Dirk Sorge / Analog algorithm
- Bert Stabler
- 22 hours ago
- 8 min read
The title of Dagmar Herzog’s 2024 book The Question of Unworthy Life derives from Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche’s 1920 book Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunswerten Lebens, or “Permission to Annihilate Life Unworthy of Life”, which Herzog identifies as the “main template” for the Nazis’ eventual mass murder (officially called “euthanasia”) of disabled people. She cites a Nazi textbook that differentiated between those who, “’despite limited mental powers’ were ‘work-willing’ and ‘good-natured,” versus those whom the textbook identified as “idiots as adults still sitting senselessly in a sandbox.” Herzog chronicles a history illustrating how such hierarchies of human worth both persisted and were resisted after the war. She cites a 1954 survey in which 70% of German respondents indicated “that it ‘would be good’ if a child with disabilities ‘died young.’” These attitudes continued to be reflected in influential eugenic scholarship, such as in the concerns expressed in 1965 by psychologist and special education professor Helmut von Bracken over “increasingly more frequently occurring damage to the hereditary substance” of the population. Herzog reports that midcentury hospital administrators used “the mentally disabled… as an (unpaid) labor force”, while “the most severely disabled were kept more hidden than they had been in the early twentieth century.”
The sorting and hiding of Germany’s disabled population in segregated education, employment, care, and public life were accompanied by eugenic policies of mass sterilization that continued into the mid-1980s. But these practices were eventually exposed and protested by a diverse coalition of disabled activists and their allies, with the result that, while divisions among the disabled are still perpetuated in policy, a growing consensus recognizes the profound harm enacted by instrumentalized ranking based on productivity. The visually impaired German artist Dirk Sorge spoke to the selective erasure that accompanies the country’s extensive service infrastructure. “The community of blind and vision-impaired people in Berlin, they are pretty well connected,” he said to me. This is partly thanks to the city’s oldest self-help organization, which was founded in 1874.
But I think there are other kinds of disabilities, or many chronic illnesses, which are far more difficult to navigate through… This system that we have in Germany, it's very bureaucratic, very strict in a way. And as soon as you are not fitting into one category, things get really messy. So I was lucky, in a way, that my disability is pretty straightforward.
A performance that speaks to these past and present inconsistencies is Paint it Black, from 2008, in which Sorge records himself in front of an audience in a tattoo studio being given a tattoo on his chest. The tattoo image is three black circles, which is the symbol used to refer to blindness and low vision in German public accommodation, such as to alert drivers to watch for blind pedestrians. When presented as a tattoo, however, this image cannot help but evoke the black triangle that the Nazis used to label “antisocial” concentration camp inmates, a category that included the disabled as well as Roma, unhoused people, and social misfits deemed unable or unwilling to work. Meanwhile, Sorge pointed out to me, German manufacturing still depends on disabled people to do tasks for which “it would be too expensive to construct a robot.”
Much of Sorge’s work engages the senses of vision and hearing as conceptual content, as modes of experience and communication as well as modes of expression. As with the tattoo, which only signifies for a sighted viewer, sight and sound are sometimes mismatched, and disability is often invoked, explicitly or elliptically. But, as he also told me, “not all of my works are about disability.” Rather than directly representing or explicitly translating his personal disability experiences, Sorge’s works focus on public places, figures, and discourses, in and between both physical and media spaces. As such, the uneven provision of social supports and medical interventions, as a spatially specific and historically complex phenomenon, offer a lens through which to approach his diverse body of work.
Speaking of lenses, another of Sorge’s earlier pieces is the exception that proves the rule, as regards his depersonalization of disability experience. In Chapter 2: Television Lens, from his 2008 video series On the sense of sight, light, and life itself: A treatise in five chapters (all German titles translated), the footage is of surgery being performed on the artist’s eye to implant an artificial lens, in order to address his cataracts. The video shows the doctor’s perspective of the surgery – literally the medical view. But the audio is an English narration describing the fabrication of a camera lens, rather than a prosthetic lens, accompanied by an innocuous EDM soundtrack. One twist is that sighted viewers rely on the lenses of both eyes and cameras to see this meditation on mediation, with one lens described through sight and another through sound (although the German translation is only available via subtitles).
In a performance lecture from 2020, Museum of Blinding Arts (a pun on the German name of the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, which hosted the lecture), the theme of soundless images return. Sorge voices the story of an early form of lens replacement surgery being performed on the cataracts of composer Johann Sebastian Bach, accompanied with descriptions and discussions of European prints from the museum collection, dating from the17th through the 19th centuries. Occasionally interrupting the bright, hazy footage that comprises most of the video, the prints depict disabled and blind people in Biblical and classical myth. These images offer evidence supporting Sorge’s assertions regarding the long history of the moral model of disability. This model shifted during and after the Enlightenment into the modern “medical model”, which locates defects solely in disabled individual bodyminds rather than shortcomings in the access infrastructure of society.
