View transcript: Cosmic Miniatures: A Conversation

Cosmic Miniatures: A conversation. Alexander Kluge with Leslie Adelson, Erik Born, Sabine Haenni, Rainer Stollmann, Kizer Walker, and David Yearsley.

October 17, 2023

Transcript/translation

01: Introductions

Kizer Walker: Welcome colleagues, and welcome Alexander Kluge and your colleagues. I’m Kizer Walker. I’m Director of Collections here at Cornell University Library and curator of the website, “Alexander Kluge: Cultural History in Dialogue.” I’m delighted that we can all be here today, at least virtually, for a conversation this afternoon about a fascinating set of short films that Dr. Kluge has created under the rubric of “Cosmic Miniatures.” These films are inspired by a 2017 book by Professor Leslie Adelson of Cornell University, entitled “Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense: Alexander Kluge’s 21st-Century Literary Experiments in German Culture and Narrative Form.” It’s especially fitting that we have an opportunity to speak with both Dr. Kluge and Leslie Adelson and a group of her colleagues who serve as a scholarly advisory board of the website “Alexander Kluge: Cultural History in Dialogue.” Before we begin though with introductions, I wanted to express my sincere and deep thanks on behalf of Cornell University Library to Alexander Kluge, for providing all of the film and video material on the website, and allowing us to make it freely available around the world over the course of what is almost now a twenty-year collaboration. I also wanted specifically to thank Rainer Stollmann, one of the initiators of this project, the website project, again, nearly twenty years ago, along with the late David Bathrick. So, thank you very much, Rainer. And now, I think if we could all introduce ourselves here, starting with the local group, and then move to the online colleagues.

Leslie Adelson: I will introduce myself only by saying I’m the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies at Cornell University. I’m delighted to see you all, including I think that’s Leon in the background. Hello Leon [Kluge], nice that you could join us.

Alexander Kluge: Born in 1985, like our friend sitting at the other side.

David Yearsley: David Yearsley, Herbert Gussman Professor of Music, also an organist, mostly concerned in my scholarly life with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which I think we’ll get to maybe later in our two hours this afternoon.

Erik Born: Hi everyone, I’m Erik Born. I’m an assistant professor in the Department of German Studies, and I work on Media Studies and Medieval Studies. And I’m thrilled about our exchange and dialogue.

Sabine Haenni: Hi, I’m Sabine Haenni. I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell. I’m in Basel right now. I’ve started working on silent film, particularly immigration and silent film. I’ve also done a bit of work on animals in film, which is part of what connects me to things here. And have recently been working more on Mediterranean and cinema.

Rainer Stollmann: I’m Rainer Stollmann. I have worked with and about Alexander Kluge for, I think, now forty years. And I would like to mention in the connection with Cornell, the name of David Bathrick, who was my friend and has died two years before, and he was the initiator of the connection between Cornell, Kluge, and Bremen. He has worked a lot of time about Müller, Heiner Müller, and of course Heiner Müller and Alexander Kluge were big friends.

LA: Herr Stampfl and Barbara Barnak, would you like to introduce yourselves briefly just so your introductions are also included in the recording?

Barbara Barnak (DCTP, Düsseldorf): Yes. Hello, I’m Barbara Barnak. Some of you already know me from our visit in Princeton. I’ve worked for Mr. Kluge for over ten years now. Yeah, that’s the most you should know, I think.

Christian Stampfl (Akademie der Künste, Berlin): My name is Christian Stampfl, and I’m working for the archive and the Academy of Arts, and I’m working for a month now for Mr. Kluge.

02: Cosmic Miniatures, Future Sense & Filmic Form: “In Dialogue”

LA: Well, thank you all for being here. Herr Kluge, it is wonderful as always to see you and to be in dialogue with you. Thank you so very much for all the exciting work that you continue to create for many different audiences around the world. Thank you especially for making yourself available to talk to all of us today about the minute-film collection you have called Cosmic Miniatures, which you were kind enough to share with us a bit earlier this year. When I coined the term “cosmic miniatures” a few years ago for the book that Kizer mentioned a few minutes ago, I was focusing on your micrological experiments in literary form with cosmic motifs and narrative voice in relationship to what I called the future sense. However, the literary texts that I focused on, under the rubric of cosmic miniatures, did not rely on or even use any graphic images at all. So I’m especially interested in hearing more about what motivates your recent intensified interest in cosmic miniatures in filmic form in particular. And, specifically, I argued in my book that your literary experiments, the cosmic miniatures, challenge a dominant paradigm in European philosophy about future time. What I argued is that your micrological experiments in writing practice and cultivate the future sense for better, more livable futures, in terms of sense perception. That you make future time accessible to sensory experience. That basic intervention goes against the grain of the dominant philosophy of future time, at least in the history of European philosophy. So I’m very curious to hear more about whether you would say that the minute films that you’ve made as cosmic miniatures also work on future time as a long-distance organ of sense perception. Does this amount to work on long-distance senses? And if so, how? In 1981, when you and Oskar Negt wrote Geschichte und Eigensinn [History and Obstinacy, an abbreviated English version of which was published in 2014], you wrote very pointedly and poignantly that “the long-distance senses have never been worked on.” I argue in my book that future time is one of the long-distance senses that your cosmic miniatures in literary form work on and change. I’m wondering what you might say about the minute-films that you’ve created in terms of working on or changing sense perception.

AK: Look, long-distance senses means we live like in houses, in cottages, in our lifetime. We are inhabitants of our lifetime. And three lifetimes are three generations. This is a period of narration. The grandchildren, the Enkel, will understand narrations from each other, but real narration is longer than that. The narrative of mankind includes evolution. You could say we are 4.5 billion years old, as old as our planet. You could say so. Because certainly in ourselves wide beliefs of our conscience belong. We are children of the cosmos and of our planet, and of the development of these long-range times. So, all times are connected with each other. If we talk of millennia, of eons of times in the galaxies, this is reality, you see. Our lifetime is not a reality in concepts of the universe. It’s an exception, something improbable, but something very fine. And always connected. So, it’s the future I’m interested in, and all the past since Babel, or longer than that, as also the other side of the unknown. You cannot deal with the senses of proximity if you don’t respect the long-distance senses. And you cannot construct the house of subjectivity, in a good way, if you don’t respect what is outside. And one of these movements I do always goes to the stars and galaxies, to something we cannot touch. It’s the opposite to purely lifetime, though we belong to it. Look, I would not deal with stars if I did not know your book, for instance. And your book has nothing to do only with the stars, but also with Adorno and Critical Theory and literature. All these things are one circle, a sphere, and belong together. This is my belief. And I love the idea to cooperate with you, to have the same subject. With music, together with David for instance, with history, with languages. Music, languages, mathematics, and iconographics. Pictures. These are four main kinds of expression, and they fit together. Though it’s not usual to talk in the way of mathematicians. I don’t know anybody who is talking or making small talk in mathematics. But the cosmos obeys to mathematics. And the microstructure of our world, the quantum for instance, or something beneath the atoms also obey to mathematics. They don’t obey to languages. And they have music. Kepler, for instance, is my interest, for instance, with David together. To reconstruct the planet music of Copernicus - eh, of Kepler. And of Dr. Robert Fludd for instance, or others. Today it’s possible to measure the sound when these big planets like Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter cross the spacetime. You cannot hear it in space. But you can see how time and space is moving. This is like in film the optical sound [Lichtton].

