A typographer and caricaturist for newspapers, Zdeněk Košek experienced a profound psychological trauma in the 1980s that led him to conceive of the world in a radically different way. He became convinced that he played a decisive role in the grand order of the universe. Perceiving himself as a kind of central station constantly receiving and transmitting a multitude of information, he believed he had to control meteorological problems by recording everything happening around him:
“I not only controlled the weather but also politics — I appointed Václav Havel President of the Republic. […] I believed I was immortal.”
He spent his days at his window noting all kinds of data in school notebooks, atlases, or old magazines. He brought together sounds, letters, numbers, representations of sex and time, natural phenomena and everyday incidents — for him, everything carried meaning. Amalgams of non-hierarchized signs, reflecting a quasi-scientific aesthetic, Košek’s works followed a dictated ritual to which he had to submit, at the risk of being responsible for irreversible chaos.