Alle Publikationen

Ausgehend von neueren Initiativen zur digitalen Bildauthentifizierung wie dem News Provenance Project geht der Beitrag der Rolle von Protokollen bei der Stabilisierung bildlicher Referenz nach. Im Rückblick auf die Geschichte der Instrumentalisierung technischer Bilder zeigt sich: Wo immer Bilder zu stabilen und belastbaren Informationsträgern in arbeitsteiligen Abläufen und weitläufigen Netzwerken werden sollen, schreiben standardisierte und standardisierende Protokolle der Bildlogistik vor, wie mit technischen Bildaufzeichnungen zu verfahren ist, und erlauben zugleich die Aufzeichnung der Bedingungen, unter denen Bilder hergestellt, distribuiert und mit Informationen angereichert werden. In dieser Hinsicht gibt es keinen Bruch zwischen analoger und digitaler Bildpraxis: Stabile bildliche Referenz hing immer schon an Protokollen der Stabilisierung. Allerdings, so die These des Beitrags, findet derzeit mit digitalen Aufzeichnungstechniken und sozialen Netzwerken der Bilddistribution eine radikale Ausweitung des Feldes des Protokollierbaren statt: Wo es möglich wird, die gesamte content journey, »everything that happens to a photo«, automatisiert zu registrieren und dauerhaft zu speichern, wird bildlogistische Protokollierung zum unabschließbaren Prozess. Damit verschiebt sich auch der Einsatz bildlogistischer Protokolle von der Standardisierung der Produktionsbedingungen zur Regulierung der Distribution, und von der Dokumentation einmaliger Aufzeichnungsakte zur sequenziellen Registrierung von Transaktionen.

Text-to-image generators such as DALL·E 2, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion promise to produce any image on command, thus transforming mere ekphrasis into an operational means of production. Yet, despite their seeming magical control over the results of image generation, prompts should not be understood as instructions to be carried out, but rather as generative search commands that direct AI models to specific regions within the stochastic spaces of possible images. In order to analyze this relationship between the prompt and the image, a productive comparison can be made with stock photography. Both stock photography databases and text-image generators rely on text descriptions of visual content, but while stock photography searches can only find what has already been produced and described, prompts are used to find what exists only as a latent possibility. This fundamentally changes the way value is ascribed to individual images. AI image generation fosters the emergence of a new networked model of visual economy, one that does not rely on closed, indexed image archives as monetizable assets, but rather conceives of the entire web as a freely available resource that can be mined at scale. Whereas in the older model each image has a precisely determinable value, what DALL·E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion monetize is not the individual image itself, but the patterns that emerge from the aggregation and analysis of large ensembles of images. And maybe the most central category for accessing these models, the essay argues, has become a transformed, de-hierarchized, and inclusive notion of ‘style’: for these models, everything, individual artistic modes of expression, the visual stereotypes of commercial genres, as well as the specific look of older technical media like film or photography, becomes a recognizable and marketable ‘style’, a repeatable visual pattern extracted from the digitally mobilized images of the past.

While development of software always implicitly takes place in contexts ofinherited entanglements and legacies, its maintenance deals explicitly with what is already present. Software maintenance locates itself in media res, in the middle of things. Maintaining software typically involves intervening in the material archive of source code, documentation, and software tools. Doing so successfully requires relevant situated knowledge of how the software at hand already hangs together, and how to effectively put this knowledge to use. This knowledge builds on first-hand experience, acquired in practice over shared lifetimes of people and code. For code to continue to endure over time, ongoing articulation of its entanglements is externalized and materializedacross contributing programmers and software development tools, each themselves vulnerable and in need of maintenance. This paper analyzes how this process of externalizing and materializing knowledge is negotiated. We conclude that the common knowledge which suspends the string figure of software in time and in a broken world (Jackson 2014) is always a locallyhybrid assemblage which carries this knowledgeforward. Hence, to maintain software well is to add on to its legacy.

