Technoid Realism
The technical drawing is not just the engineer’s answer to the problem of imagination, but also the market’s answer to the problem of language. The technoid equivalent to the holy spirit, although not in the sense of the pentecost polyglots, but an image to replace the word. If the babylonians already had worked according to the norms for construction drawing, technical product documentation and geometrical product specification god’s petty confusion of language would have had no effect on the tower whatsoever, as a communication about the construction according to DIN EN ISO doesn’t need any additional mediation, given that the technical drawing has been drawn correctly. The standards organizations of the world have known this for a long time. The key word is clarity or rather unambiguity: The technical drawing is monosemantic because it is monotheistic. This unambiguity is then through the diachronic inertia of language mixed up with our sense-certainty. As Marx credits the commodity with abounding metaphysical subleties and theological niceties, maybe these are not only found on the side of the fetish, where perception and interaction with the commodity create an entangled aesthetic knot, but can also be found even before anything has been produced within a powerful fantasy of unambiguity. The technical drawing asserts not only that it can be translated completely into language, but also into matter. Its influence is coextensive with the continued, ever farther reaching accumulation of capital, whose aesthetic (and epistemic) foundations it co-lays. As such the technical drawing is not a rare semiotic occurence, which would foster something like a false consciousness, but should be examined as the historical materialist condition of the possibility of the sign, understood as a relation between signifier and signified. Thereafter, the sign needs to be redrawn, its own imagery must take a step and the ontological aftereffects must be worked through.
Björn Kühn is an artist and lecturer in art for students of architecture and urban planning at the Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus-Senftenberg. He studied art at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, the University of Barcelona, and he was a member of the Independent Study Program PEI at the Museum for Contemporary Art Barcelona MACBA. He publishes useful literature made by artists through Verlag für Handbücher (Publishing House for Handbooks), which he cofounded and he creates sculptural and performative workflows for exibitions and stagings. His dissertation under the name of »Technoid Realism« discusses the aesthetic and political implications of the technical drawing.