It’s a strange way to talk in German and English at the same time, but it’s instructive. It is also dialogue. The languages are in dialogue with each other. If we would talk in a Babylonian way, we would have sixty, eighty languages at the same time. Only when the tyrants of Babel tried to unify language, and forbade all separate, all different languages, then people misunderstood each other. And then came the confusion of tongues. So I think it’s very interesting to speak in all languages we can afford.

03: Critical Theory & Public Sphere: “Building the Subjective Side”

AK: I think we should come back to these questions [on our list for discussion]. The main point is I’m a believer in Critical Theory, or a servant or the house poet of them. It is very good to give all these attempts continuation. And I think the possibility would be best across the ocean. The freedom and liberties on your side are different from the liberties we have here. We have a public sphere in danger. It is partly already disrupted. It’s not any more the public sphere of 1807 for instance, of the classic times, of the time of the foundation of the USA. It is necessary to reconstruct, always, like the Bauhaus did with practical things, with industrial products, or with house building. So it is necessary to build the subjective side.

The subjective side, the narratability of the world, our capacity for observation must be renewed again and again, like a Bauhaus, together with all those that have worked on these efforts before us, with the help of Benjamin, of Aby Warburg, of Critical Theory, and the help of Parsons as well, and also Luhmann, in cooperation across all borders while strictly preserving the various métiers. Everyone thinks differently, all the disciplines are different. And not every philosopher can read music. But conversely, as regards music, one must actually move every thought once through music, once through the languages, in their full diversity, once through mathematics, and once through images. And at every border crossing, a light comes into being. That is modern form, the task of our 21st century and it would suit us well to work, so to speak, as dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. Yes, that’s the whole point, and I would be pleased if we could get to your list as soon as possible. In order for us to get to the practical questions, so to speak, of what we can actually do. We must take lots of small steps, so that we can, in a sense, come back to these questions again and again. But the context, that is the great idol.

04: Bach’s Feet: “To the Roots and to the Stars”

AK: David, you have already begun working on this. He has written a book, “Bach’s Feet.” And I know from organ technique how warming it is, in the winter, in a cold church, to work the organ with one’s feet. That is really vigorous movement.

DY: And with your hands on the keys. Also in your pockets, there are reports of that.

AK: Yes, the hands too. Movement is polyphonic, vigorous, and establishes connection. All these things. I mention it here just as a point, because the soles of the feet, you see, feet are hidden in shoes for life, like in a prison, but really they are just as sensitive as the hand. And our ancestors in the trees learned to balance with their feet, and then to walk upright.

These are very important things and to reconstruct all of this, again and again, to go back, again and again, to the roots and to the stars, and then to incorporate that back into our image of the world, which consists of children that are born and come into the world with basic trust, always anew. They have forgotten all about the evil deeds of their ancestors. They have not yet learned how to be evil. Yes, and now there is life and education and cooperation. These are all wonderful things. But I don’t want to go on too long, I would like to hear above all from you.

I would also like to hear where we can cooperate, so that, in honor of Miriam Hansen, for example, we can, together with Ms. Haenni, honor and reconstruct the beginnings of film, and post examples on the website, for instance. And how we approach music. As far as I’m concerned, it could be an early master like Jacopo Peri. This is the earliest opera in the world and one can reconstruct it. This is eleven years before Monteverdi. The opera is about Daphne and how Apollo, this god of logic, gropes her and, petrified, she turns into wood. But not just any wood, according to Ovid, but wood whose leaves do not wilt. This is the origin of the laurel tree in the whole Mediterranean region. From an instance of rape. This is something really wonderful: the metamorphosis of something vile, cruel, evil, like what this god does to Daphne, into something beneficial, which however is no help to Caesar. The laurel wreath on his head does not protect him from death, precisely because it comes from rape. And this perpetual storytelling from the roots, storytelling about future perspectives, about where the story is going, and at the same time making storytelling altogether more diverse. That is our task.

05: Narration, Music, Film, Algorithm: “Die Schwächen der Aktualität”

LA: You are speaking now of language and storytelling. In the first minute-film on the most recent list, “The Original Sound of the Planet Uranus and the Song of the Gorillas,” as far as I can remember, there is no language and also no storytelling. So this particular film works differently, doesn’t it?

AK: Yes, it works differently, but it is also just one – it is a film, and there are texts, there is even a whole book called Kong’s … “Kong’s Finest Hour.” Yes. A gorilla, right? You have to understand, these books and the films, in my case, form a unit. Yes, unfortunately I am not a composer; in that sphere I can only act as a servant; otherwise I would give that a try as well. Fundamentally, we should do what our heads are indeed capable of, which is to work in all times, with all forms of storytelling. The subjunctive mood is no less important than the indicative. The indicative is only real and current when it includes the past tenses and the future tense – and the future perfect as well. What will I have been if I do this or that, you see? That is a very important dramatic form. It doesn’t occur in everyday practice. I’ve never heard it on the evening news. Yes, and these are the errors, the weaknesses of currency. The current moment needs to be charged again and again with all the other times. One of my films is called “The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time,” that is, the attack of currency on all other times, and we are the defenders of all other times, against their curtailment by the current moment. That is one of the forms of this Bauhaus of experience.

But I don’t want to spend too much time laying this all out, because of course we can’t do it all. We can take only small steps, but we should choose what these are as soon as possible. Then they will come about in due course. Above all, I harbor the silent hope that, if a website like this one expands a bit more, it will be emulated. Richard Langston will emulate it. In Germany, in France, there will be people who will emulate something like this. And that is the counter-algorithm; it is part of the counter-algorithm to the merely simplified algorithms that the Big Five create. An algorithm is a good thing, it’s a machine, a good tool, but it requires a counter-machine. Yes, that’s what the dialectic tells us, whether we’re talking about the book on dialectics or practical dialectics. It’s really nothing special. Yes, and we could take “The Original Sound of the Planet Uranus and the Song of the Gorillas,” for example, and post it on the website. And that is truly… I was astonished that the jagged lines look like the optical sound strip in film, and one can hear them. And I have to tell you, I can… well, Cage would be enthusiastic, you know? And the tone of the planet Uranus can be clearly distinguished from that of Saturn. And the most beautiful tone of all that I know is that of the ex-planet Pluto. It was deposed as a planet, but it has the most interesting tone. Yes, and Mercury chirps like a little bird. So, in other words, this is truly, really music, and it is constantly changing. It is not one tone.

06: Himmelshunde, Jacobins & Digital Age: “Was die Natur für Töne hat”

Now let’s take the next one, “We Dogs of the Heavens.” This is an act of mourning for the little dog Laika. I am shaken to this day. This was a stray dog, a Siberian stray from Moscow that was particularly robust and bold. She allowed herself to be trained and trusted that she would be brought back by her people. And they left her in the lurch in space and she died a miserable death. And, I feel, why not have a funeral for her and play funereal music?

And “The Jacobins in a Balloon on a Flight to the Moon,” that’s the film, a short film, that follows the film about the abaric point that I spoke about recently with Mr. Born. Yes, and “The Galactic Year” is something very interesting, the fact that the dinosaurs saw the Milky– the center of the Milky Way from the other side, that is, 250 million years ago, our sun with all the planets and heavenly bodies, and moons, was on the other side of the galaxy. That’s the way it was some 250 million years ago. A brief moment, from the perspective of the universe, but for the ants, a long road. Things like this are all metaphors that we must keep in circulation. Because they are real.

“The Beautiful is Flawless,” flawless beauty, that is another expression I got from Leslie Adelson. And “Dawn of the Digital Age,” that is a horrific perspective, but true. On the third day of a Third World War, all the heavy ships, all the heavy warships, from all sides, are at the bottom of the sea, and we could just as well say that digitality will have disappeared. But we will start over with paper files, notepads, and pencils. Those are the six films [a seventh has been added]. And in the meantime, there is a corresponding film– I have made a three-part film in the meantime that is new– it will be finished in November. And we could, Kizer Walker, perhaps put it [on the website] next to the film about the year 1929. Yes? It contains, in the first part, “Speedways of Light” and everything about light. Yes, because light is also a different reality, but when we say “Enlightenment,” that contains the word “light,” doesn’t it? And at the beginning of the Enlightenment, we have Franklin, ambassador in Europe, cofounder of the USA, and inventor of the lightning rod. And he is a relative of Lichtenberg, who developed the Lichtenberg figures, traces of lightning captured on glass, and then 100 years later we have electric light, Edison, the International Exposition, then at some point the Osram bulb, which, imported to Siberia, leads to literacy in Russia after 1917. Yes, of course these are all perspectives. And digitality is also derived from light. That’s the first part of the film, and the second part consists of animals, that is, astrobiology, and today this really exists as a science. Although no one has ever been able to film an alien animal on another planet, a great deal is known, by now, about the presence of life beyond the earth. And the likelihood that we are all there is… [slim]

07: Gorilla Song, Planetary Music & the Cosmic Bestiarium of Film: “Weil wir Menschen amphibisch sind”

RS: Alexander, may I interrupt here and pose a question about the planet Uranus? The sound of the planet that you alluded to? Is it made for our ears, that is to say, has it been translated, or does it really sound like that?

AK: It really sounds like that. These are recordings made by NASA and ESA and ESO. They are original recordings made by satellites, and they precisely record the oscillation curves of the heavenly body as it breaks through spacetime. This tone really exists, and it is recorded in the form of– just as what we are saying here is recorded, as oscillation. And we can translate it back again, one to one; it’s no different from an optical sound strip or some other acoustic oscillation that one can transl– it is not translated; rather one can hear it if one has the proper equipment.

RS: Yes, but I couldn’t hear it with my ear, so to speak, if I were to stick that ear out of a spaceship.

AK: No, because outer space is soundproof. But only because there is no transmitter. The noise is there, the sound is there. It’s there, but it is not transmitted in airless space.

LA: There are electromagnetic waves, I believe, or oscillations, but no air, which one needs in order to actually hear the sound.

AK: Yes, but if you put a film in the projector, you can’t hear anything at first, but when you start the optical sound, which is nothing other than an electromagnetic recording, then you hear the film sound.

DY: And is it your intention to draw a comparison between, let’s say, noise or music and the songs of the gorillas and this sound, so to speak, or is it that– I know that understanding is not the point here, but I wanted to make this connection somehow…

AK: This is a proposition, right? I don’t know the songs of the gorillas, but they are said to exist. Gorilla researchers tell us this. Now I could vary it and say that elephants, for instance, communicate intensively with each other by means of very deep tones that they hear, more or less, with their feet. And you know how it is with whales. It is very interesting how many different sounds nature has besides the sound of the sea. There are animal species that are unmusical, but some are excessively musical.

RS: But you write “Song of the Gorillas” over a medieval music manuscript.

AK: Just a moment – that is a notation of Kepler’s about the music of the planets that you see there. He stud– that is to say, he notated the music of the planets. This is not geometric. He wanted to do it according to geometrical considerations, according to measurement, you see? But he doesn’t get much beyond the elliptical form of the planetary orbits. Well, he researched these in any case and for that reason he borrows from Plato, from Fludd. Doctor Fludd writes an infuriated review, to which Kepler, in turn, replies with his “Apologia Doctor Kepleri.” It is a furious battle around [1610, 1612] and so on between the two of them, between Oxford and Prague, pivoting on the question: What is the right recording method for the planets? Yes, and in the meantime we are at a point where we can really measure this, and we can also measure other heavenly bodies, for instance, such as neutron stars, which rotate around each other very fast. And they can– one can convert this very precisely into tones. They also sound very, very interesting and are, it’s important to note, not uniform. That is to say, they have, well, what stories they tell, I can’t tell you, but I can say in any case that the sounds are different, and one can listen to such recordings for three hours without ever hearing the same thing twice. I put this here just to introduce something unfamiliar, you see? And above all, to honor Kepler.

SH: Can I ask a question about the gorillas? Or more specifically, the cosmos in your work is a bestiary, and I find that quite exciting, because I come from film, and film history, as Akira Lippit has said, early cinema is “haunted” by animals. Animals were there from the beginning, very prominently, so that the studios, since, well, in 1912, William Selig built a zoo, because that went along with running a studio. And the MGM lion… Somehow the cosmos, and space travel, and animals expand the sensorium, if you will, so cinema needs that in order to alter sense perception. And that’s why I found the minute-film about the dogs of the heavens so fascinating, because it’s told from the perspective of the dogs: “WE dogs of the heavens.” Is this just a matter of animals as a counterpoint to human beings, or is it significant that there are so many different types of animals? Dogs that become more and more robotic, but also the fabulous creatures of Rabelais that appear again and again, especially beyond the Milky Way. Does this help– Is this a type of “future sense”? I guess that was my question. Does this help us have new visions?

AK: Well, just now I am working on a project, writing texts and making films about animals, but not because I’m an animal lover, but rather because we human beings are amphibious. By half, we are still part of evolution, still actually animals, right? Our intestines are more animal than anything one could call particularly civilized. And over these parts that belong to evolution, a modernity of the civilized human being has overlaid itself, but we have not become a fully civilized human being. We are instead like Chiron, who is after all a god and a brother to Zeus. Chiron has the body of an animal, with the head and upper body of a human, and was the best physician of Antiquity. The teacher of Asclepius, and the teacher of Jason and all of Homer’s heroes.

And Adorno, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, in a prominent passage in which he discusses intelligible character in Kant, says: We humans could actually tell ourselves to always act in such a way that one can say of you that you have been a good animal. He says that, all the way to the process of reasoning, all the way to the power of imagination, to logic as well, all of this derives from attributes originally stemming from evolution, you see? A dog’s sense of smell is represented in our brains by the parts that produce imagination, the association center. So we smell images, yes? The capacity to visualize. These are all things that, if we dismount for a moment from the high horse of Decartes, who said it’s either an animal or a human being, and if we trust in Spinoza or Leibniz, then we will say that we are double-beings. Yes, and one part of us is still in the animal kingdom. Well, you won’t find lions inside us, but you will find animal traits in us that have been refined.

Take snakes, for instance. They hear with their jaw. I once made a film about this. They lay their jaw down on the sand and they can hear their prey from far away. They hear the rhythm, the scratching sounds of movement coming, the ground vibrations, and this jawbone migrates all the way to our ear. There it forms the ossicle of the ear – I’m not the one saying this, science tells us this – and this tiny bone can determine balance, languages and music. And also has the capacity to distinguish danger and can, for example, help children to clearly distinguish whether someone means them well or not; children can do this by assessing the tonality in someone else’s speech. That is to say, the ear is a sophisticated organ, seven times more intelligent than the eye. The ear is able to perceive 360 distinctions per second, while the eye can only really perceive sixteen distinctions per second, then that’s it. And all of these things, it seems to me, belong to the interior design of the human being. We dwell within these traits, and if we respect their origins, that is, the equipment of the hunter, the eye of the hunter tracking his quarry, the human predator, right? And at the same time it is also Goethe’s eye, so to speak; it can have a sparkle, it can also give a forgiving look.

Well, I suppose I got carried away in answering your question, because I believe if we admit in which points we descend from animals and are internally related to them, that would essentially lend more balance to the distinction between the senses and reason. Immanuel Kant says these are the two trunks of cognition, reason and the senses, and they don’t understand each other at all. The senses tell you, that dog is a Pekinese, the other one is a Saint Bernard, Kant says – they aren’t the same. So actually the senses would not say, as reason and language can: Dog. And yet, at the same time, we can… This is what he calls the schema of understanding. And in Greek, “schema” means form, dance step. The dance step of the spirit mediates between the senses and reason, and that is the power of imagination. And this power of imagination makes it possible for human beings to understand the foreign, the other, that which they are not. And that does indeed distinguish them from animals. To act on this, that is actually our task. And it would be nice– film has contributed a great deal in this regard. And the movie camera, for instance, is more astute than I am– I always observed this as a director – it records things that I only noticed on the editing table. It can look in a better, more exact way. It isn’t intelligent, but it is a tool of intelligibility.

08: Stable Diffusion, Warburg Commentary & Revolutionary Intelligence: “den Konjunktiv der Bilder aufnehmen”

LA: Could you tell us perhaps a bit about how you produce, concretely, these latest minute-films, these Cosmic Miniatures? Is it all done in the studio?

AK: All in the studio. I have a piece of machinery there called Stable Diffusion, which can do what the film camera cannot: record the subjunctive of images. I must do this cautiously, but every image has the potential, that is to say, has potential. Every image has not only the moment in which it is fixed; it also has a before, an after, and so on. These are things which I, as an observer, cancel out again and again, by the way. I have an image of Kennedy lying dead in the car, that is, he’s just been shot In this example I don’t imagine only that image, but also what came before, what came after, and this Stable Diffusion camera can provide commentary on this. It can make assumptions about such things. It does this– but it too is just a tool, it’s not intelligent, but it is extremely helpful for every intelligence. Yes, and that’s why I would say that if we expand our concept of intelligence, as Mr. Born also suggests, then we can say that sea jellies have an intelligence, it’s just not ours. They don’t even have a head, but they are more sensitive, in some respects, than we are. And so there are, so to speak, traces of intelligence, in living organisms that go well beyond our human habits. And if we attend to this, then we could indeed expand our capacities for perception.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now, we should start by saying that these initial six miniatures could already be added [to the website] with the ultimate goal of adding the full 90-minute film, which will be subtitled by November and would be ready to go in February. If that could be done…there aren’t many titles, not many subtitles, and then we would basically… That doesn’t change anything in terms of also including the miniatures separately, because “The Original Sound of the Planet Uranus” isn’t in the long film, and neither is “The Jacobins” or “The Galactic Year.” So that would be one option, for example, and then, if I could make a request, the other option would be that one could… The commentaries on Warburg that are currently on exhibit at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, that show goes till February, and after that, one could also– well, actually one could take them on here and very carefully expand them. Because what we are talking about now is not the same thing as long-distance senses; rather we are now talking about narrative in iconography. Images do not talk with one another in the way books talk with one another. Images are mainly not discursive, but they have– one can build them into a discursive context, in the manner of a constellation. That is what Aby Warburg does, and he does it from Babylon up to the year 1929; then he died. Yes, but it is incredibly insightful, the way he moves from Antiquity, viewed from the perspective of sacrificial divination and coming from astrology, then makes an arc over the Renaissance up to, as I said, 1929, to Panel 77, where he includes advertisements such as “Eat More Fish!” and a golf champion who swings his club like an executioner who wants to chop off a head or like the friend of the samurai that Warburg also places in the same Mnemosyne Atlas. And he alerts us to these connections.

KW: Dr. Kluge, you and I had spoken a little bit about the Warburg material that you’ve been working on, specifically about the commentary that you did on Tafel C, on Panel C of the Atlas. I think there are some connections, both formally and thematically, between that little film and the film about the Jacobins, the “Jakobiner im Ballon.”

AK: You are right. Completely right.

KW: I wondered if we might talk a little bit about that. I think, on that Atlas Panel C, Warburg is tying together Kepler, talking about the orbit of the planet Mars, and about Mars in myth and astrology, and his influence, his warlike influence. And puts that together with the airship, with the Zeppelin, right?

AK: Right.

KW: And I think you pull out, I think, that sort of military connection to the Zeppelin, in the film commentary. You mentioned before, when you were speaking, Franklin, and the connection between Franklin and light and Enlightenment. Franklin and electrification. Franklin, I believe, was also, when he was in Paris, was at one of the first demonstrations of a hot air balloon, of the launch of a hot air balloon in Paris.

AK: You are completely right. It’s not by chance that the balloon–conquering the air–is concretely possible.

KW: Could you talk about a kind of dialectic of enlightenment there? The hot air balloon is both about exploration and overview, but it also immediately has a military purpose, right? It’s immediately used for aerial reconnaissance in the wars following the French Revolution, all the way through the American Civil War and even after that. Is that the right way to think about that little one-minute film about the Jacobins? I mean, it seems to be, you have both the Jacobins, and then you have, there seem to be Soviet cosmonauts in some far future, so a sort of unrealized revolution in space. Could you say more about all of that, that cluster?

AK: The sans-culottes, ja? The new human of the great French Revolution is convinced that humans can do everything. They are omnipotent. It’s not true that they are, you see, it’s only imagination, which belongs to this French Revolution. By the way, they invent the circus, the winter circus. Animals have to do the impossible, what they cannot do by nature. For instance, for the elephants to stand on one foot; this they perform in the circus, against nature. The dompteur puts his head in the mouth of the lion. That’s exactly what the sans-culottes want to show. This is the same as conquering the air. This development goes up to Napoleon when he wanted to conquer Great Britain. He wanted to do it by an air bridge. Thousands of balloons with his soldiers in them. Always three soldiers and one balloon were supposed to cross the Channel. Very strange pictures. This belongs to a clear description of the great French Revolution. Not everything of this feeling of omnipotence is good. If it is used with too patriotic a tool like the guillotine, I hate the idea. To work like a factory, we might say, patriots cutting the neck. It’s also the same idea like making circus, like making balloons, to do the impossible. Both are fantasies. To be dominant in the world, this is the bad side. And there are so many good sides, you see. We have to describe both sides.

09: Beyond Star Wars: Exit Strategies?

EB: I could ask a question following up on this. We were talking a little bit about the ways that your films present different stories than the ones we normally hear about, speculative fiction and science fiction. I think in particular the two main stories we always hear are the space race and Star Wars. And I’m thinking in particular, some of the models that you draw on, so nonhuman space exploration and also the “Space Pilot Pirx.” These are different stories from what we’ve often heard about space exploration. I’m curious. What kind of story do you think we need to tell about humanity and the future to get beyond these models of the Star Wars and military competition, which we see in the “Dawn of the Digital Age” film? Or maybe beyond the space race and technological competition. Do we need a different form of story, different characters and protagonists? I’m wondering how can we imagine a future without war and oppression and all the issues that we’re dealing with in the present.

AK: I don’t know everything, you see. But I think we have a simple question. If we ever would destroy our planet, by war, you see, a war like 1914, we could manage [to do] this very easily. In this case, it would be a good idea to have an exit. And this question is perhaps the second planet of Jupiter, which consists of an ocean, a huge ocean. This ocean is warm because Jupiter is so turbulent, moving the waters, that these waters are not so cold, like they should be in space. Therefore, this might be, if we ever could manage to come there, a rescue for mankind. For my grandchildren. Yes, it’s only an idea, it’s only thinking, what I do, you see? It’s nothing practical. But it’s not so far away from a very bad man, like he who governs the moment in the Big Five, from the private space enterprises. He knows quite a lot, you see. He’s a dwarf Columbus [heading] to the stars. I would not be surprised in twelve years if we could pose this question as something practical. And I’m sure that conflict justice like we have in the moment in the Near East, in the Pacific, and in Eastern Europe at the same time–if you have somebody like Prigozhin, you could have others who are adventurers. You cannot foresee what will happen and therefore, it’s a very interesting question Kant would put to us, Immanuel Kant. Where to go outside our planet.

DY: Of course, If we can’t get along on this planet, why would we get along on any other planet?

AK: I have my doubts whether we could go to one of our other planets. But to some moons, it would be possible. Titan is a very interesting candidate, you see? Yes, it’s like our earth in medieval, geological medieval times, 500 years ago, I mean, 500 million years ago.

10: Astrophysics, Anachronism & Anticolors: The Task of Relativity

LA: One of the things that has always characterized your work in literature and film, or other media too, is that you don’t actually paint visions of a better future, you don’t portray utopias, but rather your artistic work practices the expansion of sensory and cognitive capabilities for imagining and making better futures without telling us exactly what those better futures should or must be. You’ve mentioned so many different topics today, and I’m thinking still of what you said about dogs in response to Sabine’s question and your invocation of Adorno and Critical Theory. And I’m reminded that Adorno was also very interested in and fond of dogs, and in Minima Moralia, he writes in the episode “Great and small” about a dog doing its business on the street. And the dog for Adorno is especially significant and helpful in reminding us of the difference between what’s important and what’s not important. What’s important, which may or may not be small in size or may or may not be large in size. But how to differentiate between things that matter and things that don’t matter so much. But Adorno also uses the word anachronistic to describe the capacity of the dog, in “Great and small,” to tell the difference between what’s important and what’s not. Because you mentioned astrobiology earlier, and I know you’re very interested in these new developments in astrobiology in science, I’m reminded of the fact that your work has always been riddled with the history and technology of astrophysics. Now we live in an age where quantum theory in astrophysics is much more real than it was twenty years ago. One question I have for you in how you think about the relationship between the somatic and the possible is whether anachronism as a concept is itself anachronistic today. Because all times, we might say, co-exist at the same time. That’s what you were talking about at the beginning of our discussion today also. All times are bound up with each other. All times are simultaneously present.

AK: Exactly. Exactly. And even if you come to the Planck length and the Planck time, yes? This is very tiny, very short time, you see. These are the reality. I’m sure that perhaps vivid entities, intelligent entities, in this moment just arrived on Earth. But if they do it in Planck length, nobody would notice them and they would not notice us. It can go through the head of– the brain of an American president without touching. Relativity is not only in physics, it’s also in thinking. And this relativity is our task, you see. To make understandable that while we are talking here, things on Planck length exist too. Or if you take the three colors. Atom: In the atomic dimension, you see, you have the three quarks, named according to Joyce, and these are called the three colors. They bear the strong–the strongest power. The strong reciprocal effect. They are linked. And if you could bring them one to Vladivostok, the other to Paris, you can light up whole Europe with the energy. They want to come home, to come together again. This is the strong reciprocal effect, the strongest power in space–in the world. This is very tiny. This is called colors and has anti-colors. Nobody has ever seen anti-colors. It’s very interesting. And it’s real, you see? It’s not so that I imagine this, you see? Because it exists with more reality even than we ourselves. And such things– an astrophysicist or a physicist– he treats these things daily. This is a reason why I believe that the direct contact of science and politics is something marvelous. The details are completely different and should not be hybrid and not be mixed; but the skin of the one and the other. This is sensible, that is, sensitive. Where the contact is, at the interface, this is called the Separatrix, according to Leibniz. The Separatrix: something is separated, then there are empathies of one in the other. Extremely intensive. At the interface of opposites, of the irreconcilable, that is where the ties and the inventions and the associations of nature are strongest. We have chance as an ally in this case, Leibniz says. And the poetics of the world of chance is still unwritten, yes?

LA: You have been working for decades on this yourself.

11: Grief & Critical Perspectives on Heroism & War: The Labor Power of Somatic Intelligence

AK: Yes, but let us get back to our lovely list. Because the devil, but also our opportunities, are in the details. And here we have, I read, “Humor and Heroism.” I could also say, “Humor and War.” And we need psychological help, a kind of grotesque narration, to deal with war. Because for example I notice that I no longer want to think about war, it repulses me, and therefore I am not a good observer. I need, for instance, to draw from Rainer Stollmann, and I have to seize on Rabelais or Eulenspiegel, like sustenance, in order to gain a perspective from which one can still tell a story about war. I can’t deal with it diametrically, in a direct way. I need an indirect approach, so that my libidinal economy comes along as I observe. And there is, for example, a certain point in narration that stands, without which I cannot tell a story about a thing. And of course I cannot tell the thing itself at all in narrative.

RS: I think it was Erik who mentioned or who asked if we need a different perspective compared with the majority of science fiction films. I had the feeling that Alexander’s film is another perspective. I never had such a strong feeling about the official pictures and the official attitude concerning space and space research that it is heroistic as when I saw the films of Alexander Kluge. Because not any detail here is heroistic; the use of the images of all these animals excludes a heroistic perspective. Also, I had the feeling that… that the dominant feeling in these films was anti-heroistic, in the sense that they contain a great deal of sorrow. Pirx is a sorrow video, Laika is a sorrow video, and on the other hand, as you just explained, Alexander, from the perspective of the universe, we are all animals, so to speak. And yet the animals that you portray appear very human. I have never seen such a human gorilla as Frau Mimi. And even the dogs in their spacesuits have human traits. And I have the suspicion that this strange, this bizarre object in which everything takes place in the first video, “The Original Sound of the Planet Uranus,” that this is actually Earth, and that this is perhaps also a response to Kubrick’s black monolith.

AK: Yes. I can’t rule it out.

Now I’m interested, Kizer Walker, how could we put, if we have one new series concerning cosmic miniatures, and then on the other hand a series together with David on music, you see? And then on intelligence – coming from film, coming from the invention of this youngest kind of art. My film is 128 years old. Perhaps since Muybridge. Like the Olympiad, the modern Olympiad. It’s very young. Painting is 40,000 years old. From cave painting… deriving. And film is completely new and a youngster, still a little bit wild, you see? And coming from there, I would be very interested to study together with you, Mr. Born, different kinds of intelligence. The intelligence of cats is different from– by the way, cats in space are better navigators than dogs. But they don’t obey humans. They don’t obey at all, they don’t understand discipline. Therefore you can’t use them. And all of these kinds of intelligence, it’s worthwhile to study them. And this would be– But it needs an amount of minutes in our website, and action from both sides. You have to put something there, I have to put something there, you see? And so, then we have music, intelligence, and film history, and with Haenni, Sabine Haenni, we have the possibility narration in film, in media. I don’t love sound film. I love film muet, silent film. This is my favorite. Because the pictures behave independently – more independently. They are not governed by theater. And by talk. Therefore, Miriam Hansen taught me to follow this interest and to make as many films, silent films with music – we could do this now. This is also the idea, the type of minute-films comes from the film of 1902, as you know, that’s the earliest kind of film, because they had no possibility from the industry to have more than one minute for one piece. But on the other hand, I also think it is necessary to make very long contexts, to be thorough. Our media– nowhere are our media thorough. The principle of commentary. You could say, art is– I can say it only in German: Lyrik, Dramatik, Epik [lyric, drama, epic], AND you could say critique. But better to say: comment. Commentary, you see? Because the commentary – all the others are in length, linear. And the commentary is vertical. It’s like a mine – like mining, like a catacomb, like a well. This kind of narration is the start of all universities in the 12th century. The universities were founded from so-called commentaries. This means juridic scholars who dissolved the corpus juris and made comments, commentaries. This theology took over from Bologna to Paris, and also made commentaries. And then the seven free liberal arts started to make commentaries. Since the 18th-century, Enlightenment, it’s again completely linear. A dwarf is not linear. It is subterranean. The exits are not found always on the line. And so– I’m not against linearity. But we should add non-linear methods. All mathematicians know that the root from minus one is always more than seventeen. That is, the root of minus one is always multiple digits. There are the – well, the imaginary numbers, which were already known in the 18th century. Imaginary numbers are not imaginary, it’s just that one cannot touch them or see them. Yes, but now let us get back to these lovely sentences. We’ve already mentioned Warburg. And “constellation and montage” is likewise something upon which one could found an entire school.

And intelligence: cognitive, somatic, military, digital, virtual. It’s very important because somatic intelligence, this is, for instance, the diaphragm, the capacity to laugh. It’s a very rebellious organ. If there is an authority that behaves in the wrong way, you will laugh. You cannot stand it. This is a gift, you see? I believe in the diaphragm. The ears I already mentioned. The ear is more intelligent than even the brain – though it is within the brain of course. And so on and so on. Look, [pointing to his finger], this is the gift. Apple noticed that it is special to stretch, that is, to stroke, to touch, for operating a device. It is a very old capacity, 800,000 years or much more. There is a special intelligence coming from children of our ancestors who gripped into the neck, into the hair of their mothers when flight is necessary… When flight is necessary, the child of our animal ancestors clings to the mother’s fur, a gratifying feeling, and this is how labor and the knowledge of the fingertip arise, not in the interest of police work, but from desire, from the origin of desire. And the origin of desire is to be rescued by the mother in a moment of danger. Well, what I’m saying isn’t necessarily true, but it is a proposal, a metaphor.

LA: You’ve been talking about the ear and the finger. So these are different modes or involve different modes of sense perception. And I wonder if we could get back to the role that the visual plays in the minute-films, the cosmic miniatures that we all foregrounded for today’s discussion. Because I’m also reminded that you spoke a lot in today’s conversation about light, which is also related to vision and Enlightenment, which has a very complicated real history and legacy very disputed today. Not everyone recognizes Enlightenment – the historical Enlightenment – as necessarily a good thing in the world. But I’m also thinking about the fact that astrophysics has played such an important role in your work on cosmic motifs. I noticed that Fritz Zwicky, for example, shows up briefly in the long film that you made, also called cosmic miniatures. And Zwicky was a real astrophysicist from Switzerland, I believe, who worked in California. He coined the term supernova. I think he was also the first astrophysicist to talk about dunkle Materie, dark matter, what we can’t see. I’m wondering if maybe you could pick one of the minute-films on our list to talk about a specific scene or moment in the film in the way that you worked with what can be seen and what can’t be seen. Just to help us get a very detailed sense of the way that these cosmic miniatures work, in visual terms, for you.

AK: You can’t see most of the energy in space. The negative energy, contrary to gravity, moves all galaxies with a strong power that expands, going to– expanding space. Very strange, yes? And I’m very curious. But, look, my main interest is the humans, our experience in lifetime. This is my main interest. But you cannot deal with it if you don’t accept what is outside. It’s not that I’m interested in science fiction alone. I’m interested in cosmic miniatures because it has to do with practical questions of our… the organization of our inner constitution, that is to say, it is really always labor power – working power – and its political economy that is of burning interest to me. But one cannot describe an object just by staring at it. One has to get to its counterpole, which is not within the purview of our labor power, and that is the untouchable universe – up to now, at least. That is, one cannot touch it, and labor and our lives are something we can touch.

12: Cosmic Miniatures & Film Poetics: Constellations & Intensities

LA: I’m wondering if we could come back to the minute-films themselves, the cosmic miniature films. And maybe also if you could say a little bit about the longer film version that we haven’t studied as closely. I don’t know if everyone on the board has been able to see it yet. But it’s striking that you have chosen to create a 90-minute film that you’re also calling Cosmic Miniatures. It’s not just an edition of the minute-films that you’ve sent. Some of the minute-films are not included in the long version. And you have described the long version to me as an “abendfüllenden Film” [a film that fills an evening] which is also – it’s a temporal notation, abendfüllend, it has to do with time and experience. I’m wondering what you yourself see as the relationship. I think it’s clear that we do intend to put the long Cosmic Miniatures film and some of the short ones on the website. But can you say a little bit about how you see the relationship between the long version and the short versions?

AK: Content changes character – the information – and the poetics change the contents, if you make a long film. Take as an example the film, I’m very proud, Kizer Walker, that you put the Eisenstein selection, “News from Ideological Antiquity,” into the Cornell collection. Your version is, I think, five hours long, but the real, original film is nine and a half hours long and only in the French state collection. This is a constellation you cannot make with minute-films, but the complete film is made by minute-films together with more extended material. Intensive Landwirtschaft und extensive Landwirtschaft; intensified agriculture and extensive. Extensive means you have… To keep livestock, I need extensive agriculture: lots of land. And hothouses are the opposite, right? And the two together are a good method. And in the case of film, this is like the fluctuation between films that fill an evening, or even longer films, ten-hour films – and the minute-film. Minute-films are especially mobile.

For instance, David, in the opera house, in the intermission, I put mini-operas. Eight such films. You change– you give a good commentary to Verdi or Bellini or Wagner, it’s always different. And this you could not do with a 100-minute film. Or you could not compete with an opera house if you made a ten-hour film. You cannot be longer than Richard Wagner. And therefore, the kind of constellation, the complete meaning is different if you have a long version. The constellation is different. And all content, everything you put as picture or sound, or whatever, will be changed by the kind of constellation. The chance of the minute-film is, if you have a triptych, it is much too fast to be understood the first time. It is good to see it once more and then you see a quite different film. You can do that as many as ten times. Then you will have made, as a spectator, new films from the same material. It is a good kind of montage. You couldn’t do it by linear montage, because then you will be overwhelmed and think you have understood everything if you saw it once. But a good film, like a good piece of music, you get to know if you have heard it several times or seen it several times. A good piece of music, you have to hear ten times, and you have to have a good reason. I learned from Luigi Nono and Michael Gielen taught me to make opera films in this way, that you have, for instance, the second scene of the third act of Götterdämmerung [Twilight of the Gods]. This is when Siegfried meets the daughters of the Rhine. Wagner started to compose anew after his Tristan opera, his Meistersänger, and so on. After twenty years, he interrupted his composition of the Ring des Nibelungen in Siegfried, and he started from anew with this scene. It is eight minutes long. And Nono taught us, first make it with piano alone, then with piano and singers, then with orchestra exercising, then with orchestra perfect, to give a reason to the listener to see it ten or twelve times, and then he gets this complicated music of Wagner. And then Nono taught me, take only the Mittelstimmen, how do you say that in English?

