Siegfried Zielinski - Quotes

Expend and enrich the horizon of fantasy! I am pleading for a project of diverse practice with advanced media machinery. I am counting on a creative side-by-side co-existence: not in the sense of grandiose arbitrariness but rather a division of labor that is necessary because we — as cinephiles, as videophiles, as computerphiles — do have different wishes and expectations of the obscure object of desire.
Zielinski, Siegfried.

Thirty-five years ago, when I began my studies, it was theater, radio, and film which interested me in the field of media. As a young man, who studied in Germany and came from a Polish-German family (from the region where Hans Bellmer was born), I was occupied analytically in the first years by a question: I absolutely wanted to know how the Nazis had used media, how they had conquered the heads and hearts of those who supported their death-machines or even killed for them.
Zielinski, Siegfried and David Senior (Interviewer) and William Rauscher (Translator). "Interview with Prof. Zielinski." in: Rhizome. April 7, 2006.

The investigation of the deep layers of media history began, however paradoxically at first, when I dedicated myself in the eighties and nineties more intensively to new electronic media. As a media researcher who had twenty years earlier written his philosophic dissertation on the history of the videorecorder, I had a growing uneasiness with the idea of the future that was being suddenly and constantly announced to me. I doubted very much that our epoch embodied the greatest possibilities of progress in the history of civilization, if one used diversity - the richness of variety in existing things, forms, techniques, arts, etc - as criteria for progress.
Zielinski, Siegfried and David Senior (Interviewer) and William Rauscher (Translator). "Interview with Prof. Zielinski." in: Rhizome. April 7, 2006.

In my studies I try to connect two movements, one through the verticality of phenomena and processes, which means in effect, the attempt to get to the bottom of things - about which, above all, I was encouraged by the Polish artist and poet Bruno Schulz. The second movement is characterized by the conceptual dance on the plateau, which I have learned less from French thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari than for example from the philosopher Vilem Flusser, who the Nazis drove out from the alchemist-city of Prague to Sao Paulo, where he learned to couple a deep consideration of the world with the dynamic figure of the samba.
Zielinski, Siegfried and David Senior (Interviewer) and William Rauscher (Translator). "Interview with Prof. Zielinski." in: Rhizome. April 7, 2006.

Like Nietzsche and Foucault, I favor the concept of geneaology for historical research, which asks after the developments, turns and leaps.
Zielinski, Siegfried and David Senior (Interviewer) and William Rauscher (Translator). "Interview with Prof. Zielinski." in: Rhizome. April 7, 2006.

When I wrote Deep Time of the Media, I had invented for it the concept of anarcheology. This term now seems to me too negative and destructive in its construction.
Zielinski, Siegfried and David Senior (Interviewer) and William Rauscher (Translator). "Interview with Prof. Zielinski." in: Rhizome. April 7, 2006.

For two or three years, I have worked only with the concept of variantology, under which I understand the imaginary sum of all possible genealogies of media phenomena. As opposed to the heterogeneous, with its heavy resonances from ontology and biology, the variantological, in its methodological and epistemological respect, interests me as a mode of lightness. The variant is just as at home in the experimental sciences as it is in diverse artistic practices, above all in music. As different varieties or divergent interpretations, variants belong for composers or performers to a self-evident vocabulary and to practical everyday life. The semantic field of this neologism possesses a positive connotation. To be different, divergent, changing, alternating, are alternative translations for the Latin verb variare. It tips over only into the negative when it is used by the speaking subject as a means of exclusion, which the word does not actually sustain. To vary something then is an alternative to its destruction.
Zielinski, Siegfried and David Senior (Interviewer) and William Rauscher (Translator). "Interview with Prof. Zielinski." in: Rhizome. April 7, 2006.

To not accept leaders does not mean that one does not respect heroes.
Zielinski, Siegfried and David Senior (Interviewer) and William Rauscher (Translator). "Interview with Prof. Zielinski." in: Rhizome. April 7, 2006.

