Thomas Schmenger and the Philosophy of Medientanz
Introduction: Against the Quick Answer
There is a particular kind of intellectual courage required to resist the demand for clarity. In an era defined by optimised search results, algorithmic certainty, and the relentless pressure to reduce complexity to bullet points, the work of Thomas Schmenger — operating under the name medientanz — occupies a deliberately uncomfortable position. It neither delivers answers nor performs the theatre of expertise. Instead, it cultivates the conditions in which genuine questions become possible.
Medientanz — a compound of the German words for media and dance — is the name Schmenger gives to his interdisciplinary laboratory, based in Landau in the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany. It is at once a design practice, a philosophical project, and a mode of inquiry that refuses to settle comfortably into any one of these categories. The work encompasses painting and installation, photography and video, sound, performance, writing, and, increasingly, experimentation with artificial intelligence. What unifies this sprawling practice is not a consistent medium or even a consistent aesthetic, but a consistent intellectual posture: the willingness to remain genuinely uncertain.
This article traces the philosophical foundations of Schmenger’s work, examining the thinking that underlies the practice and asking what kind of contribution medientanz makes to contemporary debates at the intersection of art, design, philosophy, and technology. It draws on the published content of the medientanz website — a substantial body of essays, provocations, and exploratory texts — as well as the broader intellectual tradition to which this work implicitly belongs.
Fluid Design: The Ethics of Openness
The central concept animating medientanz is what Schmenger calls “fluid design” — a practice of form-giving that remains deliberately open, provisional, and responsive to change. This is not, it should be noted, merely a stylistic preference or a description of working method. It is a philosophical position with real ethical weight.
Classical design theory, from the Bauhaus tradition through to much of twentieth-century functionalism, has tended to privilege the finished object — the designed artefact that fulfils its purpose with maximum efficiency and minimum ambiguity. The designer disappears behind the object; the user encounters a seamless interface between intention and function. There is something admirable about this tradition, but also something philosophically limiting. It tends to assume that the problems to be solved are already well-defined, that the criteria for success are already established, and that the role of design is essentially executive rather than interrogative.
Schmenger’s fluid design proceeds from the opposite assumption. The problems are not yet defined. The criteria are contested. The process of design is itself a process of question-formation. In this respect, his position has strong affinities with what design theorists call “wicked problems” — problems so complex, interconnected, and value-laden that no definitive solution is possible. What design can offer, in this context, is not a solution but a space: a resonance space, to use Schmenger’s own terminology, in which different perspectives can encounter one another and something new can emerge.
The concept of iterative creation, which Schmenger develops at length in his published writing, is central here. Each version of a work is understood not as a failed attempt to reach the final form but as a genuinely informative stage in an unfolding process. Mistakes are not catastrophes to be avoided but data to be read. This is, of course, a recognisable principle in contemporary design practice — the language of iteration, prototyping, and rapid feedback cycles is ubiquitous in the design world. But Schmenger takes the idea further, suggesting that iterative thinking is not merely a useful technique but a fundamental attitude toward reality itself. The world, in this view, does not yield to those who demand final answers. It reveals itself — partially, provisionally, and always with surprises — to those who remain genuinely open to revision.
The Philosophy of Contradiction
One of the most distinctive and philosophically rich features of Schmenger’s work is his sustained engagement with contradiction. Where much contemporary thought — in design, in management theory, in public discourse — treats contradiction as a problem to be resolved, medientanz treats it as a resource to be cultivated.
This is a recognisably dialectical sensibility, though Schmenger does not invoke Hegel explicitly. The claim is that opposites do not simply negate one another but produce, through their encounter, something that neither contains alone. Tension is generative. Dissonance is informative. The contradiction between, say, the rational and the intuitive, the systematic and the spontaneous, the finished and the unfinished, is not a deficiency to be corrected but a condition of genuine creative thought.
In practice, this means that the medientanz laboratory explicitly seeks out what Schmenger calls the “beautiful conflict” — the point at which aesthetic considerations run up against functional ones, at which individual expression meets collective responsibility, at which the analogue texture of physical materials encounters the abstract precision of digital code. These are not margins to be tidied away. They are, in Schmenger’s view, precisely where the interesting work happens.
There is something here that connects Schmenger’s practice to a broader tradition in German philosophy and art — the tradition that runs from Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment as a kind of structured free play, through Schiller’s letters on aesthetic education, to Adorno’s insistence on the cognitive value of artistic contradiction. In each case, the claim is that art and design are not mere decoration or entertainment but modes of thinking, and that their capacity to hold contradictory elements in productive tension is precisely what makes them epistemically valuable — that is, valuable as ways of knowing.
