With this debut volume of Zētēsis, the artists, philosophers, designers, technicians and scientists involved with this project and committed to an ‘old fashioned’ kind of research – that which is generated by a curiosity and deep commitment to know (the whatever) – declare a new Daybreak. It is one that intends to take as a given, complexity and the irrational / imaginary in art and the sciences, physics and metaphysics, culture and its economies, skin and the pleasures of the flesh. It steps to the atonal rhythms of the mimetic patterns of camouflage and the flâneur. It aligns itself with the history of those who were (and remain) willing to ask and act upon this basic question: Supposing it could be otherwise, what would this otherwise look like, become, be, now? We want to say that however it would look, be, become (now), the journey to find out must be fuelled by experiment, rigour, and a willingness to risk. We owe a strong debt of thanks to our past and present-day interlocutors, from the genealogists, libidinal economists, feminists and queer theory / practitioners to those dancing in, on, and with this new field of ‘wild science’ and its very welcome co-collaborator, the sensual. We also owe a strong debt of thanks to those who were and remain willing to take a (financial) punt on this possibly awkward, possibly bruised, blue-sky thinking endeavour: The Birmingham School of Art in particular and its wider platform, The Birmingham Institute for Art and Design at bCu along with the staff and student artists, designers, philosophers, technicians, web aficionados, research fellows and scientists who gave generously of their time, despite wider pressures cascading onto their already overworked work schedules. This is not a perfunctory acknowledgment to the School of Art at Margaret Street. For the academic, dare we say, intellectual world – and the universities that nourish its diversity, strident intelligence, playfulness and rigour —seems to have lost its way. This world, our world, challenged as it has been for the last decade or so with profound cuts in the arts & humanities, alongside a gluttonous appetite for all things STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths), and topped with a seemingly wilful misreading of what constitutes experimentation, thinking, practice, indeed research itself, especially when it comes to art, philosophy, social science, culture, needs a bit of TLC (Tender Loving Care). So the journal and its future offspring, comes with a warning: be prepared to think outside the proverbial box, and to do so, slowly and with care, as if approaching an untamed but curious beast. As an aid memoire, we dedicate this, the first volume, no. 1 to questioning The Cruelty of the Classical Canon. Each intervention / contribution / design decision has been peer-reviewed with members from an internationally and discipline-diverse advisory board. Some of the selected pieces support the classical canon; others reject it outright; still others try to strike a delicate balance between outright rejection and the appeal of its tried and tested repertoire. All have something to do with Nietzsche’s seminal text, Daybreak, Lyotard’s shout (demand), We Libidinal Economists! and the first discovered imaginary number,√2. It is up to you to decide which is which, and why. Welcome to Zētēsis: a re-search generated by curiosity.