Whitehead’s critique of instantaneity (closed circuit technique still being generally known under the term of ‘Instant Feedback’ at the time) and his inferences of process philosophy, can, at least as an implication, be sensed in Dieter Kiessling’s closed-circuit video installations. Some of the features there can be generalised with certainty and observed similarly in non-artistic feedback phenomena. The twenty pieces by this German artist as completed over the past nineteen years and described in the book, testify to his consistent and successful further development of his investigations begun in America, with the most filigree structures the medium can offer and his reciprocal rapport with the experience of time and aesthetic perception. The critique of the instantaneity of time is by no means far removed from the critique discussed above, of the usual understanding of ‘real time’. One of the consequences of these adjacent theoretical approaches has to be a critical evaluation of current theoretical trends that perceive in computerised ‘real time’-processing programmes such as ‘morphing’, a substantially new and revolutionary development, and which would make a sharp distinction between this digital and other, ‘analog’ options.
The viewer is continually challenged to discover principles of order – in time, topology, technology and other spheres – thus confirming the artistic intention of reassessing not only these but also the relation between work and beholder; of providing that viewer with active access to the medium and retrospectively to his/her own ‘mechanisms’ including the personal constructs of reality.
Luhmann’s operative systems theory thus co-incides with the ‘structuralism’ of Kiessling’s closed-circuit video installations with their foundations of ‘self-reference’. They seek to demonstrate to us viewers the ‘idiosyncratic world of the world of apparatus’ (‘Eigenwelt der Apparate-Welt’ – the motto at the ‘Ars Electronica’ show in 1992) – without losing sight of the circumstances that allow them to come to be in the first place.
For Volker Riegas, there is
"no reason at all to favour the homeostasis model at the outset as opposed to the input/output model... As states //statuses appear as both arguments and values of the function, autoregulative constructions, for example (feedback loops etc.) can be modelled in this tangible, vivid form //in such terms with great ease... "
What Kiessling calls the ‘latently existing kinds of state’ are evidently intrinsic to both of these worlds.