Some November musings on dancing stars, street art and scheduling software.
“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
So said Friedrich Nietzsche. And while we wouldn’t normally turn to a 19th-century German philosopher to explain what we do at ASIMUT, a small incident outside our office in Aarhus has tempted us to give it a try.
Take a look at our street-facing sign. Someone has added another logo: a rebellious, freehand capital “A” beside the geometrically harmonious lowercase “a” of the ASIMUT logo. And there they stand, side by side: order and chaos, neatly illustrated at street level.
At first glance, an unlikely pairing. After all, ASIMUT is a software company dedicated to bringing structure, clarity and a certain degree of calm to the complex and chaotic world of higher arts education. Scheduling, room bookings, event management – making sure everything is where it needs to be, when it needs to be there. The antithesis of anarchy.
But here’s the thing: we don’t see order and creative chaos as opposites. Quite the contrary. We see order as something that makes room for creativity – including the rebellious, chaotic kind.
Which brings us back to Nietzsche. He had quite a lot to say about Apollo and Dionysus – the Greek gods who came to represent, broadly speaking, order and form on the one hand, and creative abandon on the other. And how art needs both.
Our unexpected street artist is onto something. The carefully designed logo and the unruly A belong rather nicely together, and we’re more inclined to say thanks than to call the graffiti removal crew.
