Roland Benedikter - Arts and Philosophy As Related To Post-Ideological Education

Arts and Philosophy As Related To Post-Ideological Education

Benedikter cooperates with artists like Giovanni Melillo Kostner (Fotografi senza frontiere / Photographers without frontiers, a global NGO) and Martha Jimenez Rosano on issues located at the interface between social research, art and documentation.

Regarding his own preferences, as far as known Benedikter has been positive about Darren Aronofsky's 2006 film The Fountain. According to his statements over time though, his favourite movie seems to be "Out 1 - Noli me tangere" by Jacques Rivette (1971–72, 12:40 hours, 16 mm) and some films of Jean-Luc Godard, Andreji Tarkowskij and Wim Wenders. Some of his favourite books are Thomas Aquinas' "On Being and Essence", "Faust" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Les miserables" by Victor Hugo and "The Philosophy of Freedom" by Rudolf Steiner; and among his favourite painters are Giotto, Max Beckmann and Emilio Vedova.

With regard to the arts, Benedikter in its basic sensitivity to time and space has been occasionally asserting to be essentially "a musician", being destined, at the age between 18 and 20, to become a pianist after 13 years of professional education. Benedikter is known to be a composer of experimental pop music tracks since the 1990s, all of them in 7/4 rhythm. The 7/4 rhythm, according to Benedikter, "forces the audience to fly in a balanced and attentive way, as the future requires, instead of stamping in 4/4, as rock'n'roll and pop wanted to suggest. 7/4 is kind of the 'golden ratio' transferred to music".

Also, "music is time that resists against time" because it "brings time to consciousness of itself, of time in its own happening while it is happening. It is something more human than the current human being; and something more political than most politics that are being enacted."

In this sense, "music may serve as a model for a thinking mind in general. It is a model of rationality and enlightenment as a concrete performative act in time and space, instead of any abstract programme or ideology. I think we may try to transfer some of the aspects music is about to academic thinking and science, particularly to the social sciences and the humanities."

Nevertheless, Benedikter - in public statements and interviews of the recent years - seems to be of the opinion that there is no art whatsoever that compares to the new images of the universe provided by ESO, ALMA (since October 2011) and Hubble, being them "like modern art by Emilio Vedova, but just much more than that, since they are the reality", i.e. "the most moving and stunning perceptions probably ever caught by the eye of humanity, in search of its own place and role in space and time."