To obtain a new operative basis it was necessary to systematize the media so that they could form logical sequences and would permit a multiplicity of operations. The result: variability and extensibility.
The colour series provides the law for formal expression, colour and form cancel each other out as opposites.
Anonymity of the media, non-limitation of the structural laws, relativity of the dimensions, extensibility and flexibility determine the expression.
The machine and the expression are developed at the same time, the method represents itself, it is the picture.
The picture field is a structural field.
The prerequisites for the development of flexible ordering systems are the identity of the pictorial media, of surface and surface boundaries, the anonymization and objectivication of the structure, the congruence of the beginning and the end of the action.
The anonymous element is part and substance of a system of coordinates in which each element has an equal share of passivity and activity.
The individual expression lies in the choice of methods, in the control of preliminary conditions.
Simplicity is not produced by spontaneity but by the multiple superimposition, interpenetration and modification of the processes of development.
There is no definition of aesthetics without the definition of its social basis.
he task consists in developing systems that make transparent and combinable, flexible orders possible.
Technological reality is a fact that cannot be ignored. Identical with it is a vocabulary of media that is characteristic of this epoch, an instrumentarium of methods, systems, modes of behaviour, an arsenal of forms of expression that have already shaped the life of the epoch and will continue to shape it.
A social basis corresponds to every cultural expression, a cosmology to every aesthetic. In no other form of art do the media and methods of a global technological strategy find a legitimate expression as they do in constructive, logical, systematic or serial art, which is a sublimated and critical echo of the structures of civilization.
The forms of expression of a non-hierarchical society correspond to this society in the sphere of visual art: they are flexible, transparent, verifiable in method and in result.
It is as an instrument of cognition that art has a social value
Every technology has an appropriate sign alphabet that differs from its forerunner in structure, dimensions and motion. Forms of expression in art correspond to this global structure.
Flexibility is the counter-principle to monumentality.
No other epoch has experienced this onset of straight lines, direct connections, accumulations of identical elements resulting from the addition and division of the identical.
The possibility of repeating elements and facts mechanically is one of the identifying marks of this epoch.
Geometric art forms have a range extending from the esoteric to democratic orders. There is no such thing as the language of geometry.
The serial principle is a radical democratic principle.
These english translations of Lohse's texts were first published in "Modular and Serial Orders", Waser Verlag 1984 Publications.