Wind Tunnel Bulletin #09: ...freeze!

<p><strong>The Experiment in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility</strong></p> <p>Written in the mid-1930s, Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” serves us as both a substrate and an impetus for exploring the following question: What happens to an experiment when it is captured on camera and then reproduced, evaluated and distributed as a film?</p> <p>This <em>Bulletin</em> issue approaches the question in two parts: The first part takes a pictorial form (pp. 168– 262, published in December 2018) by presenting—in accordance with the print medium—single frames and sequences of frames from scientific films. In doing so, we concentrate on fluid dynamics. Since the 1900s, scientific films have been produced at various fluid-dynamic research institutes worldwide for the contact-free recording of dynamic and potentially turbulent flows. One of these institutes, which embraced the medium of film with considerable effort and skill, and used it in applied and basic research as well as in research commissioned by the military, was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Göttingen, Germany. Ludwig Prandtl headed the institute from 1925 until 1946. Our single frames and image sequences are taken from films from Prandtl’s institute. The selection of images is also indebted to our discovering this rare material in the Archives of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, whose permission to reproduce these images is gratefully acknowledged.</p> <p>For the second part (pp. 263–282, published in June 2019) we invited several authors to reflect with us on the first part with its images and react to our question: What does film do to an experiment or even to the experiment in general? We are overwhelmed that all authors whom we asked agreed to contribute and think with us. Thank you very much! And thank you, dear reader, for joining us too.</p> <p>We will now raise the curtain, switch on the camera and … freeze!</p>