In our chapter, we focus on the concept of mixture that primes the de-scription of mixed reality images. The latter do not insist on one aug-mented or virtual reality; rather, they explicitly install the interaction of multiple realities. However, this does not mean that in the mixture the individual components get lost. Consequently, we selectively pursue those moments in which the entanglement of image and bodies becomes apparent. In the first section we analyze techniques from film and theater, such as the phantasmagoria, in which an interaction of image and body is essential. Therefore, we refer to a concept of the body by Michel Fou-cault, who argues that real bodies reach into virtuality as well as virtual bodies require a localization. Based on this viewpoint, the main section examines three contemporary artworks by the artists Banz & Bowinkel, Sarah Rothberg, and Charlotte Triebus. Ultimately, in these artworks at least two mixed bodies meet in a mixed reality image in order to enable a “kind of mixed, intermediate experience.”

This paper focuses on the concept of acting with and in images in the context of recent AR and VR artworks. The thesis is that the (virtual) hand plays a significant role in an immersive experience. Referring to Doris Kolesch’s relational concept of immersion as one that considers not only the status of being evolved but also the process of getting inside, three forms of actions in and with images are discussed: the hand as stage, the hand as a symbiotic contact zone, and the hand as a designing hand. With artworks by Jeremy Bailey, Aristarkh Chernyshev, Rachel Rossin, and Florian Meisenberg, this contribution aims to contour the forms of action in which the (virtual) hand, in particular, allows an immersive experience by interaction with the virtual sphere and knows how to combine distance with nearness.

Ausgehend von der Beobachtung, dass Digitalisierung und Digitalität längst – auch im pädagogischen Feld – zur Normalität geworden sind, greift der Beitrag in Ergänzung zu bisherigen schul- und medienpädagogischen sowie sozialisationstheoretischen Fragestellungen eine wissenstheoretische und -geschichtliche Perspektive auf und sucht die Fragen zu diskutieren, wie sich denn ›Digitalität‹ auf Formen und Praktiken des Wissens auswirkt und ob bzw. in welcher Hinsicht von möglichen Transformationen von Wissenskulturen durch ›Digitalität‹ gesprochen werden kann. In einem ersten Schritt wird daher der Bedeutung von ›Digitalisierung‹ als einer Gesellschaftsdiagnose nach- gegangen (1.), bevor dann die eigene wissenstheoretische Perspektive – und zwar zunächst systematisch (2.) und dann bildungshistorisch (3.) – skizziert und das praktikentheoretisch ausgelegte Konzept des ›Bildungswissens‹ erläutert wird. Diese Rahmungen erlauben, die Frage nach den Formationen und Transformationen einer durch Digitalität geprägten Wissenskultur aufzunehmen und aus erziehungswissenschaftlicher Perspektive zu bearbeiten (4.). Entlang ausgewählter Strukturmomente werden dabei längst erreichte Merkmale von ›Digitalität‹ skizziert und auf ihre möglichen Folgen für Wissensformen und -praktiken, Wissensordnungen und -kulturen untersucht.

Ausgehend von einer etymologischen Herleitung des Testens aus dem Kontext der Metallverarbeitung, widmet sich der Beitrag der Frage nach Anwendungsbereich und Funktion eines Verfahrens, das wie kaum ein zweites der effizienten (Selbst)Vergewisserung von Sachständen dient. Dem Testen kommt dabei eine egalisierende Wirkung zu. Mit seiner Transformation ins Virtuelle erhält der Test ein Moment des Universellen. Getestet wird im Zuge dessen schlicht alles. Neben einer hochgradigen Ausdifferenzierung der Anlässe wird das Testen selbstbezüglich: Es zielt auf das Verhältnis von Realem und Virtuellem, untersucht die Gediegenheit von Seinsformen und damit das kompetitive Verhältnis zwischen beiden.

