λ1 — Natur & Technik: Group Exhibition

Technology and nature are in a constant state of tension: the more radically technology picks up speed, the more visibly nature suffers. It is as if both are competing for the same resources. This state of affairs is reflected in the dichotomy of different pairs: the natural sciences and the humanities, reason and emotion, the creative and logical hemispheres of the brain. This pair has always been considered incompatible. But this was not always the case.

The ancient Greek term téchne (ancient Greek τέχνη) probably originates - as far as can be reconstructed - from pre-Socratic antiquity and originally referred to manual dexterity; the ability to translate theoretical knowledge into practical action. Or also: to translate virtual theory into a natural reality.

Since industrialisation in particular, technology has lost its role as a medium for translation and has increasingly become a metaphor for man-made destruction and displacement of nature - this image reached a cinematographic climax with the 1982 experimental film "Koyaanisqatsi" directed by Godfrey Reggio.

Technology - at least according to the Aristotelian idea - should build a bridge between the manual framework of action and the transcending experiential value of an activity, a science or a work. It has become a buzzword of innovation-obsessed start-ups and a synonym for an out-of-touch view of the world. Where can technology and nature come together again? In art, of course.

Art has always described the transcendent, which defies rational attempts at explanation. It raises a question of faith, a spiritual dilemma that takes the viewer into a world beyond the tangible. A world that can be defined down to the quantum and at the same time defies the most complex equations and can be experienced by the senses.

At Galerie Watson, this fusion finds a preliminary form in the first dedicated group exhibition "Nature and Technology". Ten international artists, including Dori Deng, Monika Grzymala, Tom Jacobi, Regine Schumann, Keith Sonnier, DRIFT, Jacqueline Hen, Marlies von Soden, Protey Temen and Jan Philip Scheibe, explore the aesthetic and social interfaces between these two worlds.

There is no contradiction between nature and technology, between art and science. Only language separates the rationally describable and the irrationally tangible. Or as Victor Franz Hess, the first Austrian Nobel Prize winner for experimental physics, said: "Anyone who believes that there is a contradiction between the natural sciences and religion does not understand the natural sciences."