Finding 2

Why should finding be the subject of an art project like The Atlantis Blues? Because in finding Atlantis, Marianne Schuit proved how incredibly much the human brain is dedicated to finding? Yes. Does the myriad of phenomena to be found in Atlantis not reflect the myriad of phenomena we find today whenever we go looking for something?

Be it shoes, cars, boat trips or friends, in contemporary life we find dozens of them without even looking for them. Dozens? Anyone who has ever used Google (or Yahoo... or... or...), is familiar with the tidal wave of findings he is confronted with while looking for some piece of information.

Contemporary society is – however odd this may seem – much, much more about finding than it is about searching. In fact there is so much to be found that a lot of people do not even know anymore what they are looking for. Before they can make up their minds about what they are looking for, all they have already found already puzzles their minds to such a degree, they lost track of even the vaguest idea about what they are actually looking for.

Nowadays psychologists are familiar with this contemporary condition: choice stress. People do find so much, they are not able anymore to choose from it, because every choice they make, makes them aware of the fact that they have to forget about all the other possibilities. What if I had chosen that other thing? Would my life not have been better than it is already?

It is the ability to find which has taken us from our hostile, cold, unsafe cave to our nice, warm, safe apartment. But like anything else man has invented, there are (at least) two sides to this. Life in that cave was hard but simple. Life in our apartment is easy going but complicated.

This being the case, is not Atlantis living proof that we are still able to cope with this? He who takes the time - if present amidst all his finding... - to look a little bit better at Atlantis, to take a step back to see ‘the whole picture’, will see that its paradoxical complexity still rests in an undisturbed harmony. Underneath the boundless restlessness of Atlantis there is a grand calm.

That’s what The Atlantis Blues is exploring: the paradoxical tension brought forth by the noble art of finding, a tension that seems to be an integral part of the contemporary human condition.