In the theory of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, knowledge and power constitute two closely interwoven concepts. The more extensive and detailed our knowledge, the greater become the opportunities for control and hence for power. Control and disciplinary techniques lead, in Foucault’s view, to ever-new forms of knowledge and vice-versa. The 19th century saw the development of numerous schemes for identifying, classifying, measuring and calculating objects and persons. Practices of surveillance, confession and documentation set up the individual as a describable and analysable object. This development has accelerated and intensified with new techniques of monitoring, archiving, collecting, analysing and networking data. The knowledge society is the new class society; the digitization of the world is driving a world of equals among equals into a new world of billions of singulars.
An example of this from Obama’s second election campaign: The head of a data collection team, “Daniel Wagner, just 29 years old” had undertaken to “gather more knowledge about the voters than ever before. And by that he meant not the average values for certain groups, but knowledge about as many individual voters as possible. This succeeded with shocking precision. […] For example, it is assumed that Wagner’s database contained, for each of the 166 million voters, around 10 000 to 20 000 data points: Name, address, telephone number, previous voting decisions, responses in surveys, political opinions, data concerning income and consumer behaviour, friends on Facebook and Twitter – and numerous other details. […] Out of this enormous fund of data, Wagner’s algorithms computed multiple indicators for every voter. A persuasion score between 1 and 100, which indicated the probability that a citizen was going to vote Obama. [...] Eight months before the election, Wagner distilled out of the data flood 15 million voters the campaign should focus on because they were deemed persuadable. […] No electorate in the world has ever been so precisely gauged, so precisely dissolved.”1
This is opposed by our own, individual interest in knowledge, which creates for us a meaningful order in our life in the larger context, world. Attentively we try to avoid blending the two epistemological interests. Yet how, when knowledge production, knowledge transfer these days is performed mainly via the Internet, which is algorithmically set up and analysed?
Ilit Azoulay, in the intermediate zone between her own and extraneous knowledge, battles through the chinks of the world and wrestles with the difficulty of building up for herself a system of understanding, of knowledge, a type of private, liveable order in a strange world. Her large, multi-part, audio-visual work Shifting Degrees of Certainty, 2014, stands in the centre of the room, of the section and asks, as it were, on behalf of all artists and on behalf of us visitors, how we can achieve a certain degree of certainty, of stability.
Hans Danuser is the father figure in this section. The subject that preoccupies many young artists today, knowledge production, was dealt with by Hans Danuser in the Eighties in the major seven-part work In Vivo. With his essayist series on gold processing, nuclear power, pathology, surgery, Ronald Reagan’s attempt at “Star Wars” (Los Alamos), animal testing and genetic engineering, he entered a number of secret(ive) fields of society, taboo areas in which knowledge, values and power are generated. We show here a series on pathology and animal testing. In both areas bodies are opened in order to obtain knowledge about them; in the case of animal testing, interventions are additionally performed in vivo, on the living anatomy, in order to generate knowledge from the body’s reactions.
Simone Demandt photographed various laboratories using long exposures. In her images we learn about, experience the secret life of machines, of devices during the night, when all humans have left the laboratory. She exposes, as it were, automatic machine intelligence which, even at night, when all is asleep, unceasingly works on.
Yann Mingard with Deposit and the four sub-topics “Animal”, “Humans”, “Plants”, “Data”, deals on the one hand with knowledge production in these fields and, on the other hand, with the attempt by humans to store knowledge along with seeds and data at secure locations in the Arctic or Antarctic, for Time Zero after a mega disaster on Earth, for a future in which it is perhaps possible to solve the problems of today. This documentation tells of the utopia and folly, simultaneously, of allowing life to become completely plannable and salvageable.
Dayanita Singh has, almost incessantly, been photographing India of the archives for a number of years. The files pile up, multiply, form sediments, because court cases, for example, often go on for years, decades, in India, sometimes for a whole life long. They proliferate, begin to drape a blanket of questions and answers, a skin of etched-in disappointments, of waiting in vain, over one’s own life. A shadow world manifests itself in her images, curiously lively and lifeless simultaneously, the underworld of paper, of paragraphs, of files, of society, palely illuminated by the light of old neon tubes.
Daniel Blaufuks, in a large project bearing the title, All the memory of the world, part I, deals with photography as an archive of memory, between reality and fiction. As he deals with W.G. Sebald, Georges Perec and Georges Didi-Huberman he works through questions about the relationship between language and image as it concerns memory and confronts visual memory of Auschwitz, for example by contrasting the importance of Europe’s major rail stations as a network of travellers, of citizens of a new freedom, with the railway routes and wagons which all led ultimately to the concentration camps.
Jules Spinatsch took photographs on the topic, “Knowledge, Order, Power” in the Planetarium in Mannheim and realized his computer-controlled multiple scanning there. In this panorama, beneath the Planetarium’s cupola, we glide through the unfolding of Space after the Big Bang.