Black or white? Positive or negative? Can we answer these questions unambiguously at the spot? In our daily lives we are often forced to take sides.
This inevitably creates tensions that accumulate with time. However, an analysis one’s own thoughts results in a conclusion, that completely opposite concepts or attitudes can coexist in the very same brain, hence be a part of the same personality.
Does this fact pose a paradox? The question itself is again a demand to take sides. Such nested paradoxes have fascinated humankind since a long time. People that could afford taking the time have documented those (i.e. Zen Kōans). The mathematician Kurt Gödel has freed us from the torture of the infinite – as a consequence of his Incompleteness Theorem one can always find a higher system in which the contradictions of the original system wouldn’t be contradictory.
The path of hedonism is a dream among modern people. The maximization of delight and enjoyment is however a utopistic maxim that cannot work in a dynamic society. Each step towards hedonism causes a wave of reactions that can be extremely polar due to the fact, that everything is judged relative to the individual, space and time.
An example of a paradoxical system mentioned above is the personal Weltanschauung. Each Weltanschauung is unique not only among individuals, but also between seconds. By learning something new about the world, the inner world or the attitude towards a certain concept can reverse in an instant, either resolving smaller contradictions, or adding new ones. Hence, The Good can become The Evil in a jiffy and, perhaps, transform into Good the next second.
The photographs from the series "Via Reversion Kit" crystallize my personal relative Weltanschauung through photographic inversions into a form and are dedicated to The Good here and now and with grateful thanks to the model and to my friends.
DLed, Berlin 31.12.2007/Munich 23.01.2008