Article by Marvin Reinhart published in the Thüringer Allgemeine on 30.12.2022.
Click here for the article (in german).
With the kind permission of the Thüringen Allgemeine, we provide you with this article, which has been translated into English.
How "alive" are machines and plants?
New research project at Bauhaus University Weimar explores the animality of nature and technical devices.
Marvin Reinhart
Weimar. Four men in red shirts and black ties, industrial sounds: With the release of their album Die Mensch-Maschine in the late 1970s, the band Kraftwerk not only took another groundbreaking step for electronic music, but also addressed a theme that has long been a topic in the history of ideas and is more relevant today than ever before due to digitalization: the question of the relationship between man and machine.
In E.T.A. Hoffmann's contribution to this discourse, The Sandman, published in 1816, the beautiful Olimpia is revealed to be an automaton who drives Nathanael to madness. In Ernst Jünger's 1957 novel Glass Bees, the protagonist encounters devices modeled on human body parts and insects. In the movie »Ex Machina« (2014), the protagonist falls in love with a robot, and anyone who has ever played chess against a computer knows how quickly we begin to attribute human behavior to a machine. Today, machines have become so complex that we can communicate and interact with them far beyond rudimentary levels. Siri, Alexa, voice assistants: "These give the impression that we are increasingly dealing with animistic, i.e. ensouled, devices," explains a spokesperson for the Bauhaus University.
We now know: Trees Communicate with Each Other
Recent findings show that intelligence and communication are not exclusive to humans and a few select animal species. "The cognitive abilities of plants are currently receiving a lot of attention. We now know that trees are connected by a 'Wood Wide Web' created by fungi, allowing them to exchange information and nutrients," the spokesperson added.
Starting next year, the University of Weimar will dedicate itself to a research project entitled Animism/Machinism: Configurations of Critique between Science, Art, and Technology, which will explore the animacy of nature and technical devices. Housed in the Department of Media Studies, the project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with 546,000 euros over three years.
The project team consists of Henning Schmidgen, Professor of Media Theory and History of Science, philosopher Mathias Schönher, who will lead the project, and visual artist Jenny Brockmann. At its core is a new understanding of "animism," or the perception of "aliveness" or "ensoulment," and its positioning within media studies research. "The project asks what consequences would result from adopting an animistic worldview in which the distinction between non-human nature and human culture is dissolved," explains the university spokesperson.