You say: the real, the world as it is. But it is not, it becomes! [...]
The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.
John Cage in conversation with Daniel Charles,
Christopher Shultis:Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of Nonintention,
in: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Summer 1995), S. 319.
When John Cage made this remark in 1970 in a conversation with Daniel Charles, the world was still divided into firm blocks with no sense of mobility, a matter of course in today’s media age. John Cage shows, that the coincidences which appear in his notations can be seen – together with the coincidences which occur during the display of his works – as art. That means that information based on coincidences together with substantiality becomes the reality of the piece of music.
Cage articulates that something coincidental does not have to be arbitrary.
In the 21st century, the once inflexible categories came into motion. Art and science became closer.
As a result, this years documenta 13 hired quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger as a consultant.
Zeilinger is convinced that the role of coincidence is one of the most important discoveries in natural sciences in the 20th century, and also that the concepts of information and substantiality are interwoven and inseperable.
Although the world as process has come to the fore, substantiality and reality are still taken for the same. But reality is the result of the interaction between coincidence with information and substantiality as a potentiality. To continue to make this idea clear, is the core discipline of art how Cage understands it.
The concept of the exhibition “im Orbital” broaches the issue of coincidence in the tradition of John Cage and the design of substantiality of quantum theory. The shown drawings and animations are determined by coincidences.