This short text is a brief summary of my PhD dissertation that I finished in January 2024 at Koblenz University and Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. The full dissertation was published as issue 20 in the edition “Medien- und Gestaltungsästhetik” at transcript in late autumn of 2024.
Maschinen und Atmosphären:
Zur Ästhetik des Virtuellen bei E.T.A. Hoffmann
In welchem Zusammenhang steht »das Virtuelle« mit Poetiken, die in der Romantik konturiert wurden? Andreas Sieß zeigt, dass sich die ästhetischen Vorstellungen dessen, was »das Virtuelle« ist, nicht nur bereits um 1800 konsolidierten, sondern dass die (bild-)ästhetischen Maßstäbe, die heute grundlegend für moderne Anwendungen der Virtual Reality sind, bereits damals Gegenstand von Aushandlungen waren. Anhand der Begriffe »Maschine« und »Atmosphäre« verhandelt er zwei gegenläufige Stoßrichtungen des Virtuellen, deren dialektisches Spiel eine neue Perspektive auf Fragestellungen zu der Gestaltung von gegenwärtigen virtuellen Medien anbietet.
Experiment (Work in Progress)
The following playground is currently a work in progress. It represents an attempt to provide an experimental and playful approach to fundamental theses that were not only central to the discourse around 1800 but also relevant to the negotiation of the virtual in Romantic poetics. Since most sources originally appear in German, I have included an English translation alongside the original quotation.
The central quote is presented by Hoffmann in a text initially published as a music-aesthetic essay within a review of a Beethoven symphony. He later incorporated this text into a fictional work, specifically the Kreisleriana in the Fantasiestücke. Hoffmann writes:
Original quote:
Wie ästhetische Messkünstler im Shakspeare [sic!] oft über gänzlichen Mangel wahrer Einheit und inneren Zusammenhanges geklagt haben, und nur dem tiefern Blick ein schöner Baum, Knospen und Blätter, Blüthen und Früchte aus einem Keim treibend, erwächst: so entfaltet auch nur ein sehr tiefes Eingehen in die innere Structur Beethovenscher Musik die hohe Besonnenheit des Meisters.
Hoffmann 1810: Spalte 6341
Translation:
Just as aesthetic measurers often lament a complete lack of true unity and inner coherence in Shakespeare, and yet, to the deeper gaze, a beautiful tree grows, sprouting buds and leaves, blossoms and fruits from a single seed: so too does a very deep engagement with the inner structure of Beethoven’s music reveal the master’s profound deliberation.
Particularly intriguing is the metaphor of the tree, which emerges through a deep exploration of the structure of a text (or a musical score). In this instance, Hoffmann also references—at least in its Gestalt (i.e. its form)—the symbol of the arabesque, which Friedrich Schlegel introduces to Romantic discourse. Although the Romantics use the arabesque as a metaphor, examining the ’design‘ of arabesques proves interesting. Here, I have included a contemporary example drawn from an architectural theoretical work from 1752.
A central motif of Romanticism was the notion of readers as “extended authors”2. This concept posits that the “actual” (i.e. the historical) author provides merely an initial affordance, which readers then synthesize into autonomous and highly subjective works of art. Romantic authors employ a variety of metaphors to describe this configuration of the text. For instance, Eichendorff writes of a “Jacob’s ladder”3 that the text offers to the reader, which the reader ultimately must ascend on their own. Conversely, Hoffmann speaks of “magical preparations”4 from which an enchanted world can arise.
This indicates that the text merely serves as an initial substrate, from which a work of art emerges through reception. In my dissertation, I argue that this imbues the text with a potential that can be regarded as “the virtual.” As I explicitly engage with literature around 1800, I also employ a definition of the virtual as conceptualized by Leibniz.
Original quote:
Alle jemals stattfindenden Veränderungen sind längst von Anbeginn her in jeder Monade oder vielmehr in dem ihr von Gott eingepflanzten Veränderungsgesetze virtuell vorhanden, und laufen wie aufgezogene Uhrfedern nacheinander ab. Auf diese Weise wird die ganze reale Welt mit allen wechselnden und bleibenden Zuständen das Abbild einer idealen Welt von Gesetzen in Gottes Verstande.
Leibniz 1847: 505
Translation:
All changes that ever occur have been present virtually from the beginning in every monad, or rather in the law of change implanted in it by God, and unfold sequentially like the unwinding of a clock’s springs. In this way, the entire real world, with all its transient and permanent states, becomes the image of an ideal world of laws in God’s mind.
It becomes evident that the Romantics engage with the motif of infinity: since each text generates a new and genuinely individual work of art with every act of reception, as Hoffmann suggested in his review of Beethoven, a text unfolds into a sprawling tree of plural possibilities. This “unlimited diversity”67 is thus already implanted in every textual “preparation”.
However, it remains to be examined, especially in light of Leibniz’s view that God implants these laws of change in monads (or here: texts), that the Romantics aim for a scenario where there is no singular “creator”/author of texts. Instead, the collective of readers assumes the role of creators, ultimately writing Leibniz’s laws of change themselves. The implicit ideal of the Romantic work of art, therefore, is that it does not take on any form or format of fixed media but rather strives for immediacy8 by existing solely in the subject’s mind.9
Bringing all these aspects together, I consistently envisioned a “mathematical formula” as the initial “seed” while writing my dissertation. As Hoffmann suggests, from this seed, a tree should emerge through deep engagement with the textual substrate or structure. This tree is characterized by its branching into an infinite diversity, thereby achieving an infinite, perpetuating, and recursive depth of reflection. This metaphor can also be visualized, therefore I have attempted to explore this concept visually in the following experiment. With this small tool, I aim to replicate what the Romantics might have meant by suggesting that from a tiny initial seed, a tree emerges, which takes on a new form with each act of reception. The formulas can be edited, and the recursion depth—that is, “how deeply to penetrate the structure”—can be freely determined.