Wissenschaftsgeschichte

On 17-18 December 2019, the first workshop of the DEMA project - Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice & Theory - project took place at the C²DH. For this workshop, specialists from the fields of media history, art history and the history of science were invited to share best practices and experiences in documenting hands-on and experimental research.

In October, I traveled to Prague for a workshop on the history of science and the Second World War. For the second time during my PhD, it was an opportunity to cross the imaginary iron curtain. The experiences during those days were undoubtedly insightful.

The notion of the automaton extends at least as far back as antiquity, but successful implementation of simulated intelligence, and even life itself, continues to elude us. Although there is a tremendous disparity between how we imagine robots to behave and how they actually perform, since the eighteenth century they have become unwitting participants in a dialogue about humanity's self-conception.

“Glanz und Elend der Kunstkopf-Stereophonie” – A radio play from Stefan Krebs, with Hans Peter Hallwachs as Kunstkopf; Stephan Wurfbaum as journalist and Andreas Fickers as media archaeologist; Research, script and mise-en-scène: Stefan Krebs; Sound: Christian Schimmöller; Producer: Werner Bleisteiner; Historical and technical advisors: Günther Hess and Stephan Peus. A production of the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History of the University of Luxembourg in cooperation with Bavarian Broadcasting and the EU-research project ORPHEUS, 2017.

From the 1940s on the computer starts playing a prominent role, shaping the field of physics. The integration of the computer in this discipline was by no means a natural inclusion, but a process of debate and negotiation of what it meant to “do” physics and what kind of knowledge can be acquired using computers.