Eric Schmid at Triest

Eric Schmid

July 23 - August 20, 2025

Collective Intelligence

Triest

New York

This exhibition deploys sheaf-theoretic formalisms and categorical metatheory to articulate a porous, self-revising transcendental framework. Against Nick Land's nihilistic determinism and Hegel's totalizing closure, l propose transcendental structures as open cybernetic systems-dynamic scaffolds that synthesize heterogeneity without imposing uniformity.

My praxis operates through Gabriel Catren's "phenoumenodelic realism": each work functions as a local perspective within a global sheaf, maintaining productive voids that enable systemic transformation. Following my Critique of Transcendental Structure, these pieces demonstrate how unity emerges from below through collaborative connectivity rather than top-down legislation.

The exhibition refutes Land's caricature of Kantian critique as static control apparatus. Where Land sees cybernetic capture, I reveal recursive self-transformation. Drawing from Fichte's self-positing I and Novalis's transdisciplinary excesses, I present the transcendental as a "lighthouse sweeping a foggy coast"-iteratively mapping new territories through coordinated illumination. Each piece embodies "axiomatic heresies" —strategic violations of frameworks that generate new spaces of intelligibility.

Against Land's accelerationism as mere "voluntary consumerism," my work demonstrates that philosophical intervention requires what Simone Weil called grace: receiving unexpected insight through structural incompleteness. I synthesize Zalamea's transmodern mathematics with Romantic porosity, using direct sum (A) structures to preserve disciplinary individuality while enabling novel formations.

The result: a metadisciplinary laboratory where reason operates as self-surpassing navigation. Through these interventions, the transcendental becomes an open sea of sense, forever expanding its own conditions of possibility.