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Digital Media Bremen

Program for
Technology, Theory, and Design

Layers of Abstraction

Student
Finn Geiger
Lecturer
Marcela Antipan Olate
Semester
WS 2024/25
Course
Counting Performing Computing: Measuring

Layer of Abstraction

In his drawings, Finn Geiger works with quotations, screenshots and other forms of references from philosophy, physics, computer science and pop culture. The drawings have no graphic elements or texts of their author’s own. Everything on them is transferred with pen and ink. Finn Geiger’s interventions take place on the level of arrangement, format, and fragmentation, but above all on the level of relations. Together, the references open up clear but open fields of thought that negotiate questions about art, technology and care.

Layers of Abstraction in particular deals with questions of digital material. What status do we grant the digital? Can it be artistic material? What makes a material?

There are two elements in the drawing calling for attention in the first place: (1) a quote from Gilbert Simondon’s book On the Modes of Existence of Technical Objects (1958) stating that “[automatism], however, is a rather low degree of technical perfection”. And (2) a still from the cartoon Spongebob Squarepants in which Squidward takes a deep breath with his tentacle holding an almost undefinable technical object. One probably has to know that specific episode of Spongebob in order to enrich their understanding of this drawing. The url can be found on the drawing itself but to give a short description of the plot:

Squidward tries to blow bubbles but fails. Spongebob in the meantime keeps on reminding him of the technique (German: die Technik; which expresses both technique and technical object). Finally Squidwards uses the technique through which he actually blows a huge bubble. Proud of himself being a genius, he denies any effect the technique was having on his action. In the end of the episode the bubble traps Squidwards house, brings it to the top of the ocean, pops, and lets the house sink again.

Layer of Abstraction - Close up to bubble situation

To interpret this episode within the drawing: Squidward does not respect the technique but the technical autonomy (the bubble) strikes back. Through a series of quotes the drawing points to an indeterminacy – which might express some kind of autonomy – in technical, digital, and logico-mathematical phenomena which opens up questions on the status we grant these phenomena. If automation is not the final destination of technology will there be any destination? And what determines the path of concretisation of technical, digital, and logico-mathematical objects? Furthermore the almost not identifiable reference to the ideas of layers of abstract (taken from computer science) which underlies the drawing brings in a fundamental question to all these questions already asked: On which layer are we able to formulate which question when it comes to technical, digital and logico-mathematical question in the realm of philosophy and the arts?

References