At a time in which we are redefining our relationship with our environment, and major transformations in thinking take place, we reach the limits of our imagination. How can we understand and imagine a worldview that surpasses today?

New Realism is a project that brings creativity, imagination, and play into science. We bring workshops and retreats, we connect artists with scientists, we organise residencies and more. Creativity transforms the way we see the world.

Coming up: The New Real – line of designer goods based on the Gaze of Science

New Realism – The Gaze of Science

A transdisciplinary exhibition project 2016-2017
Launch March 2016, Science Park Amsterdam

Scientific Images
Through new technological developments, science has access to a world that is invisible to the senses but underlies our worldview. The visual language of this complex perspective is in full development, creating a new visual logic. From astrophysics to the investigation of elementary particles, a wide range of disciplines depend on image innovation. The lens-based optical perspective that since Giotto has defined our view on the world is no longer sufficient. Beyond optical laws new solutions must be formulated for a post-lens perspective, which relates to the Giottoesque lens perspective as Wikipedia relates to Diderot’s encyclopaedia. It is a dynamic perspective based on an interaction between observer and observed; an image that is constantly in the making, and, in essence, a potential realism. A visual language with a semiotics unprecedented in our visual traditions.

Potential Realism
This perspective is still in an experimental phase in which new rules and solutions are defined. Being an interaction between scientific data and methods, software and artistic choices, it causes a hybrid dynamic semiotics which takes the form of an interplay between observer, subject and environment. A visual paradigm shift that has the potential to radically change imagination itself. Not only science itself is becoming increasingly dependent on these images, but making intelligible and experimenting with this new visual method is necessary for the development of a complex 21st century worldview.

Art
The need to examine these semiotics and methodology is not only fundamental for the development of science but in a world that increasingly looks at itself through the scientific lens, it is fundamental to the arts as well. This project examines how scientific and artistic imagination can create a new field where the classic and complex imaginative worlds meet. The visual thinking of both disciplines makes them challenge and complement each other to investigate, experiment with and uncover this young and radical language.

New Realism
Artists Lotte Geeven, Doina Kraal, Gwenneth Boelens, Joost Rekveld, Tarja Szaraniec, Daniela de Paulis, Domnitch & Gelfand, Angelo Vermeulen and Joenoes Natar start a project that develops, grows and deepens during the coming two years, while visiting several Science Parks in the Netherlands and attracting new artists and scientists along the way. A project that through the internet, exhibitions, debates, and workshops extends and evolves, and challenges the limits of this new imagination.

“Among the most important images of the last three decades are those whose makers are most fully preoccupied by whatever cannot be put in a picture.”

– James Elkins