Occidental thought has always been fascinated by Chinese characters, symbols, ink drawings, and old, scientific illustrations. Here, a multitude of relations between objects and phenomena are depicted that are informative in regard to interrelations between the arts, sciences and technologies.

Siegfried Zielinski’s research project Variantology is dedicated to examining the ‘deep time’ of such relationships. The project has been conducted at the Universität der Künste Berlin since 2007.

Pivotal to the project is a critical review of the concepts of media in the past decades. The two volumes Variantology 1 and 2 have already been published.

English text.