Curators' note (Amador Vega):
With his MEDITATIONES. A metaphysical laboratory (2016), David Link embraces this poetological project by recognising the creative potential of Llull's ars combinatoria. According to the artist's description, the installation consists of an animated digital book that continues to write itself: while the visitor reads the two open pages, the next ones are in the process of being generated and so on. The scene is set in a space that calls to mind the cloistered environment of a monk's cell. On a lectern in the corner of the room is a paper copy of the book produced by the digital activity of the software, which visitors can leaf through. The work contains an ongoing meditation on the central concepts of Llull's Ars magna: the Absolute Principles (figure A) and the Relative Principles (figure T), as well as the lists of virtues and vices. The flow of text is not repeated and continually creates new meanings, with the result that it drains the concepts of meaning and seems to abolish the signification of any language at any time. The software created is based on semantic networks, shown on a screen in the room, in which each word is linked to another in the same way as the concepts in figure A of Llull's Ars generalis ultima. In Link, we have an example of an expert in generative and computer-generated text systems (see his book Poesiemaschinen/ Maschinenpoesie [Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007]) who does not ignore the poetic aspect and the capacity for invention using a few given elements. The tension between poetic freedom and mechanism is not alien to poetry itself, at least that poetry that seeks in the meter the explosive surprise of the verse. Who knows if, in the title Meditationes, Link is not thinking ironically of Descartes' Meditationes de prima philosophia by using the title of the French philosopher's metaphysical work for his installation?