An Encyclopaedia about the aesthetic function of images handling complexity
In my research project I want to examine Tableaus as historical precursors for the structure of knowledge in contemporary scientific visual aids of all disciplines as well as in displays – summarized in images handling complexity in the Age of “Google“ and “Wikipedia“. The Tableau enables a synoptical visual experience; it is a place of simultaneity – a surface, that is organizing and structuring information aesthetically.
As the Tableau is used in all scientific disciplines, it handles a wide spectrum of empirical phenomenons. But the Tableau was also defined as a fundamental system of thinking in the 17th and 18th century by Foucault in “The Order of Things”. Everything and every living creature could be represented in a Tableau. The classical age, so Foucault, is the age of measurement, of classification, of taxinomia and mathesis, of the visible and of the order. It’s exactly this thinking configuration, that is of special interest for me, as I have the impression, that we encounter Tableaus in our contemporary digital life, exactly with this kind of structure: I think of displays of mobile phones, of digital cockpits, active info displays, image statistics etc. By exploring the relation between the “classical” Tableau and an extended, contemporary view on it, in the way of a comparative analysis, I want to find out more about the epistemological function of images, that are dealing with complexity.
In form of an Artbook, structured as Encyclopaedia with alphabetically ordered texts, I want to collect keywords related to the term Tableau as synopsis of knowledge. Through exploring formal-aesthetic characteristics of Tableaus and their descendants I want to create „meta-pictures“ as equivalent and balanced juxtapositions to texts as treatises, that circle the philosophical conceptions of complexity in a visualized form.
Credits: Drawings as Tables from the Series „In Defense of the Accidental“: tablet, branches, virus, resistors, unconnected determinations, elites, drones
2017 – 2019
ink, graphit powder, pencil and crayon on paper, each 29,7 x 21 cm