Hans Jenny’s Cymatics: Practices of Knowing Human and Nature in the Visualization of Waves

Troubling the clear distinction of human and nature, terms like ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘ecology’, emphasize that human and nature are facing contemporary ecological crises in an intimately connected situation. Yet, economies of power also determine the relations of human and nature, and practices of knowing are central to them. To address the shared confrontation with ecological crises, it is thus necessary to understand how practices of knowing performatively bring about the distinctions and relations of human and nature and how they can be shifted in the interest of facing these crises together. In my presentation, I will do so by discussing Hans Jenny’s research in cymatics. Cymatics concerns itself with the visualisation of wave effects,
historically with the aim to produce human knowledge through visualizing natural processes. However, looking at cymatics from a new materialist perspective allows to raise the question who visualizes whom for whom, and thus, who knows whom. Addressing this question, I will analyse how the distinction between human and nature is made in the research practice of Jenny. Furthermore, I will ask, how taking into account the ‘natural’ contributions to this practice of knowing allows to shift it towards a practice of a shared knowing-one-another.