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Siegfried Zielinski, Ph.D Michel Foucault Chair at EGS. Chair: Media Theory (focus: Archaeology and Variantology of Media) Institute for time based media, Berlin University of Arts.
Siegfried Zielinski studied theatre arts, modern German literature, linguistics, semiotics, sociology, philosophy, and political science in Marburg and Berlin, at both the Free University and the Technical University. The major focus of his studies centred on the field of advanced technical media (radio, film, video, computers), under Friedrich Knilli, whose institute had developed out of Walter Höllerer’s Institute of Language in the Age of Technology. In the early 1970s, Siegfried Zielinski published his first essays on media studies and media critique in the journal marburger blätter and in other periodicals. While still a student in Berlin, he set up and supervised an experimental video studio.
In 1979, he was both author and director of the 16 mm documentary film Responses to HOLOCAUST in Western Germany, which was shown 1979 all over the U.S.A. in universities and Jewish communities. In the same year, he graduated with a thesis on Veit Harlan, the film director of Jud Süss, which was published as his first monograph in 1981. This was followed by a short period working as a free-lance writer, before together with Friedrich Knilli, he developed and instituted the first project-oriented study course in media consulting at the Technical University Berlin in the early 1980s. During this period, he produced with his students numerous video films, publications, and technical documentations, including on the office software for the first UNIX machines for a mass market. His Ph.D. dissertation of 1985 was On the History of the Video Recorder; his habilitation of 1989 qualified him to teach media studies at the university level.
In the same year, he received his first appointment to a full professorship in audiovisual studies at the University of Salzburg in Austria, where he set up a department for teaching, research, and production of Audiovisions, which was also the title of his first book translated into English. Exhibitions, media events, the development of the programme Artists in der Residenz (named after a famous Salzburg location), and an independent publications series were all part of his work in Austria. He also produced a series of 20 short films on the ARCHAEOLOGY OF AUDIOVISUALITY there (with Alois Pluschkowitz). During this period, he designed the programme European Summer Academy for art, film and media, in close collaboration with the film director Peter Lilienthal, the philosopher Dietmar Kamper, Eckhard Stein from Kleines Fernsehspiel (ZDF) at the Academy of Arts in Berlin.
In 1993, he was appointed Professor of Communication and Audiovisual Studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne; in 1994, he became its Founding Director and later was elected its first Rector. In mid-2001, he returned to teaching and research, focussing on history and theory, particularly the archaeology of the media.
Since January 2007 he teaches and researches at the Berlin University of Arts. He regularly gives master classes at MECAD in Barcelona, particularly for students from Latin America, teaches techno-aesthetics and media archaeology at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Saas Fee, Switzerland, where he holds the Michel Foucault professorship.
Siegfried Zielinski has published more than a dozen books and far over 150 essays, pri-marily in the areas of media history and theory. Currently he is working on a five volume book series on VARIANTOLOGY — DEEP TIME RELATIONS OF ARTS, SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGIES; vol. 1 has been edited with Silvia Wagnermaier (2005), vol. 2 with David Link (2006) and vol. 3ff. with Eckhard Fuerlus (2008). His most recent monographic book in English is entitled Deep Time of the Media — Towards an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means), which was published by MIT Press (Cambridge MA, 2006). This book was also published in Chinese and Portuguese in 2006 and is currently translated into Spanish and Russian. Before that he published in English Audiovisions — Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam University Press, 1999), which will also appear in Hungarian in 2008. Zielinski was on the editorial board of CTheory, the first electronic magazine in the Internet around the Canadian couple Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, and he co-initiated the journal Balkan Media, which was founded in 1992 in Sofia (Bulgaria) as an attempt to counter the destructive crises in the region. As of 1996, he helped to establish the Center for Communication and Culture (C3) in Budapest. He has lectured and given seminars in many countries all over the world, and his texts have been translated into many different languages (for example Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish…). Within the framework of his activities at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, he initiated and directed the annual festival Digitale [2] (1995—1999, in close cooperation with Nils Roeller), initiated and co-edited the Academy’s year-book Jahrbuch für Künste und Apparate LAB (Walther König publishers Cologne as of 1995, seven volumes had been published) and, in collaboration with Silvia Wagnermaier, established the Vilém_Flusser_Archive [3] and its own small publications series [4]. In 2008, Flusser's "Bochum Lectures" will be published by Fischer Verlag, edited by Silvia Wagnermaier and Siegfried Zielinski.
Amongst others Siegfried Zielinski is elected member of the European Film Academy (EFA) [5], the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) [6] and the Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain. At European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland, Zielinski teaches as a Professor of mediology and technoculture at the Michel Foucault Chair.
Upcoming event: New Crowned Hope-Micro-Festival at the Academy of Arts [7]
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