Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Medienwissenschaft

Under the title Constantly in Flux this paper wish to introduce an ongoing doctoral dissertation on the work of the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans. Wolfgang Tillmans is eminently an artist whose practice is bound with photography. Yet, his extensive body of work immensely appears to advance a larger and more complex study of digital art, materialized and mediated through diverse media and technologies. Tillmans has since the 1980s been working with diverse imagining and printing modalities bound up with peripherals such as the scanner, the inkjet printer, digital camera, video technology, the Xerox machine, exploited in different forms, versions and times. Giving a voice to these analogue and digital media technologies, and looking at the feedback mechanism between the artists and his different apparatuses, as a place of development, the study will allow us to understand the specific context and materiality of these specific works – and examining the works from such perspective engenders the particular affordances of these specific technologies, a dualism crucial to understand not only the ontology of photography but also larger concepts of perceptual systems and questions of visibility, and different forms of subjectivity.