Entangled Encounters, Munkeruphus / Bloom Festival 2018 / Age of Biology, Berlin Haupbahnhof 2018

Collaboration w/ Nana Francisca Schottländer

Kosmos

Who includes diversity and is Nature,

Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great

  charity of the earth and the equilibrium also,

Who has not look’d forth from the windows of the eyes for nothing, or whose brain held audience

  with messengers for nothing,

Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most majestic lover,

Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the aesthetic or

  intellectual,

Who, having consider’d the body, finds all its organs and parts good,

Who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body understands by subtle analogies all

  other theories,

The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States;

Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in other globes with their suns and

  moons,

Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras,

  dates, generations,

The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.

– by Walt Whitman

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[...] Evidently, communication [...] is necessary in all aspects of life. […] Even in relationships with inanimate objects and with nature in general, something very like communication is involved. Consider for example the work of an artist. Can it properly be said that the artist is expressing himself, i.e., literally “pushing outward” something that is already formed inside him? Such a description is not in fact generally accurate or adequate. Rather, what usually happens is that the first thing the artist does is only similar in certain ways to what he may have in mind. As in a conversation between two people, he sees the similarity and the difference, and from this perception something further emerges in his next action. Thus, something new is continually created that is  common to the artist and the material on which he is working. The scientist is engaged in a similar “dialogue” with nature (as well as his fellow human beings). Thus, when a scientist has an idea, this is tested by observation. When it is found (as generally happens) that what is observed is only similar to what he had in mind and not identical, then from a consideration of the similarities and the differences he gets a new idea which is in turn tested. And so it goes, with the continual emergence of something new that is common to the thought of the scientist and what is observed in nature. This extends onward into practical activities, which lead to the creation of new structures that are common to man and the overall environment in which he lives. It is clear that if we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature, we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas. Why then is it so difficult actually to bring about such communication?” – David Bohm, On Dialogue