Breaking the cage
As part of the transdisciplinary team, artist Koen Vanmechelen selected Breaking the cage as the artwork to integrate the ideations of group 5 with the feedback and reflections of the transdisciplinary team.
Transdisciplinary team feedback group 5
Society. “My freedom doesn’t stop where someone else’s freedom begins.” This is a statement that breaks with the current cliché of repressive freedom, of freedom as defined by the least tolerant. Why should we conform to such a flawed notion of freedom, and how can we quantify – and perhaps even maximise – freedom with a set of paradoxes and dilemmas? There’s this an almost utopian idea that those dilemmas could be the key to reconciliation.
It’s interesting to note that you haven’t tried to define freedom itself; after all, freedom is always part of a wider context.
As we see it, there are two main directions in which you can proceed. The first one has to do with the question of whether freedom is quantifiable. If it is, doesn’t achieving the greatest possible degree of freedom become simply a matter of optimisation? Many thinkers before you have considered this problem… Because, undoubtedly, this approach also entails certain dangers. Where is the moral aspect of your algorithm? How do you choose one from the other, and how do you define boundaries? Take a case where my freedoms are many and someone else’s are few: from an optimisation standpoint, this might be defensible. But not from a moral one. Perhaps you could explore this, using a case study?
The second direction relates to your idea of freedom as a learning space. As you say: freedom has a language, and freedom can be learned… The idea of a common language of freedom in diversity is very tempting in a world that is complex, and in which the differences between communities can often barely be bridged by words anymore.
