New Spirits – Reading Deleuze in India
Consciousness exists only in connection with other consciousness
Here in Auroville, the people in charge of Bharat Nivas recently removed a play from the program. The reason given was that some in the community had taken offense at it, even before it was performed. This raises questions. What may art do, when is a ban justified? Bound up with this, of course, is the question: what is the task of art, what should art do? The question invites reflection on the role of art in general, here in…
Weiterlesen
Exhibition “Roots From the Sky” by Cedric Bregnard at Centre d’Art, Auroville March 2023 Cedric Bregnard is Artist in Residence at the Centre d’Art in Auroville. Over the next 2 months, he will take a photograph of the banyan tree in the Matrimandir garden. This photograph will then be scaled to the size of a wall (approximately 3x7m) in the gallery. Residents of Auroville are invited to trace light and shadow on the bark, the leaves, the roots, in ink…
Weiterlesen
Standing in the back of a small truck, I have spent the last few days driving through Auroville to collect various things for the Pottersmarket. These small trucks are the big brothers of the tuk-tuks. Sometimes you see six or seven dozen people standing on them when another big festival is coming up. They are a popular means of transport for people in the villages when they travel long distances together to be close to the gods. It is surprising…
Weiterlesen
Yesterday, after many years, I finally went into the village center of Roubion. Vilém Flusser lived here for many years. I quoted his books often in my seminars and used them as a basis for discussion. Especially his philosophy of photography. Flusser is a wild theorist. He wrote much about images, media, language, technology, signs, history… It seems to me he kept thinking about how thinking works. How do words and images arise in our heads, and how much does…
Weiterlesen
Autobahns have always been special places for me. Most of the time, I was not under time pressure; rarely did I have to get from A to B within a certain time. Rather, autobahns are travel routes. There, I find myself in in-between states, a kind of no-man’s-land with infinitely many possibilities. This opens up spaces for thought. Often they are simply empty. The brain is occupied with moving safely through traffic. It is a pleasant kind of occupation; consciousness…
Weiterlesen
It is now definitely time to rethink. What our fathers and grandfathers called progress is destroying our planet. Science is not an end in itself, not everything technically possible is good, not everything that is fun and satisfies our senses is meaningful. Now we hear again and again from many sides that we should concentrate on the small steps in front of us; only in this way would we move forward together. This may occasionally be right too, but it…
Weiterlesen
In Plato’s allegory of the cave, people sit before a wall on which the shadows of the real objects of the world can be seen. Since they have seen only shadows throughout their lives, they think these are reality. The philosopher’s task is to explain to people that they should turn around to see how the apparatus of light, which serves as a projection mechanism, produces an illusion. Once people had recognized this, they would free themselves from the chains…
Weiterlesen
I am sitting in a café in France. Around me, lively chatter. This morning I was ‘on the internet.’ How different these experiences are. Now, pears are difficult to compare with apples, and yet we often do this. Working in an office and working from home, for example, are similar; seeking community on social networks or in a café, for example; reading in the library or researching on the internet. These are apples and pears, similar and yet categorically different.…
Weiterlesen