This text intends to contribute to the transformation of the classical printed book to its alternative forms and shapes, praxeologies and customs. Besides digital variants, this also applies to those that specifically emphasize other forms of reception, those that shift the reading experience into the virtual sphere. At the same time, the book has an enormous capacity to persist in the economy of mediation. This applies both to the customs of its use and to its cultural status in general. It is self-evident that this transfer of the book’s appearance does not take place without interruption. Of course, there are significant differences both in reading habits and in reading scenes. Reading modalities have also changed, diversified and differentiated. However, the appearance of the classical book and the traditional ways of dealing with it persist. It is necessary to situate this appearance of the book and thereby put its persistence in relation to the phenomenal formations, to the changed arrangements, infrastructures, and materialities. The book remains valid as a semantically as well as phenomenally equally resilient center of organization, not least because it succeeds in regaining terrain by the use of technical possibilities and thus also by reaffirming its historically vouchsafed phantasmatics, for instance by using new sensualities. Procedures of virtualization and augmentation turn reading into an advanced reception possibility, adapted to the state of the art of the technical world of living and reading. In the course of this shift, not only did the possibilities of reception change, but also the object of reading. Both aspects can be condensed into two core concepts, which also characterize the title: Multisensory and Uniqueness. Multisensory integrates other senses such as tactility and haptics in addition to seeing and hearing. Whereas the concept of uniqueness encompasses moments that promote a regionalization of literature. The corresponding narrative appears increasingly data-driven (data epics): It is based on a sensorial recording of life circumstances, and on the individual and personal set pieces which can be found in the respective environments. Not the major themes of world literature, but the respective life conditions with their everyday objects and behaviors become the driving force of narratives and reading moments. This finding is particularly striking in view of the possibility of typographic duplication and contradicts common expectations. The object of reading and thus of literary mediation is thus less a canon of literary works that is considered authoritative. Rather highly personalized narrative forms and narrative moments are tapped in the course of changed receptions. These emerge in different places and with different target groups as effects of these new possibilities. In this way, an almost poetological momentum is unleashed that not only works its way through predefined narrative patterns and a canon of works considered authoritative and translates them into other reading environments, but also creates them autopoetically. Both aspects, the expansion of the senses and the radicalization of what there is to write and read, contribute in their own way to making the concept of mediation more flexible and to freeing it from the appearance of the social-distributive, that is, of the field of markets, editors, forms of distribution, and event routines. Literary mediation thereby becomes a process of mutual references between production and reception, but by no means a moral custodianship and transfer of a set of texts, however stably conceptualized, that are commonly understood as literature. In the derivation of these changes, there is a peculiar overlap with historical ways of dealing with and stations of reading. It turns out that above all the possibilities of a multisensory addressing are themselves literarily prefigured – in a reading that Friedrich Kittler has reconstructed prototypically for the writing system of 1800. In the course of the New Reading, cultural technique and media technique, imagination and immersion, enter into a relationship of mutual modeling. Reading forms alliances, for example, with the technical possibilities of designated immersion scenarios, thus, under the conditions of virtuality. The discussion of altered sensualities is laid out, for instance when haptics for affective reading or reading under new highly technical reading environments are inquired about. This paper demonstrates that the book survives these movements in many ways. It maintains its persistence through strategies of flexibilization and participation. But it also persists by changing the praxeologies associated with it, as the persistence of page-turning shows. It opens up to new forms of multisensory experience. In the course of this transformation, virtuality becomes nothing less than a mediating instance of certain notions of literariness. And even more: virtuality promotes storytelling in a variety of ways. It enables collaborations and organizes occasions; it opens up residues of the participatory and the co-speculative. Located in an environment that, under titles such as Research through Design, Speculative Design, or Design Fiction, wants to break away from functional monotonies and guaranteed affordances, the design of alternative futures thus becomes possible. The book appears in the mode of the tailor-made, the personal tailored, the issued unique. Uniqueness and multisensoriality thus constitute the center of a new reading.

Virtualität war im Zuge des Computergrafik- und des World Wide Web-Booms der 1990er- und 2000er-Jahre auch ein Schlagwort für die durch digitale Technologien bedingten politischen Möglichkeiten. Seien es web-communities oder online-Bürgerplattformen, mit ihnen verbanden sich zahlreiche Hoffnungen nach einer stärkeren Partizipation in der politischen Gestaltung sowie in der Transparenz von legislativen Prozessen. Neben dieser Bedeutung der Virtualität möchte der Artikel eine jüngere Konzeption präsentieren, in der Virtualität als ein Modus begriffen wird, der bis in die Alltagspraktiken hinein reicht und die (politische) Partizipation sowohl auf nicht-menschliche wie auch auf nicht-lebendige Akteur*innen ausdehnt.

