PhD — Techniken des Bezeugens
Doctoral candidate & research associate · RTG 3064, JGU Mainz
Since April 2026 I have been a doctoral candidate and research associate in the DFG Research Training Group 3064 “Technologies of Witnessing” (Techniken des Bezeugens) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, which studies how the practices and procedures of witnessing are changing under digital transformation. My dissertation there focuses on delay in distributed sociotechnical assemblages in which humans, machines, data, and infrastructures interact.
Networked infrastructures extend action and perception across spatial distances while compressing them temporally — whether in telesurgical systems, algorithmic decision chains, or satellite-based networks. Yet where interactions appear instantaneous, temporality persists: not as a negligible residual, but as a constitutive condition. Every form of medial coupling necessarily produces temporal offsets: latencies, cadences, differential times. These delays do not disappear with increasing transmission speed; they shift, fold into the infrastructures, and become the structural condition of what can be perceived, witnessed, and held accountable at all.
The dissertation investigates delay as such a material-immanent temporal fold: a differential time in which technical, embodied, and epistemic practices are coordinated asynchronously. It asks whether, where, and how delay manifests in these assemblages, how it structures perception and affect, and under what conditions it enables or interrupts witnessing. I understand witnessing here as a relationally distributed practice rather than a punctual act: responsibility and agency circulate between actors, apparatuses, and infrastructures. Theoretically, the project is situated at the intersection of media culture studies, cultural anthropology, praxeology, and post-phenomenology.
My dissertation thus continues the inquiry into complex human–machine interactions that began with my bachelor’s thesis Screen Spaces at University Hospital Cologne and that I pursued further, through participant observation, in the field research project Robotic Operations. With the Da Vinci® system, the delay between the execution of a gesture at the console and its implementation inside the abdomen is too small to be noticed, and for that very reason it folds into the working conditions.