Intelligence, Pattern, and the Limits of Measurement
A significant strand of Schmenger’s published work engages with questions of intelligence — its definition, its measurement, its multiple forms, and its relationship to the machines that now claim, in some sense, to exhibit it. These are not casual excursions into fashionable territory. They reflect a sustained philosophical curiosity about what it means to think, to perceive, and to make meaning.
Schmenger traces the history of intelligence testing from Alfred Binet’s early twentieth-century work on cognitive assessment through Charles Spearman’s influential concept of general intelligence — the so-called “g factor” — and on to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which proposed that human cognitive capacity cannot be reduced to a single dimension. This intellectual history is not treated as dry academic background but as a live controversy with contemporary relevance. The question of what intelligence is, how it is distributed, and how it can be recognised and cultivated bears directly on questions of education, social organisation, and the design of technological systems.
The exploration of pattern recognition in Schmenger’s work operates at a similar level of depth. Pattern recognition — the capacity to identify regularities, structures, and meaningful configurations in streams of data — is, of course, one of the central capacities of contemporary artificial intelligence. Machine learning systems are, at a technical level, sophisticated pattern-matching engines. But Schmenger is interested in what this tells us about human cognition as well. If machines can recognise patterns, what remains distinctively human about the act of perception? If an algorithm can identify a face in a photograph or a melody in a sound file, what does this say about the nature of aesthetic experience?
These are not questions Schmenger answers definitively — consistent with his broader philosophical orientation, he treats them as productive provocations rather than solvable problems. The contribution of medientanz in this domain is to hold these questions open, to resist the premature closure that comes from either enthusiastic technophilia (the claim that AI has solved cognition) or defensive humanism (the claim that human intelligence is categorically different and therefore unthreatened). The more interesting and honest position, Schmenger suggests, is one of genuine uncertainty — an openness to the possibility that the encounter between human and machine intelligence is transforming both.
Systemic Thinking and the Commons
The ecological and social dimensions of Schmenger’s work are perhaps the most explicitly political, though they are grounded in the same philosophical framework as everything else. The central concern is with shared resources — physical, cultural, informational — and with the conditions under which they can be sustainably maintained and equitably distributed.
The concept of the commons — originally a medieval legal term for land held collectively by a community — has been revived in recent decades as a framework for thinking about shared resources of all kinds, from urban public space to open-source software to the global atmosphere. Schmenger engages with what the ecologist Garrett Hardin famously called the “tragedy of the commons”: the risk that individually rational behaviour leads collectively to the destruction of shared resources. But he does so critically, noting that the tragedy is not inevitable — that communities have historically developed sophisticated norms and institutions for managing common resources sustainably — and that the framing of the problem matters enormously for the solutions we are able to imagine.
The treatment of urban space in Schmenger’s work illustrates this concern concretely. His writing on car-free city centres, for instance, engages rigorously with the empirical literature on the economic and social effects of pedestrianisation, drawing on case studies from German and European cities. But the argument goes beyond urban planning. The question of how we organise shared space — who has priority, whose needs are recognised, whose presence is welcomed and whose is marginalised — is at root a question about the kind of community we want to be.
Systemic thinking, as a method, is what allows these different scales to be held together. A systemic approach does not treat urban congestion, climate change, social inequality, and the design of public institutions as separate problems to be handled by separate specialists. It asks how they are connected — what feedback loops, emergent properties, and unintended consequences link them — and what leverage points might allow us to intervene productively. This is a demanding intellectual orientation, and one that is at odds with the fragmentation of contemporary academic and professional life. Medientanz can be understood, in part, as a laboratory for practising this kind of integrated thinking.
Play, Chance, and the Generative Unknown
Among the most distinctive features of Schmenger’s practice is the role assigned to chance — in German, Zufall, a word that carries an etymological suggestion of something that falls toward you, arrives unbidden, exceeds your control. This is not the mere randomness of dice throws or procedural generation, though both have their place in the medientanz repertoire. It is a deeper attitude toward the relationship between intention and accident in creative work.
The laboratory format of medientanz is designed to create conditions in which unexpected things can happen: encounters between materials, ideas, and people that were not planned in advance and could not have been predicted from the starting conditions. This has clear affinities with the tradition of experimental art — Dada, Fluxus, the Situationists, and the long history of performance and process art — but it is also grounded in a philosophical claim about the nature of creativity itself.
