1. All that is solid melts into air
"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their own train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air..."

"All that is solid melts into air": This is how Marx and Engels, more than a century and a half ago, expressed themselves in the best known and most quoted manifesto in our modern time. With this they grasped, maybe more clear than anyone else, more clear than they probably could envision themselves, the ironic and dialectical history of the modern society, where all development also seems to be pregnant with its contrary. The history of the humanistic Enlightenment project of the modern society, to which Marx doubtless was most supportive, expresses this contradiction painfully clear. The Enlightenment project has more than fulfilled the "hard" expectations, the natural science based technological expectations. The latest example is the digital revolution, the exponentially growing information- and communication technology. In contrast, however, the more "soft" expectations on the Enlightenment project concerning values, art, aesthetic ideals, ethics and politics have in no way been met during the last centuries.

However, in the history of the modern society several grand projects have been launched in attempts to unite the two sides of Enlightenment: the hard (technology and natural sciences) with the soft (values, democracy, art and ethics). One remarkable such project was the Bauhaus. Today, in the digital age at the turn of the century, we can witness new attempts to creative and socially useful meetings between "art" and "technology"- an emerging "third culture" .