Martin Reinhart, filmmaker and media planner, and Jan Knopf, literary scholar, go back to the beginnings of technical reproducibility. The issues of that time seem closer than expected to today's problems and raise questions that are still at the centre of discussions today. Do technical media enrich people's everyday lives? Can we trust them and their information?

The word film is rolling, things are beginning to speak, the ABC sounds insistently in up and down sound columns, the symphonies shine in a spectrum of colors, the astonished viewers sink into a pupil intoxication and the new visuals make noise from the screens. Space and time cancel each other out, the environment is set in motion, the rhythms of motors and machines govern everyday life, the organic is transformed into dynamics. The arts free themselves from the imitation of the representational and open their eyes far into new undreamt-of worlds. The visual expands into the virtual.

Building as a new synthesis of traditional craftsmanship and new techniques, which are realized in the media of radio, film and electronic music, dissolves the traditional arts and their limited genres as well as challenges new open designs. Artistic creation unites »all work-artistic disciplines into a new way of building«, as Walter Gropius formulated the Bauhaus program, based on a vision of a self-determined society oriented towards the state of advanced technology, which no longer knows national boundaries: »Internationality of the arts! Global world!«

At the end of the twenties, the concept of the »apparatus experience« already existed. Does it have the last word - or do we set everything in motion again? What personal possibilities do they open up in the sense of active participation? What have we internalized to the extent that we no longer recognize the guidelines. Do we live in the apparatuses and do we replace our world of experience with them?

Organization / Institution

ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe