Matthias Wittmann

In my book Die Gesellschaft des Tentakels (The Society of the Tentacle, 2021), I established the skeleton-less octopus as a central – and ambiguous – figure for an analysis and criticism of our culture and media history, suggesting that we’re not only in the midst of a society of the tentacle, but might also let the octopus help us imagine new modes and narratives of collectivization—open to new inclusions, intervals and interspaces. Its outlandishness makes the octopus unpredictable as a ceaseless deviation - even from itself. Surprising turns occur. The octopus repeatedly escapes our orders of knowledge to show us forms of “epistemic disobedience” (Walter Mignolo) that ultimately arrive at a new social contract based on the recognition of vulnerability. If we are to learn anything from the kraken, it might be new socio-techniques of responsivity – stretched between inside and outside, eccentricity and curiosity, wanting and giving attention. Can the octopus encourage us to think more from multiple perspectives instead of clinging to a closed worldview?

My current project "Octoscopia" builds on these questions and tries to develop a new idea of expanded cinema in dialogue with the octopus’ behaviour. How could expanded cinema be conceived from the perspective of the octopus (in whose body tactility and visuality, data and images intricately exchange)? What might such an “octoscopage” of the moving image produce? How could a trans-species epistemology and poetics of search for new forms and social realities of the image look like?

Of course, we can’t know what it is like to taste, see, feel the world in a multidirectional and poli-perspectival way with tentacles, suction cups, chemoreceptors, etc. But we can trace the (after)life of the octopuses in the archives of (post)film and watch the society of tentacles transforming our knowledge – and expanding, decentring and destabilizing our notions of image, cinema, experience. Perhaps, even, there are anti-cinema-Gestalten of the octopus, and an octopodology of world experience out there that cannot be cinematographed, pointing us to blind spots of our “own” (?) technologies and grids of visualization, technologies that have always had a mimetic relationship with the animal world.

"GHOST WITHOUT A SHELL", a 3-parts essay, published on Various Artists (2021):

1. Within the Society of Tentacles

2. The Ends of Paranoia

3. A Tightrope Dance with Eight Arms

"Tentakuläre Gesellschaften" - Radio podcast in the series "Superscience Me - Wissenschaft, Fiktion, Spekulation #7", by Julia Grillmayr (9.11.2021) - on the Cultural Broadcasting Archive of the Freien Radios Österreich

Listen to the podcast

"Das Buch ist auch das Dokument einer Art 'Filmsinnkrise' in meinem Leben"

Conversation between Matthias Wittmann and Alejandro Bachmann on Kolik.film, n.37/2022, pp. 59-86

Lecture Performance at the Stadtkino Basel (17.12.2021) with film screening (The Navigator, Buster Keaton, 1924) and live music

Lecture Performance at the Fotomuseum Winterthur (23.11.2022) in the context of the exhibition "Jean Painlevé - Les pieds dans l'eau"

Lecture at the Universität der Künste Berlin (20.1.2023)