Calculated Innovations

For this session of our research colloquium we welcome back guest researcher Michael Rottmann. He will talk about some of the findings and insights of his research visit at IXDM from earlier this year:

In current discourse of creativity graphical media and methods are regarded as essential. Looking back in the 1960s – an important historical period for this topic – one can diagnose a tendency towards a systematisation of innovations within the field of design. To this end especially (graphical) media and methods of mathematics, statistics and cybernetics were used. It is a crucial aspect that a parallel development can be identified in art history: Artists of Minimal-, Serial- and Conceptual Art like Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner and Frank Stella were all protagonists of constitutive discourse-based art movements, reflected their graphical practices (e. g. with diagrams) and explained their procedures and intentions. Thus, rooting this development in a case study of art history opens up important artistic analyses concerning the medial and material character of graphical media and their operative potential. Most significantly, key concepts of the discourse of creativity like „control“ were treated. When the artists explore their activities of innovation within the prearranged triangle self-media-system – which I suppose – they criticize, paradoxically, at the same time the systematisation of processes of innovation. Against this background the case study enables both new insights concerning the discourse of creativity and – because of the same historical context in a comparatistic manner – design theory. Finally it adds a new perspective on Minimal-, Serial- and Conceptual Art itself.