In my work with young artists and intellectuals in various academies, I have learned that without personalities with whom one can passionately identify, one manages only with difficulty. It is essentially better when this potential for identification is not identical with the teacher, but rather comes completely from somewhere else, from another time, another region, possibly out of books. When we are involved with art and media, we operate in the world of illusions. The Latin verb (illudere) that hides in this beautiful word means etymologically not only to bring something before others, to produce appearances, but as well to enter into a risk, to set something into play, even, when necessary, involving oneself. This necessity is not rendered superfluous under the conditions of the production or generation of art with digital media or in technological relations. Completely the opposite - we must think them anew. My excursions into the lives of a few and their partly impossible working conditions gesture to this effect.
Zielinski, Siegfried and David Senior (Interviewer) and William Rauscher (Translator). "Interview with Prof. Zielinski." in: Rhizome. April 7, 2006.

Movements on the periphery, which do not exclude the occasional crossing of the center, appear to me at present to be more meaningful and in the foreseeable future, more pleasurable than the overexcited pushing and shoving for the best place in the middle.
Zielinski, Siegfried and David Senior (Interviewer) and William Rauscher (Translator). "Interview with Prof. Zielinski." in: Rhizome. April 7, 2006.

From a perspective of media archeology, we have to give up trusted cartographies. Technical media as we know them were made marketable and developed into products in the metropolis of the western world (London, Paris, New York, Berlin, etc). If however we are interested in deep-temporal emergence and development, we have to use a wholly other orientation. The deeper we penetrate historical layers, the more we must turn towards the far East and above all towards China, and from there we roam through Asia Minor and the Arab lands and cultures, moving then into southern Europe, before we arrive in the pre-modern regions and cities familiar to us. My thesis is that the new and arousing ideas come out of the provinces much more frequently than out of the centers of power, where they are worked over and freed from their resistances.
Zielinski, Siegfried and David Senior (Interviewer) and William Rauscher (Translator). "Interview with Prof. Zielinski." in: Rhizome. April 7, 2006.

More and more in Europe, academic institutions are permeable to the demands and desires of the fitters and guiders of the states. Poets and thinkers however need autonomy and freedom as indispensable and sustaining elixirs. Academies of the arts and sciences must not degenerate into test departments of the globalized information society. For the institutions to which I am responsible, I thus plead vehemently that they be able to proliferate as gleaming ivory towers.
Zielinski, Siegfried and David Senior (Interviewer) and William Rauscher (Translator). "Interview with Prof. Zielinski." in: Rhizome. April 7, 2006.

Study at the academy should be more than ever the offer of a protected time and space where original thoughts and idea can be developed and tried out. The possibility of failure belongs to experimentation. That is nothing other than the idea of a contemporary laboratory, whose windows and doors must above all not be closed. At the academy in Cologne for example we offer ourselves constantly up to the judgments and critiques of the public, through exhibitions, open concerts, performances and lectures.
Zielinski, Siegfried and David Senior (Interviewer) and William Rauscher (Translator). "Interview with Prof. Zielinski." in: Rhizome. April 7, 2006.

The students and the guests of our program enjoy the freedom to experiment and offer their thanks through outstanding projects and artistic work, which have received international recognition. We remind our students and fellows in any case of their crucial duty: they have to be ready to take risks and not want to simply swim in conventional waters. And with that the circle of the project of a deep time of the media and variantology closes.
Zielinski, Siegfried and David Senior (Interviewer) and William Rauscher (Translator). "Interview with Prof. Zielinski." in: Rhizome. April 7, 2006.

An interface separates things, or the concept would make no sense. An interface connects things, or the concept would make no sense either. An interface marks a difference.
Zielinski, Siegfried. "Towards a dramaturgy of differences." in: Interfacing Realities. 1997. (English).

Consciousness, which we use to form ideas and to express them, for instance, in speech, is an interface; the oldest one we know. This is where world/worlds/reality/realities are formulated. With the help of this interface we try to comprehend what confronts us, in short: the other, in the broadest sense of the word, that which is not identical to us.
Zielinski, Siegfried. "Towards a dramaturgy of differences." in: Interfacing Realities. 1997. (English).

