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July 9, 2009
Markus Rautzenberg, Begegnungen mit dem Realen. Zu einer Medienästhetik der Störung, Lecture

What happens when media cease to function, when they refuse to stay in the background of communication? The noise of a distorted TV-set, the crackling in a telephone line, the chemical remains of an underdeveloped photography: They all show the otherwise invisible prerequisites of mediation itself: their “pure” materiality. But are those distortions and disturbances something on the “outside” of mediation? Just something to get rid off, to ensure proper communication? Or is there on the contrary the possibility of disturbances being a conditio sine qua non of mediation? In his lecture, Markus Rautzenberg will trace these questions with reference to specific examples from film and art.

Amidst these disturbances and distortions presences can be felt and perceived. To examine these kinds of phenomena means to look at the presences of media as “materialities of communication”, not their semantics or messages, not what they mean but rather what they do and how they do it. Disturbances work in a paradoxical mode of a simultaneity of presence and absence and are therefore a crucial element of a possible post-ontological theory of presence.

Markus Rautzenberg is currently research fellow at the department of philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. His last book - “Die Gegenwendigkeit der Störung. Aspekte einer postmetaphysischen Präsenztheorie” - will be published in September by Diaphanes, Berlin.

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