Single-channel video, sound, 12:26 min.
Based on research into statistics and legislation of the GDR from the 1960s to the 1980s, Statistical Hypnagogia discusses the importance of statistics for economic planning and electronic data processing.
In the GDR, almost all procedures, institutions, and legal frameworks were based on statistical data. The legislation also established the State Central Administration for Statistics and the Central Office for Primary Documentation at the House of Statistics. From here, work was done for the State Planning Commission, which was responsible for implementing the goals of socialist economic planning in a five year plan
Statistics as a materialisation of governmentality plays a specific role here: 1. It is a materialisation of acts of governmentality, 2. the legislation anchors statistical practices in the everyday life of a non-democratic socialist society, 3. the Haus der Statistik becomes a concretisation of Guattari’s »axiomatic abstract machines« in form of a building and its practices, 4. the GDR’s software implementation called Sachgebietsorientierte Programmiersysteme (SOPS), produced by Robotron, transfers statistical practice into computer planning software
In this video work, commissioned by the Center for Net Art, Berlin, Francis Hunger uses historical footage from the House of Statistics to examine how bureaucracy, statistics, and computing technology were implemented in the everyday administrative life of the GDR and inscribed themselves in the language of GDR socialism.
The House of Statistics also represents a strand of Modernist architectural language, that emerging from the Bauhaus found its way in both East and West as contemporary architecture. In the US IBM had architects like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer design their buildings from the 1960s on in Modernist architectonic language, an in the GDR Robotron buildings were erected in iconic 1970’s modernist style extended from Bauhaus.
In the video, unwieldy, bureaucratic terms and historical footage echo through the building and counteract today’s cityscape at Alexanderplatz. The work is part of the artist’s larger research into Eastern Socialism and Modernity.
The work was also exhibited at the Robotron – Code and Utopia exhibition (Gallery of Contemporary Art Leipzig 2025 and Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund 2026)
Lecture: Kybernetik war nicht alles – Die langen Ketten bürokratischer Praktiken im DDR Sozialismus
May 5, 2021, Haus der Statistik, Berlin/online lecture
Contextual Text 2022
https://zfmedienwissenschaft.de/heft/text/sozialistische-co-innovation (Open Access)
Socialist Co-Innovation. How the relational database DABA-1600 was developed in the GDR
As media of cooperation, databases are all-pervasive infrastructures that have received comparatively little attention in media theory in contrast to “networks” or «algorithms.» This media-historiographical and economic-historical contribution examines moments of reinvention and coinnovation in the GDR by analyzing the relational database DABA-1600, which was jointly developed by VEB Robotron and the TU Dresden in the 1980s. Through this analysis, the paper discusses how the databases of the socialist GDR came to bear strong similarities to those of the capitalist West.(Text in German)
Header image: exhibition view at Gallery for Centemporary Art Leipzig, (c) Alexandra Ivanciu