Gaming into Mindfulness
Interview with Joas Nebe by Rebecca Schoensee (excerpt)

“It’s a never-ending game of disintegration. I challenge the viewer by not living up to his or her expectations. I am denying the satisfaction of solving the riddle, hidden within the depth of my artwork.” By turning his filmic cabinet of curiosity into an intriguing jigsaw puzzle of hybrid geometric patterns, Joas Nebe teases the viewer into accessing his game. He believes: “Riddle games of this kind spark creativity and pass on the role of the artist to the viewer.”

Taking the Reason Prisoner

To Nebe, “fantasy and creative intelligence are important survival skills today.” So is chess, an analogy he keeps referring to: “Chess exemplifies my game with the viewer. In a world of shortening attention spans, it’s an ideal concentration-practice. One always has to think a few steps in advance.” By screening the insanity of our daily chase towards evolutionary bankruptcy, Nebe in a clever move takes the reason prisoner, only to appoint reason to be the king of his game of chess. He calls for a close review of the encyclopedia of our philosophical and cultural foundations. In his opinion reason has the potential to direct a path away from the horror vacui he is depicting: “The model of enlightenment has increasingly been discredited, wrongfully I believe. Today survival and coexistence are only possible if governed by the faculty of reason. Labeling and connoting intellectual categories help to bring new relations into sight and to gain unexpected terms of knowledge.”

The interview essay "Gaming Into Mindfulness" has been published in Humanize Magazine, issue 11, p. 20-31.