The article deals with the visual culture surrounding the information management service provider Iron Mountain Inc. The market-leading company was founded in 1951 by a mushroom farmer who converted a decommissioned iron ore mine into an »atomic storage facility« for business papers and other documents. Based on visual materials (promotional short films, archival footage, corporate design), the article examines the digital transformation of the storage media involved and asks how the former Cold War start-up cultivates the image of a virtual archive bureaucracy that links the history of »atomic bomb-proof« repositories with the promises of digital access, processing, and administration.

The article discusses the position of retelling in literary studies. Retelling does neither play a role in narratology, nor raises further questions for text theory. In the focus of literary didactics retelling is often limited to the pragmatics of use. ›Retelling‹, however, is not a term used in literary studies. Although the term denotes a widespread cultural technique, which is used in schools and is accordingly also discussed in the didactics of literature, it has not yet been able to be acknowledged in the discipline. The greatest obstacle standing in the way of a conceptual version of retelling probably lies in its distinction from narrative. Narratology has not found any specifics in retelling that fundamentally distinguish it from narration. And the tools of trans-textuality and intertextuality developed especially in structuralism to describe textual relations are available for narrative texts anyway. Thus, literary studies already apply theories and tools that are useful for analyses of retelling: narratology, text theory and classification of a second-order literature, the theory of trans-textuality and intertextuality, and material history, as well as research on media transposition and adaptation. Defining retelling as a second-order narrative, or meta-narrative, inevitably raises the question of what is being repeated at all, and how, by means of narrative. Medieval studies particularly emphasize the aspect of repetition (›re-telling‹), which precedes a specific mediality of narration. Retelling as a variety of repetition neither presupposes a pre-text nor requires that a narrative be repeated. Rather, in retelling, the narrative procedure enters into the service of repetition. On the one hand, it is a variety of repetition, but not every repetition is also a narrative. On the other hand, one and the same text can be described from the point of view of narration or that of repetition. Literary studies that focus on the uses of retelling will pay attention to the varieties of repetition and should look at the relationship between the act of narration and repetition. Obviously, in retelling, the modes and ways, but also the degrees of reference to the pre-text can vary, so that it remains to be discussed which varieties of reference count as valid repetitions. In addition, there is the fundamental question of what falls under the concept of narrative and what components constitute it. Is narrative to be understood as a turning back with linguistic means? As an organization of events, which in turn are to be understood as displacements of actors across semantic or even physical boundaries? As little as a repetition by means of narration is linked to a preceding narrative text, it is equally questionable where and how a boundary between narrative and non-narrative representation could be drawn. In this respect, the following discussion of retelling touches, on the one hand, on the distinction between describing and narrating, which itself required its own discussion in literary theory and history. On the other hand, the distinction between retelling and paraphrasing raises the question of the suitability of linguistic and rhetorical categories of analysis for an analysis of narrative. The article will not address such fundamental questions, but only selected examples will be presented to discuss ways of retelling. The article shifts the broad question of what a retelling is into a smaller, more manageable question of how retelling is done. This shift in the problem leads to specific examples and puts the spotlight on the uses of retelling. The selection of examples presents extreme cases that lie at the edges of a normal range where research has mostly focused its attention. The discussion of examples, which comes from Thomas Bernhard/Peter Handke, Wilhelm Termeer/Herman Melville and Clemens J. Setz, is intended to show that retelling allows both an integration, appropriation or fusion of narrative voices as well as an entanglement of narrative discourse and narrative histoire. The ambiguity of the retelling, which, by retelling a histoire, always carries its own discours, contrasts with forms of use such as summary. Although content summary and retelling can be distinguished as text types according to pragmatic criteria, summarizing a narrative text and retelling a histoire can also be mixed and merge into each other. The ease with which the practice of retelling can be understood should not obscure the fact that it is not easily grasped in terms of literary theory or narratology, and brings into play fundamental questions and problems.

