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society.
Albert Einstein once stated that scientific theories are free creations of the human mind, and that he considered it to be the most wonderful thing to be able to use them, nevertheless, to explain the world. The same might be said of art. As a free creation of the human mind, it does not explain an independent world; rather, it takes issue with the experience of the subject in his world, and offers various explanatory models for a context in which the observer and the work partake.
Vilém Flusser’s thesis states that the function of art is to create other worlds and to enable access to other realities. Anyone who produces a work of art not only expresses with it a part of himself and his environment, but also brings about a dialogue with other observers and a projection of other realities. Because art commits itself to this process, changing the world—expanding human realities (knowledge, experiences, sensations or perceptions)— becomes its cause.
From this perspective, every reality is based on experiences and actions of the creator as well as of the viewer, and is thus one argument in a (possible) explanation. As an operation within a consensual domain, the dialogic process can expand this domain and contribute to the emergence of new consensual domains, leading to an expansion of experiences, knowledge and arguments, which can potentially result in an altered cognitive horizon. Accordingly, as a form of communication, art must be ascribed to the domain of cognition that creates the prerequisites of communication. «Thought, science and art are selfreferential cognitive processes, but they are not self-maintaining: they need the physical-chemical existence of organisms that bring forth cognition, and with it thought, science and art. Whereas autopoietic systems can invariably carry out self-maintenance only in the physical-chemical framework preordained by their environment, cognitive processes are free from these restrictions and obey only internal laws and exigencies.» [11]
In the art domain, therefore, reference to knowledge does not mean an approach to its possible