DY: Inner voice.

AK: Well, you have the bass, you have the soprano, and you have the inner voices. In the orchestra, the cellos, the violas, the kettledrum, or the brass. And you find out that Wagner is a genius in the detail. He’s not a genius when he paints poster scenes [Plakatmalerei], if he makes the whole, you see? The more intention he has… The more intentions he has, the worse his music becomes. And inadvertently he is a genius – and that’s what he is in the inner voices. And if, instead of playing the whole thing with 196 members of the orchestra, you hear just the inner voices, then you notice a highly nuanced weave; you have never heard anything like it. And these variations become commentaries: performing commentary. You perform it twelve times with different aspects, and in the end you love this piece.

13: “Mein Atlas” — Experiments with ADO

RS: Alexander, does this film exist or was it a project?

AK: It exists, it exists. This is a project that I did, but has not been published.

RS: That would be something.

AK: My atlas, this is my atlas, Rainer. I have an atlas, I worked on it every Saturday, Sunday for thirty years with my collaborators, and made things like this.

RS: I mean, I would really like to hear this. I think that would be a nice project, also for the website.

AK: Well, OK, then I would need to look for it and put it together. But the secret is, I have to give the spectator a reason to watch it multiple times. He must be convinced that he sees something different every time.

KW: Dr. Kluge, you just said something really intriguing. You mentioned your atlas. Can you say more about that?

AK: Well, look… It’s called ADO, Ampex Digital Optics. This was an instrument in early digitalization from Sony. It’s only the name of a machine. And I made, every four weeks, 120 minutes. This is a cassette. And I have 280 of these cassettes. And from this ADO, I edit in the moment, atlas. I don’t take everything, you see, because it will be too long. But I take… it’s an excerpt… of these ADOs, the fair copy, so to speak, and this is now at 63. It’s now in 110 minutes or 100 minutes cassettes. This is experimental. Mr. Stampfl knows what it is, and he will collect it in the archive. And Barbara [Barnak] knows it too. But it’s not for… It’s for filmmakers, you see? One experiment after the other. You cannot do this, you cannot make experiments in TV.

LA: So are there elements from your atlas archive that are in the Cosmic Miniatures films?

AK: I don’t know. I have to try to find out. But only one or two still pieces, because I have a lot of essais [attempts]. Yes! There is one scene in “Space Pilot Pirx.” This is taken from the atlas. If you see, with an analog method, the picture is anti-realist, it is breathing, for instance, like this, you see? Then it comes from the atlas.

LA: Very interesting.

KW: Thank you.

AK: Because to put something before the lens. It’s strange. For instance… if I take this [little scrap of paper] for instance, the color, and put it before the lens, outside the center, then it gives a color, And it disturbs the picture. The picture gets a special character you cannot find in reality. Such things. You cannot explain it with words because it’s too complicated for that. I should show you and send you some examples or give you access. Put something of it to Mr. Stampfl and he can transfer it to you. if you want to have a look at it.

KW: Please do. We’d be really interested to see that. It would, I think, help us understand your process in a good way.

AK: Yes. But these are not films, these are experiments, you see? You can make films from it.

14: “The Transatlantic Bridge”—Making Things Fluid Again

AK: Okay. I’m very happy to have this conversation, and I wish that it might be possible that, Kizer Walker, you and me, and separately you, Leslie, we have had already good talks. We should repeat it. Mr. Born, it was very nice on Monday to exchange and give always ideas. With David, I have already some experience and some exchange. With Sabine Haenni, I think it’s great expectations. See, I would love to cooperate, and if you ever send something to us, we will answer. Then we could put it into… if there’s no place in Cornell, we have space in Barbara’s DCTP TV. This is a very nice digital station. You know it, I think?

SH: Yes, of course.

AK: But the transatlantic bridge is something different, you see? It’s not only a collection of something, but the basis for two differences who talk with each other, who correspond. And I think, I hope, that this will function. If I were seventeen years old, I would know what we do.

LA: And let’s not forget that Rainer Stollmann is also part of this transatlantic bridge, also a very important part of our Cornell board.

AK: Yes, and he’s very important for me, you see, because if we did not have the grotesque, what we call humor, what we call the absurd, and Dada, if we don’t have rebellion of laughter against everything we see, we have not liberty, you see, we are not free. For us humans… in all human narration, back to our eldest ancestors, this kind of making things laugh, making things fluid, making them fluid again, this is the main kind of understanding. In my home city, somebody in the plebeian sphere. The city is divided into Unterstadt, the lower city, and above city, the higher city. In the above city, geographically first, live the rich people, the educated people, the academics. The laborers or those coming from the country – they have been peasants, now they are in the city, they are in the lower city. In the lower city, a talk would start, for instance, somebody says something: “Today is hot weather.” The other does not answer to that, but says something he’s interested in. It’s not even the opposite, it’s only a second sound. Then the other says something. And so they put positions, and after a while, it’s a talk. It’s not from above to below, but from below to above. It’s the best kind of communication I know. And this is what, in theory, connects Rainer Stollmann and me. And Rabelais is for me something so interesting, because he is a master of the grotesque realism. And Bakhtin has described all this and…

LA: What you describe in Halberstadt is what sociolinguists call the cooperative principle of dialogue. It fits very well with what you were saying also about constellation and montage. That it’s about ruptures and connections, but it’s also about making new connections.

AK: Montage in a state of nature! That is, so to speak, montage as it actually arises in the nature of communication in the plebeian public sphere. And this is no different in the suburbs of Detroit or in Pittsburgh. Especially in the industries that have fallen into decline, where people have time, this is the form of communication in originary code. And I contend that something like this begins just after cave painting. And in between there is still singing.

KW: I think that’s probably a wonderful place to stop for this afternoon. I think we’re at time and look forward to further conversation, virtually or together.

LA: Thank you.

AK: I’m very influenced by such conversation. You see? Because I love to work in such contexts.

LA: Well, we very much appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and share ideas and questions with you. We look forward to further conversation.

DY: Indeed.

AK: Mr. Stampfl, we’ll talk again tomorrow. Barbara, too. And we are actually all done here for the time being. So, I send regards for now and spit across the water.

LA: Then we spit back. Thank you and all the best.

Everyone: Thank you and goodbye.

LA: Thank you, Barbara.