At this historical moment, few terms are as charged and powerful as the omnipresent term environment. It has become a strategic tool for politics and theories alike, crossed the borders of the disciplines of biology and ecology, and left the manifold field of environmentalism. This article explores the first steps on this path of expansion, in which the term becomes an argumentative resource and achieves a plausibility that transforms it into a universal tool. It is not self-evident to describe ubiquitous media, cinematic spaces, or augmented realities as environments. To understand how the term gained this plausibility, it is necessary to distinguish it from two other terms: the French milieu and the German Umwelt. When these three terms substitute one another and are used as translations, they lose their historical specificity and depth, and three different theoretical and philosophical traditions merge into indifference. Consequently, a conceptual history of the term environment and its relation to milieu and Umwelt—as well as terms such as medium, atmosphere, ambiance, and climate—can help us to understand the potentials and dangers of the term’s plausibility. In this sense, the article argues for a new perspective on epistemologies of surrounding that relate that which surrounds to that which is surrounded.

To understand how robots, such as self-driving cars, drones, or rovers, generate spaces of interaction, it is important to move away from the idea that they simply represent the world through their sensors and then decide upon an appropriate action to reach a predefined goal. The question is how they generate their own worlds in the first place. This article reassesses the concept of virtuality as an analytical tool to describe the world-making capacities of autonomous, environmentally adaptive machines. Such robots employ the probabilities of virtual world models, generated by algorithmically filtering sensor data, as statistical specifications. This sensor-algorithmic virtuality enables them to decide upon actions to be actualized in the real world by playing through a multiplicity of virtual options. They don’t have access to an outside view but rather operate based on a multiplicity of virtual, possible, and more or less probable worlds. In a case study on the Mars rover Perseverance, this article describes in detail the technical procedures and the underlying epistemological challenges of machinic virtuality and shows that this virtuality—as a multiplicity of virtual worlds—rests upon the algorithmic filtering of sensor data.

Cybersecurity research increasingly involves non-engineering disciplines, such as psychology, social science and law [41]. In this paper, we argue that cybersecurity research is not only reshaped through new methods and concepts of these adjacent fields, but also through shared interdisciplinary practices. Existing literature on interdisciplinarity in cybersecurity is primarily concerned with defining ideal models that are based on ideals, rather than in empirical research of how interdisciplinarity is formed in practice. We offer an ethnographic analysis of interdisciplinary formats based on our four-year participation in the ongoing interdisciplinary cybersecurity PhD programme SecHuman at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. The PhD programme brings together engineers, social scientists as well as humanities scholars. Drawing on methods and literature of ethnographic science and technology studies (STS), we attend to eight different interdisciplinary formats and analyse how they shape cybersecurity research: its logics of accountability, of innovation, and of ontology [3]. This leads to a typology of five modes of interdisciplinarity that can be found in the PhD programme: 1. choice, 2. subordinate-service, 3. integrative-synthetic, 4. trading, and 5. agonistic-antagonistic. Based on our empirical findings, we discuss how each mode shapes cybersecurity, and conclude with suggestions of how to craft interdisciplinary formats in the field.

Der Beitrag bezieht technische Protokolle in den Protokollbegriff ein. Wichtiges Beispiel hierfür sind die Internetprotokolle, die den Nachrichtenverkehr zwischen vernetzten Computern regeln. Die Internetprotokolle sorgen als eine Art »Transportmechanismus« für Aufbau und Aufrechterhaltung der Computerverbindungen im Netz. In Gestalt der Internetprotokolle findet der Protokollbegriff also nicht lediglich eine Fortsetzung. Vielmehr wird der Begriff des Protokolls noch ausgeweitet. Technische Protokolle haben nicht mehr nur die Aufgabe, durch Vorschriften einen möglichst geordneten Austausch zu gewährleisten, wie es bei diplomatischen oder höfischen Protokollen der Fall ist. Ohne technische Protokolle wäre der Zusammenschluss von Rechnern nicht nur in schlechter oder ungeordneter Weise, sondern gar nicht möglich gewesen.

