Ether Machines: Raoul Hausman's Optophonetic Media

Abstract

In one of the last texts that the Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann published before he left Germany in 1933, ‘Trommelfeuer der Wissenschaft’/Drumfire of Science’, he strongly rejected Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and promoted the cosmological model of the Austrian engineer Hanns Hörbiger who, in his Glacial Cosmogony, explained cosmic processes based on an interaction of ice and fire in the universe.1 Hausmann’s polemic shows that the artistic avant-garde of the Weimar period was not always in tandem with the scientific avant-garde of the time. In fact, Hausmann’s main aesthetic project, which he called Optophonetics, also stood in stark contrast to Einstein’s revolutionary insights, because it was connected to a theory of the ether. In the nineteenth century, ether was assumed as the medium in which light and electromagnetic waves would propagate — a hypothesis that was rejected by the theory of relativity. However, the ether and its connection to electromagnetic fields, X-rays, and notions of multidimensional spaces fuelled the imagination of many modernist artists. Linda Henderson showed that painters such as Boccioni, Kupka and Kandinsky were inspired by the ether as a phenomenon that stood at the intersection of scientific and occult understandings of mediality. For these artists, aesthetic expression had the task to display the ethereal, electromagnetic, and multidimensional structure of the world that was not yet accessible to human perception.