Nothing without the Unknown
Since the unknown is the only source of evolution and cultural development, we can no longer reject the question of how to take the unknown and thus the unpredictable into account in our decisions, be it in our daily activities, in politics, in social or cultural affairs.
Until the Age of Enlightenment, the name of the unknown was God or, even earlier, the gods. This was the source of fate, the unpredictable will of God.
In Roman antiquity, it was the task of the augurs to grasp and interpret the unknown, i.e. the indeterminable will of the gods, so that the possibilities thus formulated could be incorporated into the political decisions of the Senate.
In the Christian era, painting took over this task. In the making of the paintings, it was not primarily a matter of depicting religious or power-political events (more and more with the addition of real figurations and landscapes), but of showing the possibilities arising from the unknown.
In the Renaissance, painters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo or Jacopo Pontormo began to grasp the unknown as a potency whose source is something quite different from the incomprehensible counsel of a supreme being. The unknown is rather a multi-dimensional potency that unfolds from the simplest constellation; the connection from one point to another.
Finally, the Enlightenment succumbed to the illusion that science would be able to numerically comprehend the potency of the unknown, thereby revealing it and eliminating all that was unpredictable in favour of a bright future in which one day even death might be conquered.
Today we know very well that it is impossible for us to decipher the unknown and thus eliminate the unpredictable. Once again, we must learn to include the unknown in our decisions, private, political, cultural.
Not unlike the Renaissance, today it is up to art and design to develop the appropriate tools for this, to test them and to introduce them into practice.
How we proceed
We need to ask ourselves three main questions and constantly work on the plurality of appropriate answers:
How do we deal with the ever-increasing complexity of the respective systems we work on?
How does one deal with the unknown of the dark energy of our subconscious, which significantly determines each of our decisions?
How do you even deal with dark matter and dark energy, without which there would be neither physical nor spiritual life?
The way we work as artists, authors and designers on the multitude of possible answers is the way of concrete implementation.
The theoretical approaches from mathematics, physics, psychoanalysis and above all philosophy form indispensable fields of correspondence for us, with which we seek interdisciplinary exchange.
To answer our main questions, we will work - in our projects and workshops - according to the following list of steps, i.e. tasks.