depicted.
Born in Zittau in 1980, Tilman Hornig studied in Dresden under Martin Honert and others. He currently lives and works in Dresden, employing a variety of artistic media, among them photography. Most of the photographic images that mankind generates and consumes nowadays are not viewed in albums or in exhibitions but on the so-called mobile device or terminal, the smartphone or, at the outside, the laptop. The ground-glass screens of the erstwhile tube-based devices–the television sets–have been superseded by the backlit glass pane of the display. The fact that these glass surfaces have often become the “creatures” with which human beings have the most skin contact day-in, day-out is one of the bizarre features of the technological alienation of human beings from one another and from Nature. In passing, it is worth noting the fact that precisely this pane of glass is the most often damaged component of the robust technology and one which hence embodies the fragility of seeing. The instrument of seeing on the device is just as vulnerable as the retina of the human being.
In his series “Glass Phones”, Tilman Hornig isolates precisely this rectangular piece of glass with its characteristically rounded corners and its gently ground perimeter edge. He separates the optical aid from the device and allows us to see it, makes us see through intense gazing, makes the act of looking-through vividly visible, and combines seeing as looking-at with gazing as seeing-through. In a comparable way almost half a century ago, Nam June Paik concerned himself with contemplative seeing and the visualization of the act of seeing in his work “TV Rodin (Le Penseur)”: the screen of a small television set shows the picture that an adjacent camera records of a small-format replica of Auguste Rodin’s “Le Penseur”. The motionlessly sitting thinker thinks, the camera films, the screen displays, the beholders see the self-enclosed circuit of image (re)production, see an icon of sculpture becoming an iconic image by means of technological aids and, there again, see the entire ensemble becoming a self-referential icon of the viewing of art.
So what could be more appropriate for an artist of today than to reassure himself concerning the seeing of art by means of a, so to say, deaf-dumb-and-blind instrument–the “glass phone”–and with the assistance of professional art scrutinizers, i.e. with the directors of museums of art or ethnology or with members of their teams. Tilman Hornig travels the country with his camera and the almost sculpturally isolated glass pane on the look-out for people who are willing to become involved in his project. He does and did this independently of many other digital projects that are taking place up and down the land. Nevertheless there are chance affinities, as for example in the recent past with the advertising campaign for an exhibition project in the Städtische Galerie Villingen-Schwenningen, which reflects the current developments under the slightly provocative title “Digital is Better”–a reference to a song that the band Tocotronic brought out in 1995. Is digital better, or is this a euphemism? The advertising campaign for the project uses as its lead image a robot hand holding a dazzlingly white iPhone, a pane of light without any picture, a place-holder as it were for–for what? Perhaps for images of Nature even, for ideas, dreams or projections?
Not all of the conversation and image partners whom Tilman Hornig contacted were prepared to take part in the experiment, be it through lack of time, lack of conviction or lack of curiosity. Yet all of those who agreed to participate are shown from behind, visible in part with the respiratory mask mandatory in the pandemic, an accessoire of disengagement and dissociation that adds a further distance to the already inaccessible back view portrait photograph. It is fascinating to see in what different ways people hold this glass–in one hand, with a few fingers, or in two hands. These hands, moreover, are eloquent: they bear witness to younger or older stages of life, confess to absent marriages or refuse any statement on the subject, display jewellery or wrist-watches, border on elements of apparel, sleeves or cuffs, and again and again one can look into the palm of the hand, can see the life lines, whose interpretation could open up wholly new horizons of thought–hand portraits of people whose fingers normally hold mobile phones, fountain pens and pencils, or hammer away on keyboards.
The author of these lines could write about these people, whose hand-portraits form a coterie of friends and colleagues, since the picture sequence brings together many people who are linked up in projects, connected through mutual experience, and united in friendships. Such a narration, however, would add nothing essential to the work–for the sequence can be seen as such, as an entity–indeed, it would be a distraction, because this is not about biographies or anecdotes. Nor is it primarily about what journeys lie behind the photographs or what places are registered: Berlin, Brunswick, Bremen, Chemnitz, Cottbus, Dresden, Hanover, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Munich, Nuremberg, Wiesbaden, Wolfsburg, Wuppertal and a few others. One could talk about which pictorial motifs the persons photographed have singled out for their moment of self-exhibition. The array stretches from mediaeval painting to modernism, the choice falling in almost all cases on paintings. This is a confirmation of the culturally formative role of this medium among the visual arts. Whereas architecture was once considered the mother of the arts, it is now painting that is seen as the fine arts’ crowning achievement. Be this a result of the admiration for its market value, for the craft skills it involves, for its indestructibility, or for the often profound insight into the world and humankind expressed within it–Tilman Hornig’s experiment teaches us to see that what we see first of all when we want ourselves to be seen as seeing creatures is painting.
