| dc.description.abstract | In 1895, the physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered a new kind of rays and called it X-rays. Like light rays, the X-rays blackened photographic plates. At this point, the marks left behind by the rays on the gelatin silver-coated plates were hardly identifiable. When Röntgen laid his hand on the plate while exposing it to the X-rays, however, a recognizable image emerged: the skeleton hand. Afterwards there was no turning back, the image-making potential of the X-rays was utilized in medicine, entertainment culture, and at the customs control. Yet, the radiographic image remained obscure in many ways. It distorts and blurs its subject in ways that complicate interpretation. The aesthetic properties of radiographs are twofold: at once exposing and concealing. This master’s thesis argues that X-ray imagery holds a unique position, where it paradoxically both is understood as a technologically enhanced vision, an extension of the eye, but also as an inverted vision unrelated to eyesight that repels and distorts, reversing the relation between viewer and viewed. I take this paradox as a starting point when approaching my research material, two books: Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) and László Moholy-Nagy’s “New Vision” manifesto, and Bauhaus textbook Painting, Photography, Film (1925). X-ray images and machines are part of the novel's plot, while they are appropriated into and discussed theoretically in the Bauhaus book. When X-rays become a literary and artistic motif and device, their twofold nature is no longer — as it is in medicine — an obstacle, but rather an opportunity to embark on questions of the limits and nature of perception. | eng |