ROUNDTABLE

To start things off, Brishty presented the filmmaker Armin Linke. In his recent works such as Phenotypes, Nuclear Voyage or Alpi he explores the relation between buildings and landscapes and the people using them. After spending years on research and the collection of material he montages a short film, that captures the essence of the specific constellation he is concerned with. The discussion dealt with issues concerning the specific angle of his films and touched on the difference between art film and documentary.

After this warm up Michaela Putz presented Bruno Latour's influential essay: Drawing Things Together. The text deals with the function of devices such as paper maps, book printing and collections. By being immutable mobiles, both static and easily transportable, they allow for comparison, exchange and dispute and therefore present a prerequisite for scientific research in the modern sense.
 

Last, but not least, Christoph Perl explained the key points of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's work on Objectivity. He reconstructed the development and shift of the meaning of objectivity as laid out in the book. While 'objectivity' up to the 19th century was considered mostly as the attempt to capture the essence of an object as it really is within, not as it looks at the surface, the concept developed more and more towards a mechanical objectivity, which would try to eliminate human interference in order to capture the specific individual object “as it is.”