This article deals with contemporary interweavings of literature and visual art. It asks to what extent they include their own form of mediation of the literary and can be relevant in terms of literary theory. This is prompted by the currently diagnosed migration towards ›Literature’s Elsewheres‹ (Annette Gilbert), which, within the omnipresent digital culture, leads away from its traditional media and places. As one of these refuges, the art museum has already come into focus. In addition to being a shelter, it also promises to be a site of reinvention for literature because it offers different modes of presentation, display structures, and modes of experience. Nevertheless, while the literariness of media art has already been explored (Claudia Benthien et al.), less consideration has been given to the spatializing means of exhibition display and, in particular, art installation. Particularly revealing are those examples that attempt to connect the museum and the digital elsewhere of literary writing. For this second site of transformation is usually considered as part of the mass-practiced digital reading-writing culture, so that bridges to the visual arts emerge primarily through related conceptual approaches of appropriation rather than through the specific experiential framework of the art context. As a starting point, therefore, serve theses on the writing of contemporary artists understood as a practice of appropriation that increasingly involves publication gestures and mediation performances (Stefan Römer). Thus, artistic appropriations of literature and poeticized theory can be brought into view, which are performed in physical as well as virtual spaces and, for this purpose, are subjected to a process of datafication as two selected works of contemporary art show. In addition, the concept of atmospheres anchored in recent aesthetics, literary and media theory proves helpful in approaching such examples. For as »spheres of sensed bodily presence« (Gernot Böhme), they imply a mediation-relevant concept of aesthetic experience that privileges body-bound presence over hermeneutics and also open up a different reality of literature (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht). At the same time, as a concept linked back to space it enables an expanded understanding of space/body/object ensembles and can be intertwined with theories of atmospheric media including their immersive environments (Tim Othold). On this basis, the first main part of the article explores the tendencies towards conceptualization, spatialization, and the performative, which are particularly at work in the intermediation of literature and the visual arts. A common point of reference here is the conceptual as uncreative writing of Kenneth Goldsmith, which shows distinctive publication performances and uses of the physical space of art exhibitions. In order to further ground forms of the spatial-installative exhibition of literature in literary theory, recourse is made to Roman Jakobson’s reflections on meaning in poetic language, which is evoked by the very positionality of words and the equivalences they evoke (Heike Gfrereis). Furthermore, it is necessary to briefly define the relationship between literature and visual art in the sign of the digital, which still favors their entanglement due to the detachment from the printed text. The paragons proclaimed by Goldsmith, which aim at a competition in terms of avant-gardism as well as digital-cultural contemporaneity, only seem informative because they promote an equation of writing, reading, and theorizing and thus imply a circular but also quite closed model of mediation among writers as readers and critics of themselves. Beyond this, the premises of fluid boundaries between the arts and of an»interdisciplinary and audio-visual method of language work« (Catherine Bergvall) are more profitable for analyzing reciprocal mediations, going back to Katherine N. Hayles and her early genre-spanning definition of digital art with the core characteristic of the literary instead of textuality. Regardless of the now multimodal research agenda (Thorsten Ries) and the conceptualization of digital literature/art as ›speech before our eyes‹ that focuses on an embodied literary experience (Brooke Belisle), however, screen-based images often remain in the foreground. Concerning the spatialized-environmental entanglements of art and literature, the theorization of the ›text as event‹ provides some more clues. Following reflections on the digital poem (Katherine N. Hayles), it has been further developed for the sublinguistic calm technologies of ubiquitous computing (Roberto Simanowski). While the resulting ›culture of presence‹ is seen as a-semantization, the two artworks by Pierre Huyghe and Jazmina Figueroa in the second main part give rise to discuss whether these antagonisms must be maintained. Selected for this purpose are Huyghe’s exhibition, which transfers Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket into a so-called musical staged on the three floors of the Bregenz Kunsthaus, and, a lecture performance that Figueroa conceived for the virtual replica of an exhibition space at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) Karlsruhe. The two artworks can be examined as paradigmatic surrounding textual atmospheres, each of which performs its own specific virtualization of the literary. In Huyghe’s case, his exhibition presents an already datafied but largely pre-digital artistic staging of a classic of world literature literally condensed into artificial weather events. Figueora, in turn, transfers such a score into a VR environment, where it allows for an individually navigable listening experience of her spatialized spoken words, which present a motivically condensed, poeticized appropriation of theoretical fragments and mythological themes. In conclusion, these exemplary artistic fusions of the museum and digital elsewhere of literature are considered regarding their forms of storage and temporality, which enable a re-experiencing of texts as atmospheric presence-events.