The persons photographed led the photographer to their chosen motifs. Many of them–chosen by women and by men–are female figures, portraits, saints, nudes. The pane of glass held in the hand prises out of the painting a focus, which with a healthy dose of intuition has emerged in interaction between the two people concerned in taking the photograph. The hand guides the segmentalizing gaze, steering the eye of the beholder to details of the works of art, thus blocking other details out, confounding and provoking. Is it permissible to curtail, to skewer, to question the aura of the painting in such a way? Does this violate the sanctity of the original? Or is the interplay of picture frame and glass edge rather an ironic refraction? The two frames–and likewise the delimited surface of the picture–generate a limitation of seeing which is not identical with the human field of vision. In the angular shape of the “glass phone”, glass, the hard material, becomes a factor that makes seeing more supple. Inevitably one asks oneself what is being singled out and what unity the picture would form without this disturbance of vision. In its purity, moreover, the glass has the effect of an unwritten sheet of paper: it gleams with spotlessness and immaculacy, and yet at the same time invites one to take a first creative step.
The glass develops a striking double nature. In addition to directing the gaze, it is also a reflecting surface. Segments of the face or of the glasses worn by the portrayed person become visible: the visual act of the photographed person forms part of that of the photographer and thus also of the beholder. Seeing becomes a threefold gazing. Visual reflection and mental reflection enter into dazzling interplay.
Most of those photographed chose iconic works from their collections, thus hoping for the recognition factor of place and object. Mandatory thinking in marketing categories has evidently become second nature in the museum sector. In one case, the choice fell on a collection ‘item’ that disregards any iconic work of art and eternalizes the celebratory presentation of an entire ensemble of paintings. The view into the Rubenssaal of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, a view chosen by an artist at the end of the 19th Century to keep a record of the very heart of this gallery building in its dignity and seniority, shows a living museum: there hang the large-format works of the Flemish grand master–as they still hang today–presented in their established room, especially designed and built for them, but there in the centre of the room is also a plush settee arrangement, on which visitors are sitting, reading and resting, while to the side other visitors are strolling around the museum and an attendant is standing on duty. The motif presented to Tilman Hornig thus reflects museum history as a lineage of seeing and was chosen in order to place today’s seeing in an on-flowing stream of history and to bring former gallery-goers, the painter, the photographed objects, and the current or future art-loving public together into a grand harmony and continuum.
There is a similar complexity in Tilman Hornig’s photograph taken in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg: the red-clad figure from “Maria und Elisabeth” with its domestic setting shows Elisabeth, attired in red, winding onto a spool the thread spun by the Virgin Mary–positioned in the painting by the master of the Nuremberg Marienaltar beyond the left edge of the photograph. On the left at Elisabeth’s feet sits John, her son, and to his left can be seen the truncated figure of the Christ child. The biblical story dating from the years just after the beginning of our era was painted for the Nuremberg Frauenkirche by an anonymous artist at the start of the 15th Century, came into the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in mid-19th Century, was placed behind glass–as the vertical bluish stripe reveals–in the 20th Century, and has now, at the opening of the 21st Century been chosen for this series of reflections on art and its history. Just as multi-facetted as this history of the motif and the work is the photograph taken of it. Alongside the painting, the photograph shows a second layer–the above-mentioned bluishly reflecting glass–which is followed by a third level, the “glass phone” itself, to which a fourth is added, since the motif is reflected in the ophthalmic lens on the right, while the lens of Tilman Hornig’s camera supplies a fifth–spatial and historical–dimension.
The complexity of such a photographic appropriation would be hard to visualize were it not in such motifs. Tilman Hornig succeeds in making perceptive seeing through conscious gazing visible. It is a strikingly creative alienation strategy.
by Bernhard Maaz, 2021
Tilman Hornig - GlassBooks in sizes 11", 13", 15"
Content is King! - Galerie Gebr. Lehman, Berlin, 2014
Exhibition Text
The Diaphane:
On Materiality and Immateriality of the Computer Screen
“Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies.
Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure.”
James Joyce: Ulysses
Metaphors flourish where the overwhelmingness of the sublime is in danger of condemning us to speechlessness – when we are con- fronted with the existential quaternary of death, god, nature, and love. Today, nothing is described by so many metaphors as the com- puter. According to Apple’s Steve Jobs, it is a “bicycle for the mind.” Microsoft’s Bill Gates describes the computer in more sober terms as “a tool.” The neurologist Peter Whybrow, in turn, warns hysterically that the computer produces actual cascades in the brain’s reward center, just like “electronic cocaine.”
Concerning its revolutionary impact on social structures, it is com- monplace to compare the computer to the “printing press.” Since the sixties, more comprehensible, but generally contradictory images are in use, including “super calculator,” “great library,” “toy,” “type- writer,” “notepad,” and the anthropomorphizing “assistant.”
As a consequence of our speechlessness in the face of the techno- logical sublime, we are looking at the computer as a mirror that should reflect ourselves. For a long time, we’ve used the metaphor of the computer being a “brain,” which ultimately went so far that the human brain, in turn, has been described in terms of a computer, instead of the other way round. Alluding to the Turing Test defining artificial intelligence, informatics pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum dub- bed the computer a “human pretender.” Fittingly, the computer “runs” in our contemporary imagination or – most often tragic – it “dies.”
Strictly speaking, because of their enormous flexibility, computers are indescribable. Their level of being is not the same as that of any other object, but rather that of a transcendental apparatus, through which every possible perception must pass in order to be real. Similar to the Kantian “green glasses” that dye all of reality green – an image employed by Heinrich von Kleist who met despair because of Kantian transcendental philosophy – the computer screen today is a prism, through which the light of reality reaches us, and which dyes that reality according to its structure, in accordance with the specific permeability of its crystals.
Only the computers of banks and stock markets materialize property. Only the digital archiving and normalization of social relations on microchips produce stable, continuous contacts. Only the recording and comparing of our data by medical computers make it possible to speak of health. In some countries, computers are already calculat- ing the results of elections by themselves. Because of their indis- pensability to modern physics, computers also define what we con- sider to be real. At this point, one has to correct philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, among the most ardent of Realism’s contemporary defenders: real isn’t what can be expressed in formulae. De facto real is what can be calculated by computers. Where computers fail, the horizon of our binding reality also ends – everything beyond that is “merely subjective.”
From an ontological point of view, computers – similar to Heidegger’s notion on Being – “are” not at all. Today, they are required to deter- mine any kind of being. They, therefore, precede any kind of being. Computers “are” not, they exist as an invisible given, which pene- trates everything. Foremost, computers are nothing specific. As a universal medium, they are similar to that which Aristotle called the diaphanes, the “transparent” – an undetermined “in-between,” metaxu, which has to be formless in exactitude to take on any form and to transport all possible impressions. The significance of the computer also correlates to an image of the Stoics, the apeiron, ”the in-finite,” which, being primal matter par excellence, includes the possibility of any other matter, and which, exactly because of that, has no proper qualities itself.
It is therefore no accident that transparency is the ethos of our time.
The absolute permeability of the computer has evolved into a meas- ure for the organization of human relations and politics. In the face of the total permeability of the digital-diaphane primal matter, all infor- mation is equally decontextualized and deformed, transformed into mere “content” on the internet. And being the result of this process, the “content” we find on the internet does not contain anything, but is similarly deformed, in a subliminal way as empty as the computer itself.
Consequently, metaphors are also running wild when attempting to describe the internet. Being speechless in a proper sense, misnomer is added to misnomer. In one instance, the net is pastorally described as a “global village,” in another instance antithetically as a “highway,” and even more hysterically as an “ocean” or a “jungle” from which we have to “protect our children.” Or is it, after all, only a “playground for brainless narcissists”? To the net theorist Kevin Kelly, it is “a copy machine.” Orville Schell, a professor of journalism, said the computer was “like radioactivity,” because “once released, it is nearly impossible to contain.” From a political perspective, it was first claimed that the internet was like “oxygen to dissidents.” After the unveiling of the inner workings of the digital-military complex, which connects Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, and several secret services, the internet was suddenly regarded as “the wet dream of the Stasi.”