In The New Building Code, from last year, Sorge exhibited a partially-worked hunk of sandstone that dated back to his student days, circa 2006 or 2007, an installation that again referenced moral histories of the body in a semantically potent place—in this case the Klosterruine, a former monastery in Berlin that was built in the 13th century and remains open to the elements. Located inside the ruin, the sculpture invited interaction and touch, but becomes inaccessible when the site is closed in winter. It was accompanied by text in which Sorge quotes local construction regulations under headings derived from Biblical precepts: “The body is a temple”, “The mind is a construction site”, and “the soul is a ruin”. Preziosi e Precari, a 2024 display in the Hall of Royal Valuables at the Royal Palace in Dresden, was another work that drew on both a site and an art collection. Occupying a set of stately vitrines, Sorge curated ‘exotic’ items from the palace archive that recalled histories of abduction and extraction, while adding his own mass-produced readymade trinkets, including gold-painted Styrofoam animals and a Barbie with a leg prosthesis who couldn’t stand up when removed from her packaging. In his choices he sought to simultaneously call attention to historic continuities of disability fetishization and colonial expropriation.
Dunkel Hell Heaven, yet another historically site-specific work by Sorge, was a 2024 video installation in the Halberstadt home of Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, an Enlightenment poet who started losing his vision in later life and who, like Bach, went through a failed eye surgery to address cataracts. In this piece, over 80 animated sets of German anagrams were projected on a wall and floor in the house’s parlor. Some dialectical pairs of words included “mondaen” (cosmopolitan, or chic) paired with “Nomaden” (nomads), as well as “aufklären” (enlightening) paired with “Laufkräne” (large cranes used in shipping), and “fortschreiten” (to progress) and “Schrottreifen” (scrap tires). Another set of paradoxical works comprised of bold text is the ongoing photo series Maybe an Image of AI, in which Sorge presents plainly handwritten transcriptions of what artificial intelligence offers as visual description when no alt-text is provided for an image on the internet. Some of these include: “Maybe an image of art (alt)”, “Maybe an image of flower (alt)”, “Maybe an image of 1 person, sitting and standing (alt)” and “Maybe an image of nature and outdoors (alt)”.
Aspects of online visual inaccessibility are also the subject of Global Capture Conference, a 2022 video featuring colorful CAPTCHA codes in a variety of Roman and non-Roman scripts. CAPTCHAs can’t have alt-texts, because that would make them readable for machines, and thus useless as a test to distinguish humans and machines; thus, some CAPTCHA services offer automatic audio versions for blind users. In the video work, Sorge is alternating these CAPTCHAs with nonverbal utterances (coughs, yawns, sighs) that have been recorded as training data for speech recognition, all against a gentle ambient sonic backdrop. In this piece, Sorge was particularly paying attention to the limited range of data in accessible in open-source datasets. The utterances Sorge found were crowdsourced by unpaid volunteers from South Korea, which resulted in young female voices being overrepresented, with other groups absent from the training data. And among the available CAPTCHAs he located there was a limited range of non-Roman characters available.
One of Sorge’s most subtle reflections on the continuation of ableism and other hierarchical structures into the digital era appears in Wo Ai Lo-Fi (I Love Lo-Fi), a 2024 series of videos he shot and initially exhibited during a residency in Beijing. In one of these videos, Training (for) a Possible Application, he poetically presents the idea of real-world physical infrastructure, such as transportation and electrical grids, as algorithmic templates for artificial intelligence. Urban details like brambles of wires on utility poles, scuffed painted indications on streets and sidewalks, and dense networks of pipes, as well as numerous fences, gates, and barriers, are all recorded on glitchy, decades-old digital videotape. A woman’s voice speaks in Mandarin and Sorge speaks the German version of the voiceover, supplemented with English subtitles, discussing the tensions between rules, signs, and material reality while accompanied by a menacing electronic dirge. The voiceover says at one point, “Rules are just thoughts. Just like us. Without a body. But they need material for them to be effective.” and later on, “But most rules have exceptions. A rule without exceptions is itself an exception. They hardly exist.”
Training for a Possible Application, 2024 (video)
Sorge explained to me that with this project he hoped to encourage viewers “not to be afraid of artificial intelligence as a future threat, but to be afraid of the present, because we are already trapped in a machine.” His intention in deploying low-resolution media is not to evoke a sense of nostalgic fantasy or gritty authenticity, but to jostle the relationship of medium and imagery in much the same way he juxtaposed the technical voiceover with his surgical footage. Meanwhile, the unsettling retro-tech aesthetic also resonates with his large body of minimal but hypnotic geometric digital animations and sound compositions-- a pursuit initially inspired in part by, as he put it, “making fun of abstract paintings”. This tendency remains present in some semi-recent work, as in the 2018 video Ritual Verality Experience which records a generative digital program that creates colorful patterns of triangles, but is often interrupted by glitches: a "constant buffering" which Sorge describes as "rhythmic stuttering".
Ritual Verality Experience, 2018 (video)
Throughout his work, Sorge makes a plea for a greater attention to historical memory, and thereby for recognizing the progress of modernity as a process of stratified reification. As he said to me early in our conversation (explicitly referencing historic versus modern eye surgery), “I think it's easy to criticize (the) medical scientific view, but on the other hand, I'm also very glad that I'm living now and not 200 years ago”. At the same time, his works suggest that the algorithmic template for our instrumentalized societies was developed long ago. Indeed, when considering the world we live in today, it’s all too clear the past is far from over.
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