In contemporary understanding, a now normalized immersion continues to be associated with digitality and high-tech apparatuses, but is also seen as diffused into the lifeworld. Against this backdrop, the article focuses on two current artworks that extend the internal environmentality inherent in VR as a spatialized image into physical space by using strategies from installation and site-related art. These examples provide for an equation and nesting of work, environment and exhibition that is interpreted here as a potentiated environmentalization. The artistic VR-environments by no means negate their rootedness in imagery, but rather self-reflexively reveal the transitions between image and three-dimensionality, what gives them a special epistemic valence. It thus seems worthwhile to relate them to considerations of knowledge objects and exhibitions, but also to (queer) phenomenological theories of entanglement and becoming originating from the following of lines. Meanwhile, the epistemic value of their latent objects, disoriented paths, and impossible spaces is only revealed in the interaction with and embodied experience of the virtual space. The article thus participates in debates on how bodily immersion does not exclude, but enables action and reflection within aesthetic experience. With regard to two fundamental paradigms of immersion, it can show how, for this purpose, the artworks turn anew the strategies of de-distancing and de-differentiation.

In diesem Beitrag wird Fragen nach der Repräsentation und Rezeption von Depressionen im Videospiel nachgegangen. Am Beispiel der Spiele 'What Remains of Edith Finch' (2017) und 'Life Is Strange' (2015) erfolgt eine medienzentrierte Analyse der narrativen, inszenatorischen und spielmechanischen Konstruktionen dieser psychischen Erkrankung sowie eine akteur:innenzentrierte Auseinandersetzung mit öffentlichen Reaktionen (betroffener) Spieler:innen auf die Darstellungen.

Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird der Einsatz von geschichtsbezogenen VR-Anwendungen an Gedenkstätten betrachtet. Vor dem Hintergrund der geschichtsdidaktischen Zielvorstellung, bei Gedenkstättenbesucher:innen Geschichtsbewusstsein zu fördern, wird der Blick auf die Bedeutung von Reflexionsprozessen gerichtet. Unter Fokussierung auf das Spannungsfeld von Vergangenheit und Gegenwart wirft der Beitrag die Frage auf, wie Reflexionsprozesse begrifflich gefasst und mit Blick auf den Einsatz von VR-Anwendungen in Gedenkstätten didaktisch eingebettet werden können. Hierzu greift der Beitrag auf ein Verständnis von Reflexion auf der Grundlage der pragmatistischen Theorietradition nach John Dewey zurück und verbindet es mit einer geschichtsdidaktischen Perspektive nach Lars Deile. Auf dieser Grundlage werden schließlich medienpädagogische und geschichtsdidaktische Implikationen für den Einsatz von VR-Anwendungen am non-formalen Lernort Gedenkstätte abgeleitet.

Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit Enis Macis Essay to blend in/into sth (Nachruf), der im Essayband Eiscafé Europa (2018) publiziert wurde. Er konzentriert sich auf vier Momente, die für die medienliterarische Sondierung der Autorin relevant sind: Erstens geht der Beitrag der Frage nach, inwiefern Dispositive rechtsextremer Ideologien entschlüsselt und soziale Medien als ein relevantes Element eines Netzwerks normativer, personaler und technisch-apparativer Elemente beschrieben werden. Er arbeitet zweitens den von Maci gewählten medienarchäologischen Zugang heraus, der sich durch eine historische und materialistische Annäherung an Effekte sozialer Medien auszeichnet. Drittens untersucht der Beitrag Macis Ideologiekritik, die im Kontext von Theorien der ‚Anrufung‘ von Subjekten verortet ist. Und viertens wird Macis Freilegung imaginierter Weiblichkeit rechter Influencerinnen nachgegangen, die in einem Zusammenhang mit der Moderne als ‚facialer Gesellschaft‘ stehen. Unter diesen Prämissen konzentriert sich der Beitrag nicht auf die notorischen rechten Empörungswellen und Shitstorms, sondern beschreibt die Anrufung als eine Dynamik der Kollektivierung. Die anrufende Funktion äußert sich darin, dass im Augenblick der Botschaft keine Verletzung erfolgt, sondern das Kollektiv durch das Angenehme und Wohlige – „ein weiches Warmes“ (Maci (2018)) – konstituiert wird.