First of all, “content” doesn’t contain anything in the proper sense, because this would require a purpose, a motive of the information on the internet that superseded the mere form, the medium. Without such context, there is no content in the proper sense. And the computer knows only one context: itself. Therefore, the majority of the information that we receive via the internet deals with the appara- tus itself. How fast is the new iPhone? Or, is Samsung better after all? By which new functions is Facebook violating our private sphere in an even more menacing way? In which software-firms should one invest today and which stocks should one sell right before the inevitable collapse of the next tech-bubble? What will change when private 3D-printers in children's rooms produce firearms? McLuhan’s formula, that the medium is the message, was never truer, never more absolute. The “content” of the internet is the nothingness of the computer and nothing more.
What is, paradoxically, most necessary in this world, is to forget about the computer itself, because otherwise everything would seem terribly one-dimensional and wan. Although we constantly talk about the computer and by means of the computer, we never talk of the computer in the proper sense. It is easier to believe we are looking at different things, when in fact we are just staring over and over at the same screen. The wall of metaphors which surround the computer bare witness to our essential silence in regard to the computer.
If there is an assertion, a meta-narrative at all, which does justice to this silence, it is the assertion of the immateriality of the computer. John Perry Barlow wrote in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” of 1996: “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.”
Barlow’s text was frequently ridiculed, but today it is fundamental to the political demands of the digital elite. The immateriality of the computer that is stated in this declaration became the foundation of the promise that – by its mere existence – the computer would trig- ger revolutions in virtually any material sector – politics, law, economy – as if it was an intervention by a deus ex machina from a better, pristine world before the fall from grace into earthly matter.
In the new Californian techno-gnosis, a Manichaean division is predominant, a division between the analog, demiurgic world of the “weary giants of flesh and steel” and the immaterial, light-flooded world of the “new home of mind,” which the computer pretends to be – both expressions stem from Barlow’s “Declaration of the Inde- pendence of Cyberspace.” A richer culture of “sharing,” direct democ- racy, the emancipation of women and consumers, breathtaking solutions for societal and environmental problems – all this shall happen practically automatically, once the fiber-wired portals to the im- materiality of cyberspace gape everywhere within the material sphere, once every single brain is transformed into a portal to the hive mind.
In regard to the phenomenology of the object, looking at its surface from the outside, one can already recognize the desire of the com- puter to negate its materiality. In no other sector, the tendencies of technology and design towards their own vanishing are so clear. According to Moore ́s Law, the capacity of microchips doubles every 18 months. A true obsession to minimize everything reigns, which has already compressed the capacity of the room-sized machines of the fifties into the size of a pants pocket. Once, the human brain was the most complex structure of nature. Today, it is the microchip. As if they wanted to amplify this ever and ever more spectacular disap- pearance of matter, the screens of laptops and smartphones are getting larger and larger. To gaze into an abyss of nothingness from a box seat, in colors as brilliant as the sun: this is the dream of our age.
Immateriality, which the computer states so vehemently with all of its existence, is its most cunning trick. Immateriality seems to discon- nect the computer from the whole world, from the corrupt structures of law, economy, and power of the material realm, to which it is in fact entangled. The proper question – the blind spot of the discourse of the computer – is the question of the materiality of the computer.
The illusion of the immateriality of the computer brought along hopes for better, more ethical industries and politics, which wouldn’t be based on the destruction of the environment via wars for raw materi- als and human exploitation. These hopes were a gigantic deception. Computing capacity requires power – at the moment roughly 10% of the energy globally produced – and it needs minerals, for the sake of which wars are being fought today in Congo and Afghanistan. The fairy tale of digital democracy was impossible without the cheap laptops and junk smartphones which tax avoiding American firms extract by the use of mental and physical violence from their Chinese working slaves.
The alleged “sharing” in social networks fills up the pockets of the new net monopolists and lets the archives of the state-run surveil- lance organisms swell to historically unprecedented extents.
Instead of a new golden age, we are witnesses to the dawning of cyber-totalitarianism, invulnerable as it remains without a face, without a form, without a space, without a body. The hopes for a bodiless information-economy turned out to be ideology in the Marxist sense, i.e. a “reversal of reality.” The consumer who is dwel- ling today in the exertive attempt to seem bodiless, characterizing the aesthetic of Apple and similar firms, dwells in a reversed reality, in which the screen must lose its materiality in order to disguise the fact that without it, everything would cease to exist.
by Johannes Thumfart, 2014