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Base of Shoes and Superstructure of Experiments You Only Need to Imagine

Pavel Sterec

29.08. – 21.09.14

A bankrupted factory and experiments that actually never took place are meeting in an exhibition space where nobody goes.
Using an unsophisticated metaphor, the exhibition (superim)poses shoes as a base and thought experiments as a superstructure: artefacts found by the author in a bankrupted shoe factory (Kosuta, Cetinje, Montenegro) and thought experiments borrowed from different thinkers as they put them down in their texts in history (Block, Leibniz, Searle).
Generally speaking, thought experiments – despite the fact they operate with specific actors and details from the world around us – only take place in one’s mind and we do not have to (or cannot) make them happen in the real world. All thought experiments at the exhibition relate stereotypically, and not by coincidence, to China.
In the author’s intuitive perception of materialistic determinism, the base stripped of its assets corresponds to a masturbation-like nature of the superstructure of thought experiments. Experiments carried out only in one’s mind can also be considered an efficient and economic measure. We may thus come across it more often in the future in consequence of economic cuts: not only in philosophy, but also in science and culture.