Es gibt verschiedene Anfänge, um die Konstellationen des Aufschreibesystems 2000 nach Friedrich Kittler zu entfalten. Ein Weg unter den vielen Abzweigungen, Routen oder Irrgängen, der dazu eingeschlagen werden kann, führt zur bislang in der Medien- und Literaturwissenschaft wenig beachteten Selbstdokumentation Die Welt im Rücken von Thomas Melle aus dem Jahr 2016.

Bewertungen sind an der Hervorbringung sozialer Ordnungen beteiligt. Wenngleich als Leitunterscheidung benannt, wird im Forschungsfeld der Bewertungssoziologie die Unterscheidung von wertvoll und wertlos jedoch häufig übergangen und die Rolle von destruktiven Praktiken unterbeleuchtet; das Feld kann profitieren von den instruktiven, aber disziplinär fragmentierten Beiträgen der Abfallforschung. Der vorliegende Beitrag entwickelt eine soziologische Perspektive, in der Abfälle als werterzeugende Instanzen im Zentrum stehen. Wie können Abfall und Wert in ihrer Relation und im Sinne einer Überschneidung von Sozialität und Materialität näher bestimmt werden? Inwiefern wirken abfallspezifische Praktiken ordnungsstiftend? Teilnehmende Beobachtungen aus einem Recyclingbetrieb und die Ethnographie einer gescheiterten digitalen Innovation von Google haben die Untersuchung angeregt. Mit den zwei qualitativen Fallstudien wird die Grundunterscheidung von Bewertung und Wertung weiterentwickelt, als fruchtbar erweist sich dabei, eine wirtschaftssoziologisch geläufigen Optik von „Wertschöpfung“ umzustellen auf soziomaterielle Prozesse von „Deformation“ und „Entsorgung“.

This essay tests the concept of the possible world for an analysis of Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s novel Arminius (1689/90). Starting from the basic literary concept of ‘world’, which usually has the function of establishing a distinction between reality and fiction, the paper first examines, using the example of battle, fight, and war, how the novel depicts contingency and how its depictions are related to the concepts of providentiality and doom, which in turn are reconstructed as subsequent interpretations. A narrative analysis traces how the novel contributes to a pluralization of the concept of ‘world’. While Lohenstein presents coincidences and misfortunes in their fateful concatenation encompassing long periods of time and thus, on the whole, establishes the aberration of the narrated from the historical events, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz exemplifies the equality of possible and real world frequently by resorting to narrative strategies. The possible world of the novel serves as a reminder that the real world could be a different one.

Die Wissenschaft produziert und verarbeitet seit jeher Bilder, die nicht nur zu Illustrationszwecken dienen, gleichgültig, ob es sich dabei um den historischen Bestand an Zeichnungen biologischer oder technischer Objekte, um die neueren Computersimulationen oder den vielfachen Einsatz von Fotografien handelt (vgl. Rheinberger; Weigel; Galison). Aus dieser Bilderfülle greift der folgende Beitrag die wissenschaftlichen Fotografien der Emotionspsychologie heraus. Diese spezielle Art der wissenschaftlichen Fotografie in der Emotionsforschung hat im Vergleich zu anderen Fällen, wie etwa den Aufnahmen aus der Psychiatrie (vgl. Didi-Huberman) und Evolutionsbiologie (vgl. Prodger; Voss), lange Zeit kaum Beachtung gefunden. Für die Klassifikation, das Rating und das Computing der Emotion im Sinne körperlicher Erscheinungen sind technische Affektbilder jedoch ausschlaggebend gewesen. Sie spielen bei der Entwicklung der Emotion AI und des Affective Computings eine immer noch zu wenig beachtete Schlüsselrolle für die technische Identifikation einzelner Affekte, die hier herausgestellt werden soll.