The historicity of the virtual: Andreas Sieß successfully defends his dissertation

As a key technology of the future, virtual environments have long made a significant contribution to both social transformation and media-cultural progress. The associated discourse of virtuality is also an increasingly relevant topic of research in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to research alliances and development projects, the academic qualification of young researchers is also concerned in many areas with the constructions and perspectives of virtualized worlds as well as their historical development and further implications.

This is the starting point for Andreas Sieß' dissertation, which was carried out as part of a cooperative doctoral project between Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg (Department of Engineering and Communication) and the University of Koblenz (Faculty of Philology and Cultural Studies). The first supervisor was Prof. Dr. Oliver Ruf, holder of the Research Professorship for Aesthetics of Communication at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, who also acted as the first reviewer. The second reviewer was Prof. Dr. Stefan Neuhaus at the University of Koblenz, and the third reviewer was Prof. Dr. Uta Schaffers at the same university. Both teach modern German literature.

Genuine virtual realities

Against this interdisciplinary background, Andreas Sieß's work addresses the problem with an analytical approach that links the aesthetics of the virtual not specifically to technology, but to its mediality. According to a central thesis, the virtual must be negotiated from a media-historical perspective. For this reason, the work explicitly addresses the interface between literary, media and cultural studies and negotiates the aesthetic foundations of the virtual on the basis of the literary work and poetics of one of the best-known representatives of German Romanticism: the example of E.T.A. Hoffmann. In this way, it can be shown and proven that the aesthetic conception of the virtual has not only been discussed since at least 1800, but also that those contemporary attributions to the medium and technology of the virtual are still highly topical for the 21st century. Under the title 'Maschinen und Atmosphären - Zur Ästhetik des Virtuellen bei E.T.A. Hoffmann' (Machines and Atmospheres - On the Aesthetics of the Virtual in E.T.A. Hoffmann), two directions of the virtual are discussed in particular, which from today's perspective are incompatible with each other, although they were already interwoven in Romanticism to form a sufficiently aesthetic dialectic. The dissertation shows how virtual environments can be realized that emancipate themselves from the currently often dominant dictates of simulation aesthetics and thus ultimately produce genuinely virtual realities.

Disputation at the University of Koblenz

Andreas Sieß successfully defended his dissertation on January 24, 2024 at the University of Koblenz with the top grade summa cum laude and remains a research assistant to Prof. Dr. Oliver Ruf at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. There, as part of the Rhine Ruhr Center for Science Communication Research funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, he conducts postdoctoral research on aesthetics, forms and formats of science communication, with a focus on the social sciences and humanities, among other things. Together with Aleksandra Vujadinovic, he is involved in setting up the new Media Aesthetics research laboratory under the direction of Professor Ruf, in which media practices and cultural techniques are tested as possibilities for communication-aesthetics-oriented design research. In addition, Andreas Sieß remains active as an elected departmental council member of the Media and Interaction department at the Doctoral College for Applied Sciences North Rhine-Westphalia.