PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

Overarching Structure / DAHNKE is a liminal art enterprise oriented around its cornerstone project, Polymathic Aestheticism, which documents the process of building a comprehensive meta-ideology/worldview that is more suitable for navigating the material conditions of a Postmodern/Metamodern world. Including Polymathic Aestheticism, there are four total projects comprising the enterprise, the other three use both implicit imagery and explicit prose and schemas to reinforce the ideology’s primary principles and values, namely: creativity, individual self empowerment, and collective harmony.

Grey Matter and The Polybody focus on the basic essentials for the individual to cultivate a creative mentality, and maintain an optimal physical body, respectively. The former is presented implicitly through an ongoing series of layered drawings, while the latter takes a more explicit format to express its core concepts. Being basic in their nature, these two projects utilize minimal color; black, white and shades of grey, as a mode to convey their simplicity.

Blackgold and Polymathic Aestheticism are more concerned with the collective; the former shines light on how we view ideas that are foreign or challenging to the current status quo, and the latter integrates all aspects of the first three projects into a unified system. Again, these projects too have an implicit, imaged base presentation and a explicit, schematic/written presentation. Being wholistic in their nature, these two projects use a broader range of color to convey their complexity.

Beginning with the flagship project Grey Matter, each supporting project is designed to illustrate a stepwise process that flows from individual creative empowerment to collective harmonic integration as follows:

1 / Cultivation of the creative faculty

The rise to creative empowerment is engendered by invoking the creative mindset. Shifting our gaze inwards towards an individual’s subjective consciousness, we begin our enterprise with an investigation into the realm of ideas, feelings, thoughts, perceptions, creative potential, and the nature of reality. Taken altogether these areas of internal experience are illustrated via the Grey Matter project.

2 / Nurturing the vehicle of experience

Once our internal nature has been thoroughly investigated and illustrated, we turn our gaze towards the external aspect of self and what is necessary to support and optimize the individual’s unique body, its objective functions and actions. This aspect of creative development is expressed through a series of health protocols for diet/nutrition, movement/biomechanics, and stress reduction/trauma release that together make up The Polybody project.

3 / Open interaction

After exploring the entirety of an individual’s creative abilities, both internal and external aspects, we set our gaze upon “the other” and how we respond to and interact with other entities, individuals, experiences, and objects alike. In American society which is a Caucasian majority, patriarchal leaning, religious based hegemony; the often stigmatized other, more specifically, consist of: women, racial minorities, foreigners, LGBTQ, elders, sex workers, drugs, and death, to name a few. This focuses our attention to how individuals can shift their gaze from preconceived notions to creatively and productively interact with other individuals and entities from marginalized society and subcultures; the predominant subject of the Blackgold project.

4 / Integration & elevation

Finally, upon completion of our investigations into the individual’s personal and interpersonal interactions, we now soften the focus of our gaze from our practical experiences, to rise up to a bird's-eye-view of the collective situation at hand. From these elevated heights we can now obtain a more broad vantage point of how all entities can work together as a whole to navigate and recreate the world and its system of values. This ultimate integration, approached as a comprehensive system of values—abstract, practical, ethical and aesthetic—is an application of the abilities developed in our previous projects to the needs and issues of everyday life. This new value system is presented as the formation of a robust ideology that is designed to produce a steady stream of ceaseless beauty and creativity in all aspects of life—the task at hand in the Polymathic Aestheticism project.

Detailed Project Descriptions / click images below