Module 3
Tangled Paths
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Richard Niessen on intentional ambiguity. Inspired by the book Tangled Paths: A Life of Aby Warburg by Hans C. Hönes
‘Tangled Paths’ tells the remarkable life story of Aby Warburg, one of the 20th century’s most influential art and cultural historians. Warburg founded the renowned Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Library) and created the groundbreaking Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–1929). This enigmatic project was a visual assembly of nearly a thousand images (ranging from classical art to newspaper clippings, astrological charts, and advertisements) arranged on large black panels. Through the Atlas, Warburg sought to reveal how images, symbols, and motifs travel, transform, and acquire new meanings across time and cultures.
Warburg’s life was marked by a relentless struggle to find his place in the world. The book explores not only the ups and downs of his academic career but also the personal demons of a man driven to meet his own impossibly high standards. Warburg spent much of his life obsessively searching for a comprehensive theory of the ‘afterlife of images’: the idea that certain motifs recur in artworks, as if migrating from one work to another, across centuries and continents. He believed that by delving ever deeper into the details, he would uncover definitive proof. While he found scattered evidence, his discoveries never coalesced into a single, grand theory. This frustration contributed to a mental breakdown, leading to his hospitalization for over five years.
Everything changed when Warburg discovered the reproduction camera and began arranging images on a large framework in preparation for a lecture. By physically and intuitively working with these images, he found a new way forward. A quote from the book:
“This new methodological framework was a crucial cornerstone that enabled Warburg’s attempt at a new form of synthesis of his life’s work. No longer relying exclusively on nuanced, fine grained historical contextualization, he now felt emboldened to experiment with a more speculative mode of thinking, facilitated by the mobile format of the Atlas and backed up by a scientific theory of memory. In addition, it allowed Warburg to retain a certain ambiguity between definitive completion and experimental openness.”
Reading about Warburg’s journey, his insight struck me. For all of us, there’s a lesson in embracing ambiguity – holding space between the desire for completion and the need for experimental openness – and in daring to think more speculatively.
In my work as a graphic designer, I always seek a non-hierarchical order: structures that are playful and open, that hopefully invite and stimulate the imagination rather than constrain it. That is not the most obvious or straightforward approach. It is often said that ‘designing is choosing’, but I am poor at choosing, I want everything to belong. So ultimately, I think it is my inability, which I recognize in Aby Warburg, to design a definitive system that leads me to embrace a more poetic approach, one that focuses precisely on the ambiguity between totalitarian completeness and experimental openness.
Further reflections from Richard:
Questions that I am responding to:
3.2 What can we learn from interdisciplinary case studies?
3.3 What can design bring to collaborative workspaces?
The relationship between this text and Richard:
With design, you can’t just ‘solve’ something or make it crystal clear without pushing other things aside or ignoring other perspectives. The intricacy can’t just disappear. Or, in other words, we don’t have to untangle the paths completely, but we have to learn to see them in their messiness. With a poetic approach, you can make that complexity rhyme. One of my favourite quotes comes from the Rosarium Philosophorum, an alchemical text from the 16th century: ‘Where we have spoken clearly, we have said nothing; but where we have used riddles and images, we have hidden the truth.’
Why is this relevant?
What if we use design not to hide chaos, but to embrace and reveal it? What if we create systems that are not only beautiful and functional, but also invite personal interpretation, leaving room for the unexpected? By consciously choosing openness and playfulness in design, we can set new standards that encourage diversity and originality, and thus shape a richer, more vibrant visual culture. Graphic design can play, in this way, a formative role in our society. Hugues Boekraad once said that ‘design promotes the flexibility of social communication’. Without this possibility, the formation of a diverse and rich community stagnates.
Questions for the students:
- What would happen if you wanted everything in a design to belong? Is that possible, or not?
- Do you think a visual form can do justice to the tangled paths, in all their intricacy?
- What would it mean to embrace chaos in design?
- How do you design a process that encourages collaboration?
- In which way can design contribute to a richer, more vibrant visual culture?
- What is the difference for you between solving a problem and exploring a system?