The interface determines the relation of the one to the other which is different and fundamentally unknown, and vice versa: through the interface the other presents itself to the one, and does this with respect to those aspects that are understandable.
Zielinski, Siegfried. "Towards a dramaturgy of differences." in: Interfacing Realities. 1997. (English).

In telematics, as in any form of communication which is based on technology, the interface separates and connects the worlds of acting subjects on the one side and the worlds of working machines and programs on the other side. It separates as well as connects media-people and media-machines. It is the borderline where the medium takes its shape.
Zielinski, Siegfried. "Towards a dramaturgy of differences." in: Interfacing Realities. 1997. (English).

In simpler words: it is the area of the mind that is furthest from the symbolic and closest to physical experience, e.g. to desire and death. It is the unknown, which confronts us in the other and of which it is the non-constructed part. Bataille might have called it the impossible - as distinguished from the possible/virtual.
Zielinski, Siegfried. "Towards a dramaturgy of differences." in: Interfacing Realities. 1997. (English).

Reality refers to those dimensions of world/worlds which we can formulate and understand and which have been (co)constructed by us. At the end of the 20th century the realities we know have been strongly permeated and occupied by media. The Internet for instance is an interdiscursive media-reality, built from and established by social, technical, cultural and aesthetic et cetera realities.
Zielinski, Siegfried. "Towards a dramaturgy of differences." in: Interfacing Realities. 1997. (English).

In dealing with virtuality or the virtual (I try to avoid marketing jargon by not using the term "virtual reality") we are not dealing with a material world, a thing-world or a life-world, but with something immaterial, something that only exists as a program, as a symbol that we can perceive sensorially in the form of signs (in abstracta, figuratively, in image spaces, as icons, imaginary). The virtual now still has prosthesis-like extensions into the thing-world/life-world, in the form of data helmets, data spectacles or data gloves, the mouse, keyboards and so on. But these are merely the outward surfaces for the program underneath.
Zielinski, Siegfried. "Towards a dramaturgy of differences." in: Interfacing Realities. 1997. (English).

The big chance offered by extended telematics is to build a tension between the local and the global, between local identities and events on the one hand and world-wide processes/structures on the other hand: to respect the other in its otherness, to maintain and support its autonomy, and at the same time not to isolate it but to enable it to participate in the global exchange process.
Zielinski, Siegfried. "Towards a dramaturgy of differences." in: Interfacing Realities. 1997. (English).

Is (artistic) subjectivity an antiquated notion at the end of the 20th century and something we must bid farewell to, or is it something that just requires new conceptions?
Zielinski, Siegfried. "Media Archaeology." in: CTheory. July 11, 1996.

I argued vehemently against declaring artistic subjectivity dead because I have the impression that were we to do so, we would encircle this empty space left by theory and philosophy in an even more hectic and panicked fashion, with even more words and images and I also think that we from the field of social praxis represented by media art must finally start to confront the production of mediocrity and nice design, particularly and because we are responsible for teaching and training young artists.
Zielinski, Siegfried. "Media Archaeology." in: CTheory. July 11, 1996.

Yet in which direction are we to formulate this concept of artistic subjectivity (in the indissoluble linkage of an aesthetic and an ethical orientation), vis a vis the gigantic cleansing and reducing machinery of digitization? And beyond the dualisms and antagonisms mentioned before?
Zielinski, Siegfried. "Media Archaeology." in: CTheory. July 11, 1996.

One of the most exceptional stories in Western Judeo-Christian culture that imagines an intensive temporal process is the dream of Jacob's ladder: the risky and hazardous ascent to the light, the ineffable, as a regular, metrical pattern of progress up the rungs of a ladder or solid steps. In some sense or degree it is the reverse side of Freud's staircase dream, which in the interpretation of the psychoanalyst, stands for the strenuous, rhythmic ascent of coitus and its release, ejaculation.
Zielinski, Siegfried. "Media Archaeology." in: CTheory. July 11, 1996.