Schaulager

 

Fri, 23.10. – Sun, 25.10.2009

Academic Consultant: Prof. Dr. Georg Christoph Tholen, Department of Media Studies at the University of Basel

The Conference of Shift 09, 'Magic Channels? On Phantoms and Phantasms in Media History', will take a discursive, interdisciplinary approach to this year's festival theme. It has been organised in cooperation with the Department of Media Studies at the University of Basel.

Friday, 23.10.2009

13.00-16.00 h

Chaired by: Prof. Dr. Georg Christoph Tholen, Professor of Media StudiesI, University of Basel

13.30 h

Introduction: Prof. Dr. Georg Christoph Tholen and Samuel Sieber

13.45 h
PD. Dr. phil. habil. Wolfgang Hagen
Lecturer in Media Studies, Humboldt-University Berlin; Director of the Department of Culture and Music of the German radio station “Deutschlandradio Kultur”

'Para!' – Epistemological observations on a key concept in research on media impact ('Parasocial interaction')

'Observations on Intimacy at a Distance' was the carefully formulated title under which two American sociologists, Horton & Wohl, published their findings in 1958. Their paper signalled a new approach to media research that is still influential today. The viewer/listener/user namely has been perceived since as 'active and creative' rather than as a 'victim' who reacts to medial stimuli merely by reflex. According to Horton & Wohl and practically all other modern theories on media impact, he engages in a situation they call 'parasocial interaction', which is to say, in circumstances that construe an 'as if': as if, for example, Günther Jauch or some other well-known TV presenter were sitting in my room and talking to me. What trance are we dealing with here, and what is its history?

14.30 h
Prof. Dr. Martin Stingelin 
Professor of Modern German Literature, University of Dortmund

The impact of media technologies on Basel around 1900

'Influencing Machines' populate our everyday lives, for all technical equipment that we are able to use at the push of a button in turn manipulates us. The term 'Influencing Machines' coined by Viktor Tausk consequently implies an only slightly 'de-ranged' shift in perspective: a 'paranoid' reversal from which ensue the clairaudience and perspicacity that allow potential developments to be anticipated. The case studies covered in this retrospective – which deal with a range of alleged 'paranoiacs' resident in Basel around 1900 – demonstrate how the inner life of newly invented 'media' has been perceived respectively explained provisionally by recourse to spiritism.

15.15 h
Prof. Dr. Stefan Kramer
Professor für Sinologie, Universität Leipzig

The dualism of aesthetics between sense and the supernatural – and an attempt at its de-ontologization

The concept of transcendence is perforce a prerequisite for any notion of the supernatural and magic. It describes a step beyond the borders of an immanent dualism, which – as its requisite Other, between existence as a material reality and as an immaterial perception – has repeatedly conjured the transcendental, the supernatural and the magic, and located cultural technologies, the 'media', at those points where the two intersect. In the light of alternate concepts of reality, an attempt will be made to de-ontologize the epistemological ontologies of this dualistic construction of the world and of reality, and their manifestation in cultural-technological terms.

Saturday, 24.10.2009

13.00-15.15 h

Chaired by: Dr. Hansmartin Siegrist, producer-director at Visavista AG Audiovisual Communications; lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Basel and The Academy of Art and Design Basel

13.00 h
Prof. Dr. Hubertus von Amelunxen
EGS Walter Benjamin Chair, Saas Fee/New York

On ghost-seers and ghosts that see

The spook of nineteenth century 'medium-ism' is already a disenchanted phantasmagoria, in which the enchantment of loss is perceived. Human perception is abandoned to the mechanisms of a 'technified' and medium-ized Panopticon. The lecture by Hubertus von Amelunxen examines the encounter of spiritism and photography in the nineteenth century, the 'cosmic shudder induced by the experience of the invisible' (Walter Benjamin) as a late form of the sublime.

13.45 h
Prof. Dr. Oliver Fahle
Professor of Film Studies, Ruhr-University Bochum

Aggregate states of the visible. Magic and technology in 1920s French cinema

French cinema in the 1920s apprehends itself as a great (cinematic) step forward into the age of Modernism and experimentation with the moving image. At its heart lie the mechanics of the cinematographic apparatus for they describe the transformation of material into something visible – into something visible however, that alters viewers' knowledge and perception of this material and that filmmakers Delluc and Epstein came to describe as magic. The history of French cinema demonstrates the extent to which magic and technology combine in film in order to gain a clearer understanding of the visible inter-relations that exist in our world.

14.30 h
Prof. Dr. Anne Jerslev
Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of Copenhagen

David Lynch's magical, mysterious world – reflections on 'in-betweenness' in 'Lost Highway' and 'Inland Empire'

In David Lynch's work there are always several worlds, dark hidden areas his characters – and the viewers ¬– can enter. Often characters don't know where they are – or who they are; spaces are transparent, boundaries are blurred, subjectivities fragile and reality a strange in-between place, at once magical and frightening. Anne Jerslev will discuss the blurring of boundaries between 'reality' and 'uncanny magic' in two of Lynch's later works, 'Lost Highway' from 1997 and 'Inland Empire' from 2006.

Sunday, 25.10.2009

12.30-14.00 & 15.15-15.45 h

Chaired by: Dr. Anna Tuschling, assistant at the Department of Media Studies, University of Basel

12.30 h
Prof. Dr. Ute Holl
Professor of Media Studies, University of Basel

Between the image and the law of transmission

Philosophy, anthropology, biology and cybernetics are plagued in the early twentieth century by a riddle that the nineteenth century left unresolved: the relationship between physiology and social structures (Lévi-Strauss). Media theory has filled the gap created by this constitutive question yet leaves it unanswered. In order to determine the gaps that first actuate transmission between those binary poles, media theory must examine the characteristics of material channels as well as immaterial forms of transmission. The issue of a magic of transmission must be raised not only with regard to the relationship between physiology and the social psyche but also as a fundamental issue of our culture: that between law and image, legality and imagery.

13.15 h
Frank Furtwängler
Media scholar and strategic creative director at plazz entertainment, Gruenwald

The greatest trick of all time: media and reversibility

There exists barely a human thought more dreadful than that of time reversed by some means or other. Somewhere between magic tricks and scientific thought experiments, the media present themselves as tools that allow their originators under certain circumstances actually to reverse the flow of time, to make things 'unhappened' or even, to overcome death in play. However, we thereby always also encounter the spooks and ghouls that accompany and influence these semi-real fantasies.

14.15 h
Prof. Dr. Sabine Doering-Manteuffel
Professor of European Ethnology, University of Augsburg

Enlightened cosmopolitans? On the symbiosis of occultism and modern technologies

Our modern era is characterized by contradictions. On the one hand education, progress and research have succeeded in permeating our lives with rationalism and technology while, on the other, there exists a strong need for transcendence, spiritual experience, mysticism and magic. These two poles are closely related. The shadow of the occult has followed on the heels of the enlightened cosmopolitan ever since he first awoke to the modern age. Spirits and the spirited mind constitute an indissoluble symbiosis.

15.00 h
Frank Nordhausen
Berlin-based journalist and author of several books

Scientology's electrometer – a magic faith machine

The so-called E-meter is central to Scientology's system of spiritual-psychic manipulation and faith. In introducing the use of this electrical device – which supposedly can read a person's mind or memory ¬– Scientology became the world's first truly modern sect. While technically speaking it is nothing more than a kind of lie detector, scientologists believe it enables them when attempting reincarnation under hypnosis to detect and erase the 'engrams' that allegedly hamper the development of spiritual potential. With the electrometer, scientology possesses a powerful means of manipulation that exploits blind faith in science and combines it with esotericism.