Planting Gardens in the Data Tsunami

Abstract

This chapter assesses the dialogue between Uwe Ebbinghaus and Alexander Kluge wherein they talked about the Internet. While the Internet floods people with its overwhelming mass of information, it evokes a counterreaction at the same time: people tend to dismiss everything that is superfluous and unimportant to them. According to Kluge, this reaction presents a new form of intelligence, and it also poses a challenge to art. There is a new longing for sustainability and a longing for a new “hortus conclusus,” a walled-off garden; a heightened interest in boundaries and containers has emerged. This is art's new calling. Art will connect everything that opera, oil paintings, and literary texts once accomplished on their own by rearranging the material according to a constellative dramaturgy that obeys nonvisible forces. The new challenge for art is to create beacons of light, harbors, and rafts.