The claim is that genuine creativity — as opposed to skilled execution of a pre-formed idea — requires a genuine encounter with the unknown. You cannot design your way to a truly new idea; you can only create the conditions in which such an idea might arrive. Play, in this context, is not a frivolous alternative to serious work. It is the mode of engagement that keeps possibilities open, that does not foreclose on the unexpected, that treats the encounter with the unplanned as a resource rather than an obstacle.
This connects Schmenger’s work to a rich tradition of philosophical reflection on play — from Schiller’s famous claim that man is fully human only when he plays, through Winnicott’s account of play as the foundation of creative living, to more recent work in cognitive science and education that emphasises the epistemic value of exploratory, non-goal-directed activity. What all these traditions share is a resistance to the instrumentalisation of creative activity — the reduction of play to a means toward a predetermined end.
Socratic Method and the Art of the Question
Running through all of Schmenger’s published writing is a commitment to the Socratic method — the ancient Greek philosophical practice of using questions to expose the limits of what we think we know and to create the conditions for genuine inquiry. The connection is explicit: medientanz publishes a substantial treatment of Socratic questioning as both a philosophical tradition and a practical tool for facilitating dialogue.
Socrates himself, as rendered in Plato’s dialogues, was famously resistant to offering positive doctrines. His method was elenctic — a process of cross-examination designed to reveal the internal contradictions in his interlocutors’ beliefs, not to replace those beliefs with his own. The philosophical value of this approach, according to Schmenger, lies precisely in its refusal to provide the closure that people typically demand from intellectual authority. A good question is not a failed answer. It is a genuine contribution to thought — one that changes the space of possibilities by opening it up rather than closing it down.
This is not, it should be emphasised, an abdication of intellectual responsibility. The cultivation of good questions requires considerable knowledge, judgment, and skill. You cannot ask a genuinely illuminating question about a subject you know nothing about; the question will simply be naive rather than productively uncertain. What Schmenger’s Socratic orientation demands is a combination of genuine expertise and genuine humility — the willingness to bring substantial knowledge to bear while acknowledging the limits of what that knowledge can establish.
The practical implication for the design of medientanz activities — workshops, events, installations, publications — is that the primary goal is not the transmission of information but the stimulation of thought. A successful medientanz intervention is one that leaves participants asking different, better questions than they were asking before. Whether it also leaves them with any specific new knowledge is, in a sense, secondary.
Resonance Spaces: A Theory of Encounter
The concept of the “resonance space” — Resonanzraum in German — is perhaps the most distinctive theoretical contribution of Schmenger’s work, and deserves careful attention. It is not simply a metaphor for a productive environment, though it is that too. It is a philosophically substantive idea about the conditions under which genuine dialogue — between people, between ideas, between disciplines, between the human and the non-human — becomes possible.
The concept draws, at least implicitly, on the sociology of Hartmut Rosa, whose work on resonance has become influential in German-speaking social theory. For Rosa, resonance is a mode of relationship characterised by genuine mutual responsiveness — a condition in which subject and world are neither fused (pure resonance, which eliminates the subject) nor alienated (pure silence, which eliminates the relationship), but in productive, dynamic contact. Resonance, on this account, is the opposite of alienation: it is the experience of being genuinely affected by and genuinely affecting the world.
Schmenger’s resonance spaces are designed with this goal in mind. They are physical and conceptual environments in which participants can experience genuine encounter — with one another, with materials, with ideas — without that encounter being predetermined or managed in advance. The space is structured enough to provide orientation but open enough to allow genuine surprise. It is, one might say, a scored improvisation: there are parameters, but within those parameters, genuine creativity is possible.
This concept has particular relevance in the context of contemporary debates about the design of digital public spaces. Social media platforms, as currently designed, are extraordinarily effective at generating volume — enormous quantities of expression, reaction, and counter-reaction — but deeply problematic as resonance spaces. They are designed to maximise engagement, which typically means maximising emotional intensity, which typically means amplifying conflict and outrage rather than facilitating genuine dialogue. The design choices embedded in these platforms — the metrics that are measured, the behaviours that are rewarded, the structures that are provided — profoundly shape the kinds of relationships and conversations they make possible.
Schmenger’s insistence on the design of genuine resonance spaces is thus not merely an aesthetic preference but a political intervention in contemporary information culture. It argues, by practice if not always by explicit statement, that the quality of our shared intellectual and social life depends on the quality of the spaces — physical and digital — in which that life takes place.
