Zielinski and Irrgang on Artnodes #34

The Artnodes #34 special issue featured two remarkable guest editors, professors Siegfried Zielinski and Daniel Irrgang. Drawing from concepts like deep time and media archaeology, they have now sparked an engaging dialogue on Materiology and Variantology. By a fortunate turn of events, we had the honor of hosting both scholars at the UOC, where we conducted interviews about the meaning and value of this special issue.

Interview with Siegfried Zielinski about Artnodes #34 by Andrés Burbano, co-produced with the Audiovisual & Sound Lab – Interdisciplinary Research and Innovation Hub at UOC.

Interview with Daniel Irrgang about Artnodes #34 by Andrés Burbano, co-produced with the Audiovisual & Sound Lab – Interdisciplinary Research and Innovation Hub at UOC.

Additionally, professors Zielinski and Irrgang contributed with an inspiring written piece, further exploring the themes of this edition:

Materiology & Variantology

The most valuable and beautiful treasure of the spirit is freedom. Especially when it is being brutally trampled on in many parts of the world, and this precious resource seems to be in short supply, it is important to remember its essence. Freedom is realized in the relationships we enter into with each other and those who are not identical to us and our views. For research into the materiology and variantology of the relationships between art, science, and technology (AST), it is an extraordinary stroke of luck to realize a project like Artnodes #34. Let me briefly outline three exceptional qualities of the publication project:

1) The current network of the journal Artnodes brings together authors from around twenty different countries and heterogeneous regions, including Brazil, China, Colombia, the USA, Turkey, Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and, of course, Catalonia & Spain. In the invitation to the dialogue, we as editors did not formulate any dependent conditions, for example, on origins and identities, fatherlands, or mother tongues. Instead, the focus was on our shared interest in materialogical art and media research and the logic of multiplicity regarding the relationships between AST. This particular curiosity was reflected in an exciting exchange.

2) The diversity of the authors’ origins goes hand in hand with a strong transversality. Without crossing and traversing the boundaries between art, science, and technology, there will be no advanced thinking and aesthetic action in the future. As thematic editors, we are particularly pleased that Artnodes has facilitated a dialogue between the sciences and the arts. Rosa Barba, Peter Blegvad, David Link, Pedro de Oliveira, and Tin Wilke discuss their subjects explicitly from an artistic perspective. Within the academic contributions, numerous disciplines are represented, or academics who work across disciplines. Arianna Borrelli from the natural sciences, their history and epistemology, the philosopher, writer, and mystic Amador Vega, Aaron Jaffe from English and American literary studies, the cultural and media thinker Florian Cramer, the art historians Hongfeng Tang or Miklós Pèternak, the design theorist Ricardo Sarmiento Gaffurri, the cinema and media theorist Benoît Turquety or the specialist for artistic and scientific archives Margit Rosen.

3) The great diversity of topics is also remarkable. Variantology as praxis of a distinguished cultura experimentalis attaches particular importance to this. The many plateaus on which the authors dance correspond to the deep temporal thinking in the vertical. The musician, draughtsman, and ‘pataphysicist Peter Blegvad introduces us with poetic ease to the micro-universe of his imaginative energies between imagination, memory, and observation. From there, the thematic diversity opens up from the history of science, religion, and philosophy, to aesthetic and media-theoretical questions, to the archaeology of media, to sound and music, but also to dedicated contributions to artificial extelligences in poetry and photography as well as to various logics of the archive or the history and practice of textile-based inscription techniques.

The dialogue will continue—between the authors and editors, but above all, between them and the journal’s readers. Our special thanks go to the Artnodes team, who made this dialogue possible in the first place.

Siegfried Zielinski/Daniel Irrgang

Guest Editors, Artnodes #34