NEOΣ KOΣMOΣ

Wendelin Pressl’s new book, published by SCHLEBRÜGGE.EDITOR, borrows its title from the name of a district of Athens and means: New World, the New Well-Ordered.

The book explores the egocentricity and ephemerality of world views, the pitfalls of a literal perspective on the world, time travel within the smallest of spaces, and failed world machines. It reflects on the conventions of lies that constantly create new truths, the observation of fake planets, and optical as well as other deceptions.

Pressl’s works appear as wonderfully functional yet seemingly fantastic and paradoxical objects—situated in the in-between space of art and science. Human imagination and poetic vision become visible in these objects as the last vestiges of aesthetic autonomy. The book is accompanied by a concise “scientific-fantastic” correspondence between the artist and mathematician/physicist Leonhard Horstmeyer.

The event will feature a conversation with Wendelin Pressl and the two co-authors:

• Astrid Kury, art historian, curator, and cultural manager. As director of the Akademie Graz, she focuses on interdisciplinary art, exhibitions, and knowledge-transfer projects on current socio-political issues.
• Leonhard Horstmeyer, mathematician and complexity scientist, who works on coarse-grained descriptions of stochastic network dynamical systems with a focus on precursors of critical transitions. He also researches moment closure techniques and dimensional reduction of stochastic dynamical systems. Horstmeyer is a former researcher at the CSH.