Artificial Intelligence as Philosophical Mirror
Schmenger’s engagement with artificial intelligence is one of the most rapidly developing strands of the medientanz project, and one of the most philosophically interesting. It is not the engagement of a technologist or an engineer — there is no interest in building AI systems or optimising their performance. It is the engagement of a philosophical artist, using AI as a medium for inquiry.
The central question, as Schmenger frames it, is not “what can AI do?” but “what does AI reveal about us?” This is a subtle but important reorientation. The dominant discourse around artificial intelligence treats it primarily as a set of capabilities — impressive, alarming, economically significant — and asks what we should do with or about these capabilities. Schmenger’s approach treats AI as a philosophical mirror: a new kind of entity whose properties, limitations, and modes of operation cast reflected light on assumptions about human cognition, creativity, and social life that we might not otherwise examine.
What does it mean, for instance, that a language model can produce fluent, contextually appropriate text on almost any topic, and yet cannot be said to understand what it is writing? What does this tell us about the relationship between linguistic competence and conceptual understanding — a question that philosophers of mind and language have debated for decades? What does it mean that pattern-recognition systems can identify objects, faces, and emotional states in images with superhuman accuracy, and yet have no phenomenal experience of seeing? What does the existence of such systems tell us about the relationship between perceptual information-processing and conscious experience?
These are not merely academic questions. They bear on how we understand ourselves, how we design our educational and social institutions, and how we navigate the increasingly intimate entanglement of human and machine intelligence in everyday life. Schmenger’s contribution is to keep these questions alive and uncomfortable — to resist the flattening that comes from either uncritical enthusiasm or reflexive hostility.
Conclusion: The Value of Productive Discomfort
What does medientanz offer that more conventional academic or professional practices do not? The question is worth addressing directly, not least because the answer illuminates what is genuinely distinctive about this kind of interdisciplinary laboratory work.
Academic disciplines, at their best, offer deep knowledge, rigorous methods, and communities of expert judgment. They are well-designed for advancing knowledge within established frameworks. What they are less well-designed for is questioning those frameworks themselves — asking whether the assumptions built into a discipline’s methods and concepts are adequate to the phenomena they are meant to illuminate. This is the work of philosophy, but philosophy in the academy has become increasingly specialised and technical, less accessible to the broader intellectual culture that might benefit from its resources.
Design practice, at its best, offers creative problem-solving, sensitivity to material and formal properties, and a capacity for synthesis — for bringing together disparate elements into coherent configurations. What it is less well-designed for is the sustained philosophical reflection that might clarify which problems are worth solving and why.
Medientanz occupies the space between these practices. It is not academic enough to claim the authority of disciplinary expertise, and not professional enough to claim the efficiency of market-tested solutions. This is not a weakness. It is precisely the position from which genuinely integrative, genuinely questioning work becomes possible. The laboratory format, the commitment to play and experiment, the cultivation of contradiction and uncertainty, the insistence on resonance over mere communication — all of these are designed to create the conditions in which something genuinely new can be thought.
The intellectual lineage of this kind of practice is long and distinguished. It includes the Romantic tradition of Naturphilosophie, which sought to bring scientific and artistic sensibilities into dialogue. It includes the Bauhaus, which insisted that the separation of art from craft, and both from social function, was an impoverishment of all three. It includes the experimental art practices of the twentieth century, which demonstrated that the boundaries of art are always provisional and that crossing them is one of art’s most important functions. It includes the tradition of philosophical pragmatism, which insists that ideas be evaluated not only by their logical coherence but by their consequences for lived experience.
What makes medientanz contemporary is its engagement with the specific conditions and challenges of the present moment: the transformation of cognition and communication by digital technology, the ecological crisis that demands new ways of thinking about human relationships with natural systems, the political fragmentation that makes genuine dialogue across difference increasingly difficult, and the cultural acceleration that makes sustained reflection increasingly rare.
In each of these contexts, what Schmenger offers is not a solution but a practice — a practice of attentive, playful, philosophically informed engagement with the complexity of the world as it actually is. The dancer who gives the practice its name does not impose a fixed choreography on the media around them; they improvise, respond, and discover movement through movement. This is not a model for passivity or relativism — on the contrary, it demands considerable skill, knowledge, and commitment. But it holds open the possibility that the most important next steps are ones we cannot yet imagine.
That, finally, is the gift of productive discomfort: not the guarantee of an answer, but the assurance that the question is worth living with.
Thomas Schmenger is the founder and principal of medientanz, an interdisciplinary laboratory based in Landau, Germany. His work spans design, philosophy, art, and technology. medientanz.de