Floating Signifiers

Panta Rhei is an old philosophical saying by Heraclitus that can be interpreted as “all that is observable flows continuously.” In the spirit of this reflection, Daan Paans (NL) attempts with Floating Signifiers to provide insight into the constant transformation that things and phenomena undergo. The case studies in this book show how primal archetypes continue to shape our contemporary (visual) culture in their ‘transmuted’ forms. With the ambiguous nature of his work, Paans aims to point to our deeply cherished bond with ‘ecology’, but also to offer the insight that this ecology is subject to an evolutionary process of transformation.