A simultaneous experience of nature and digital techniques: Kunsthalle Zürich

Trained in researching mental states, the psychologist Heide Schimke extends her knowledge of the human condition to artistic horizons of experience. For this purpose she lives and works part of the year in Australia. She wanders the paths of human history, the myths of the Aborigines and researches the principles of being.

PANTA RHEI, everything flows – water as a principle of world design

Her means of expression is initially photography, which she later extends to video art. By documenting her interventions in the seemingly untouched landscapes of the Australian continent, she creates her own forms of expression through digital techniques. The incessant movements of nature inspire her to make the dialectical principle in human reality management visible in digital media.

Microcosm and macrocosm

It is documented how the concentration on the perception of geological processes generates creative impulses in the viewer. According to Heide Schimke, the microcosm of individual experience of nature in the consciousness of the uniqueness of human existence cannot be valued highly enough for the value-oriented functioning of mass societies. Thus the modernist, divisive concept of time is dissolved in the imagined company of mythical wanderers. Dreamtime was both long ago and is still as much here as it will be tomorrow’. The past is present. It reaches into the future as lived memory. It is essential for our personal development and for the development of humanity as a whole.

The whole as the sum of its parts

For Heide Schimke, the perception of nature clarifies the mental structure of our mind in contrast to the so-called artificial intelligence. One-sided, self-contained and thus absolutist systems do not do justice to the dialectic of human levels of being. In the potentiation of systematized thinking, the analysis and organization of all areas of life, the counterbalance of human knowledge through consciousness is missing, as we experience it through activation and concentration from our sensory perception.

Human balance

The human ability to connect emotionally with the world in a complex way and to shape it cannot be replaced, at least not at present. Technical intelligence such as AI is based solely on enormous computing power. It can therefore only serve to illustrate even extremely complex systems. It can create models, but it can never replace reality. The decisive questions are still answered by humans. According to Heide Schimke, ‘there will only be balance if we maintain this mode of our own experience under human ethical conditions’