Global Humanities Junior Fellow at Johns Hopkins University

September 2015 - February 2016

Investigation into the Invention of the Timeline

The research project focusses on the so-called invention of the timeline in the 18^th century with Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg’s Carte Chronographique (1753). Looking back to the 18^th century from the perspective of the highly mediated present, it is possible to understand the boundaries between the representation of time and of space, with regard to the human body. The so-called ‘first timeline’ by Barbeu-Dubourg is seen as a turning point towards a rationalized, diagrammatic access to the world since the Enlightenment. It is important to note that there have been timelines before Dubourg’s, so why has his become so important and groundbreaking? In which way is the entanglement with which the human body becomes a quantified object inscribed into diagrammatic charts and also involved in technologies in the 18^th century? And is this situation mirrored in media changes today?

Judith Sieber, born in 1985, is currently completing her M.A. in Art History at Freie Universitaet Berlin. In January 2014 she finished her B.A. in Science of Theatre and Art History at Freie Universitaet with a thesis on the possibilities of a counter-narrative of history in the practise of artistic re-enactment. In 2014 she also worked as a student assistant in the SFB 626 “Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits.“ Next to her academic work she was also involved in the process of exhibition making in various Berlin museums.