The year 2021 marked the seventieth anniversary of the death of the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). In the context of the international Wittgenstein symposium to be held in June 2022 in Belgrade, we invite artists (individuals or collectives) from Austria and Serbia to take part in the online art competition inspired by the philosopher’s works, and to critically explore Wittgenstein’s ideas on language and communication models of our time through their works.

Wittgenstein’s precise and critical analysis the use of the language and language games, his detailed work on structural and formal questions about expression, articulation, the limits of language and understanding are highly topical, particularly when it comes to the development of social media, AI and new models of connectivity, which carry with them unsolved communication issues.

Rudolf Carnap about Wittgenstein’s methodology:

“His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer… When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation… the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment or analysis of it would be a profanation”.

Artists and researchers are invited to submit their works dealing with a number of phenomena in relation to Wittgenstein’s subjects of exploration: understanding and misunderstanding, interpersonal communication, tautologies, pleonasms, contradictions, signs, symbols and representation of words and ideas, real and imagined, memes, pictograms, abbreviations, delimitations of thoughts, oral and written, sense and perception.