Auerbach Lecture | 14.07.2025 | 18 Uhr
Jörg Kreienbrock (Germanistik, Northwestern): Non-Euclidean Cinematography
Abstract
In 1932 and 1936, the German psychologist and philosopher Karl Gerhards published two articles, discussing the possibility of non-Euclidean intuition. They are entitled “Nichteuklidische Kinematographie” (1932) and “Nichteuklidische Anschauung und Optische Täuschungen” (1936). Gerhards asks, “ob wir im Sinne von Helmholtz zu einer adäquaten anschaulichen Vorstellung nichteuklidischer Geometrien gelangen können oder nicht.” This project traces scientific, philosophical, and literary attempts to answer Gerhards’ question and produce intuitive representations of non-Euclidean geometry. Its objects are what Isabelle Stengers calls “simulation instruments”, which bring about “a new species of scientist one might call the new sophist, a researcher no longer committed to truth, which silences fiction, but instead to the possibility of mathematical fictions through which any desired phenomena become reproducible.” Thereby, the Gestalt Theory of Erich von Hornbostel and Kurt Lewin, the popularization of post-classical physics by Arthur Eddington, as well as the poetry (and literary criticism) of William Empson (among many others) provide insights on how to resolve the divergence of knowledge and intuition, theory and experience. For these thinkers, mathematical reality is not just calculated but seen.
It is the new medium of cinema which in the first decades of the 20th century becomes the most prominent new medium where, according to Karl Sierek, Medienanthropologie as a “Gratwanderung zwischen den Räumen des imaginären und des realen Menschen” is being staged. In the movie theater – like in von Hornbostel’s “I-Welten”, Gerhards’ and von Helmholtz’s pseudo-spheres, or the planetarium – the observer is immersed within a closed space of immersion. They experience the “Variabilität der geometrisch-anschaulichen Erlebnisse”, as Hans Reichenbach notes, within the Weltinnenräume (Rilke) of artificially produced immersive environments.
Ort & Zeit: Bibliothek Erich Auerbach Institut, Weyertal 59 (Rückgebäude, 3. OG), 50937 Köln |
Montag, 14.07.2025 | 18:00 Uhr