Knowledge is connected with the sense of sight: Anyone who has witnessed something can testify to it, that is, know it. Instruments of knowledge such as archives, collections, lists and encyclopedias arrange that which is confusing. Diagrams, maps and atlases provide an overview. Models and charts give shape to the abstract and the invisible. As in scientific treatises, conceptualization is at work here. They formulate, systematize, classify and discard. Despite all the striving for objectivity and universality, these patterns of order are not irrefutable: as the results of numerous assumptions and products of their historical and social conditions, they can even be controversial. Knowledge is not arbitrary, but changing, and there are numerous vantage points.

The surprisingly playful “Chronographic Map” has been handed down to us from the 18th century. Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg (1709-79) of France created a sensorial and pre-cinematic apparatus for the laborious study of a multitude of historical treatises. Using cranks, the then-accepted version of human history—which spanned 6500 years, beginning with Adam and Eve—could be viewed in one piece. The 16-meter-long timeline with sophisticated pictograms made it possible to identify historically parallel developments. For the art historian Astrid Schmidt-Burkhardt, this early learning machine is a remarkable feat of visual and interactive vision, of entertaining, even cheerful, scholarship.

Seeing and knowing, art and science have been connected since their beginnings and can mutually fertilize each other in interplay. Art offered room for visions and speculations to develop. Some of them even became reality. Art was always of its time or revolutionary, when it was able to capture current world knowledge in an image. Categories, images and methods of science are themselves always reflections of the current understanding of the world and, as such, objects of artistic inspiration and criticism.

In the course of globalization and digitization, media and scientific advances have developed a rapid dynamic of knowledge. Information has never been as accessible as it is today. Archives and museums have been opened up to the Internet and can be searched regardless of place and time. They are complemented by new digital knowledge platforms and methods for global and collective data collection. In doing so, the viewing angles beyond Western and modern hegemonies multiply. The previously suppressed and devalued can be seen. Some, however, are already seeing a new Middle Ages emerging, in view of the imbalance between accessible information and human capabilities of absorption, between scientific progress and cognitive inertia. Considering the current explosion of “alternative” and “felt” facts, hair-raising denials of history and reality, as well as conspiracy theories, this may be obvious.

Can art provide us orientation in the profusion of and contradictions in information? Does it have methods of questioning false certainties and recognizing the new and future-oriented? Can it help us to see the entire overview and the interconnected dependencies of the conditions of our existence—in short: the big picture?