Research

  • Materialism of Form
  • GRANTEE
    Benedikt Reichenbach
    GRANT YEAR
    2015

Photograph of a double page from Larissa Michelberger, Rainald Schumacher, Ingvild Goetz (ed.), Roni Horn, Ostfildern 2012, showing a double page from Roni Horn, To Place: Arctic Circles (Book VII), Denver 1998, showing Dead Owl, a photographic work by Roni Horn from 1997. Photo: Benedikt Reichenbach.

Looking at implications of production and presence of digital imagery within our built environment, the project Materialism of Form brings together a group of artists, filmmakers, and architects, all of whom have been working with forms of “the binary” as approach to their image-making. Based on a discussion of the history and form of the diptych, the project looks at formal aspects of the book, the double-page, of building with images. In light of a time past montage, with the foundations of modernism dissolving into the stillness of high definition, how may a materialist disposition be set up in terms of accessibility to creative, social, and political processes?

Benedikt Reichenbach studied at the University of Leipzig and at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, Leipzig. In 2007, he received his MA in philosophy and history with a thesis about the ban on images in the writings of Theodor W. Adorno. Since then, he has worked as a graphic designer and editor in Berlin and New York, for JRP Ringier, Sternberg Press, Birkhaeuser, Phaidon Press, and Aperture Foundation, among others. On the occasion of Harun Farocki's seventieth birthday in January 2014, he edited and designed Harun Farocki Diagrams: Images from Ten Films (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2014). Currently, he is working on an English re-edition of Pier Paolo Pasolini: Corpi e Luoghi, a book that today still is what a critic called it by the time of its original publication in 1981, the most Pasolinian book to date.