23. Salon

Shadow Knowledge

Mit Rosa Menkman.


Shadow Knowledge is knowledge of how to perceive the shadows; the fringes of what is enlightened (or not in the dark) but also knowledge of what exists in the shadows....

Discussions about what is "real" are often fuelled by the use of terms like “hyperreal”, “fake” or "alternative facts". As a result, the 2010s have become a very interesting decennium for images of "reality". As it turns out Standard Models need extensions, fields of knowledge can scale and vision can reach beyond the unseeable. Take for instance the discovery of the Higgs boson particle (2012) or the capturing of the shadow of a black hole (2019) - these are examples of when science and imagination cross and together shatter norms previously thought of as 'universal realities'.
Even for the laymen, realities should now finally be understood as complex and multiple. And because of this, we need space for Shadow Knowledge - knowledge derived from objects of unsupported dimension and scale. In the shadows, things lack definition. The shadows offer shady outlines that can functions either as vectors of progress or as a paint by numbers.