PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES: AGENCY, EVOLUTION, AND THE DYNAMIC EMERGENCE OF EXPANDING POSSIBILITIES
The Zone is affiliated with a transdisciplinary research project called “Pushing the Boundaries,” located at the Dept of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, which revolves around living organisms and their evolution, revealing the limitations of our mechanistic world view. It postulates that the age of machines (and the modern civilization associated with it) is coming to an end. This civilizational turning point (or kairos) is happening in three ways: (1) By exhausting our short historical blimp of carbon-fuelled energy, we are soon entering an era of post-abundance without the ability to power our current technology- (and hence machine-)centered lifestyles. (2) The evolving metacrisis we see ourselves engulfed in (climate, war, pandemic, ecology) forces us to abandon the illusion of the world as a machine, controllable and predictable, and come to a more systemic, evolutionary, and organic view of our complex reality. (3) One of the most pressing tasks of our age is to overcome our view of life and ourselves as machines. Life is so much more than obsessive self-optimization! The Zone explores the semantic residue left behind by the modern mechanistic worldview.
WORLDMAKING
Generating an account of the world, we also create the objects our account refers to. The world seen as mind, where differences constitute basic ideas, where the relation between content and context is more fundamental. All relations are the foundation of all knowledge. Things don’t exist out there. They are generated by the mind’s interaction with the physical world. Objects become ideas through this interaction.
ALEXíS O. VAN TLÖN
Fascinated and inspired by the work of the elusive and enigmatic scholar and artist Alexís O. van Tlön, all we know of Alexís’ life and work stems from a number of fragments we have been lucky enough to unearth in various archives, museums, and repositories distributed in an apparently meaningless pattern across the globe.
VERWANDLUNG
Inspired by Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a report and a series of artworks play with translation and transformation.
MECHANISM OF CONCEALMENT
A textual and visual research notes on “O/0”: The third person, the number, and the journey. When a language —verbal, visual, audial or any kind of language—decides to hide information, it also encourages mechanisms of concealment. In the pursuit of finding other ways to convey the hidden information, one inevitably masters the techniques to keep the information vague and hidden.
EARTHFORMS
In 2020 The Zone team came across unknown forms of stone and mud that seem to be referenced as ritual objects and earth deities of unknown origins. Evidence of their existence in the form of sketches, journal entries and reproductions by explorers and researchers from the 18th and 19th century, form the beginning of The Zone’s unpacking of their possible meaning.
VISIBLE CITIES
Tracking the journey of mysterious explorers through texts, sketches and speculative maps The Zone seeks to make sense of unknown places.
A ‘LESS-USED’ TOOLBOX
The instrument of instability; the displacement device; the mechanism that is disorganisation; and the implement that is unknown.