One day, as Diogenes was sunbathing, Alexander the Great came up to him and told him he could grant him whatever he wished.

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Diogenes replied, "Stand a little out of my sun."[1]

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"There is a visible invisible; a hidden order of the visible that I can keep hidden by keeping it out of sight. This invisible, artificially kept out of sight, continues to exist in the domain that could be called exteriority."[2]

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The era we live in is often referred to — among many other names — as the Information Age. This naming presumably heralds the possibility of rapid access to information. Yet, paradoxically, as the speed and quantity of information increases, we witness our trust in it steadily diminishing. Every new piece of information spreads rapidly, accompanied by counter-arguments and conspiracy theories aimed at refuting the one before it. One of the most defining features of this age is that attention is pulled toward the next piece of information before any relationship has even been established with the information just received. The idea that any piece of information will have been damaged by a chain of manipulations by the time it reaches the individual seems so normalized that the concept of "truth" today carries a large question mark.

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Among the pioneers of Cynic philosophy, whose origins date back to the 5th century BCE, the most frequently invoked name today is Diogenes of Sinope. While it is unknown whether he left any written sources, no text by him survives to this day; he gained his fame mainly through his unconventional statements and way of life, which were passed down orally. Although he spent a significant part of his life in Athens, he is known as being "of Sinope" (Diogenes of Sinope, Diogenēs ho Sinōpeus). Unlike many Cynic philosophers, he did not merely argue that a human being reaches their happiest state by simplifying their life and living in balance with nature, just like animals, and that as long as human culture is grounded in the desire for money and status, achieving this simplicity would be impossible — he also put this into practice in his own life. Throughout his life, he stripped himself of luxury and everything it brings, and became known — and has gone down in history — as a thinker who mocked civilized life at every opportunity. It is said that, as a philosopher, unlike his contemporaries who either sold knowledge to the public for money or were showered with wealth by the state, he chose instead to live his life in poverty.[3]

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The relationship between light and knowledge — a foundation of Western ideology, and one on which Enlightenment philosophy in particular was built — has, through its influence strengthened over the ages, become etched into our minds through the words allegedly spoken by Diogenes to Alexander the Great: "stand out of my light, I ask for no other favor." Yet when the story is read as a whole, we see Diogenes — who by his own choice lived a rather "poor," as simplified a life as possible — sunbathing by the roadside when Alexander the Great, wishing to reward philosophy, comes all the way to him and offers, "ask of me whatever you wish," to which Diogenes responds with a Cynic gesture along the lines of "just stand a little out of my sun." In this sense, his stance can be read not as "I want nothing from you, just don't stand in my way" toward authority, but rather as "don't cut off my connection to the sun, to nature, and pointlessly offer me the luxuries of everyday life that I neither desire nor need." On the other hand, his equally famous habit of wandering the streets in daylight with a lantern, explaining his activity as "I am looking for a human being," was perhaps a similarly critical and mocking stance — one directed at his contemporary Plato, known for producing philosophy under far more comfortable conditions, and at the metaphor of light and knowledge that would later also form the foundation of Enlightenment philosophy.

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In Western philosophy, shadow and darkness carry negative connotations; they correspond to a condition devoid of light, truth, knowledge, and wisdom — one that urgently needs, and must increasingly receive, illumination. So much so that even today, the way knowledge is transmitted is still grounded in this metaphor. Truths in the dark come into the light. But a truth having once come into the light does not mean it will not come into the light further still — by increasing the degree of illumination, a truth can be brought into ever greater light. Every day, through every possible communication channel of the age, humanity receives the message that everything we have heard until now was false, and that what is now being announced is "illuminating" the "real," hitherto concealed truth. We hear so often that everything we knew until now was told to us to lull us to sleep, and that this time the "real" truths have come to light, that all the new information that initially shocks us quickly enters a process of normalization... On the other hand, within this bombardment of information — one that, throughout history, has grown as communication tools have multiplied and become trivialized as it has exploded — it is no coincidence that, despite all entrenched metaphors, shadow and darkness have been embraced in the fields of art and philosophy. The shadow is the other, the unwanted, the failed, the minority, the dangerous...

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Eastern philosophies — which advocate living free of ostentation, in harmony with nature, remembering that one is a part of nature, and argue that a person must overcome the desire to dominate and possess, and file down their ego — are closer to Diogenes' stance. Tanizaki, recognized as one of the important writers of Japanese literature, examines the differences in taste and understanding of beauty between East and West through their differing approaches to shadow and darkness in his book In Praise of Shadows:

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"We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates... Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty."[4]

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When Tanizaki's book, written in 1933, was translated into English in 1977, electrical energy was already being generated through nuclear power, the atom had been split and accelerated further still, and Japan had already experienced light at its very brightest, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moreover, it would be laughable to claim that the East (if it is still even possible to speak of such a concept) has, without contradiction, stood firmly behind its own philosophies and continued its simple way of life, having purified itself of all ambition and desire for possession — especially in the wake of the recent, yet already almost entirely forgotten, Fukushima disaster...

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Sinop is known not only for Diogenes, who advocated — and put into practice in his own life — a philosophy of sustaining life in its simplest form, in harmony with nature, and reining in one's desires, but is also one of the micro-scale sites where ongoing global policies, built on the "philosophy" of always wanting more from life and consuming it as much as possible, are put into practice. The Wisdom of Shadow: Art in a Corrupted Information Age, while reminding us that the sustainability of the resources we irresponsibly consume in the name of progress, enlightenment, development, and access to knowledge must once again be questioned, draws attention to these policies, relationships, and the transmission of conventional wisdom. Rather than "shedding light" on the shadow — long ignored and advised to be avoided — it instead plans to make room for it, creating a shared space of interaction, inviting us to experience the shadow together and to reconsider, through the possibilities it evokes, our ways of existing in the world.

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[1] This is anonymous/traditional information. It varies from source to source; in Turkish sources and popular usage it more often appears as "gölge etme başka ihsan istemem" ("don't cast your shadow on me, I ask no other favor").
[2] Jacques Derrida, Gift of Death, p. 90
[3] The historical information given in this paragraph was compiled from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy web reference page. http://www.iep.utm.edu/diogsino/
[4] Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, Stone Creek, CT: Leete's Island Books, Inc., 1977, p. 31 (translation I.O.)