Rem Koolhaas

'Architects — by and large old-fashioned utopian liberals who want to save the world — have trouble when faced with someone who says the Enlightenment is dead. Koolhaas’s glee for shopping, consumerism and big fat capitalists — he sees China as capitalism’s front line, where a new society is being formed in instant cities — attracts accusations of relativism, nihilism and cynicism. 'I’m not cynical about anything,' he says, amazed. 'I’m critical. A cynic could not be this industrious. A cynic is someone who doesn’t believe in anything.” Tom Dyckhoff

Rem Koolhaas at the Serpentine
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,585-1012507_2,00.html

Pavilion with Thomas Demand Frieze

Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)

Think-tank: AMO

“Catholic, shapeless educational establishments”

I am interested in the priviledge of Koolhaas' position. Genuine authenticity seems to be tied up with a less inspiring ambition for the bombastic, and an embracement of capitalism as theatre. To be in the position of a designer outside of patronage, and a thinker who can look past the 'Ground Zero' project and shun instant household famedom. Some actors are applauded for their ability to look past a paycheck and a chewing gum satisfaction in order to 'hold out' for a big break in an authentic production, to achieve critical fame and acceptance. The genuine article. Like Ricky Gervais' character in 'Extras' or current media testaments of the recently departed Heath Ledger; the performer of craft craves to be taken seriously at the cost of poverty and fame. And that is why Koolhaas is such a mix of contradictions, tautology, and oxymoron. Simultaniously he gives clear attention to subtlety, modestness, and presents diatribes on authenticity and awareness, whilst at the same time taking on projects that simply seem to add a further layer of icing on already sugar-heavy environments and companies. Postmodern decadence, or a realistic manifestation of the split human concerns in all of us?

Confessions of a WHITNEYBIENNIAL.COM Curator

Patrick Lichty

http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/lichtytext.html

'I discussed the schism between the code-based net artists and those deciding to use more design-driven Macromedia Flash-based works. As mentioned on the Crumb New Media curating maillist in 2001 (13), one perception of the proliferation of Flash-based net art is that of post dot-com boom designers trying to distinguish themselves in the online milieu, thus the ‘art world’ not taking these Flash creators as serious artists, although this is a somewhat reductive discourse. To compound this, the split between code-based artists and Flash/Director artists fracture the nature of online art along lines of traditional disciplinary difference, technique, and craft. whitneybiennial.com positioned itself to take several critical positions between disciplines, the extant and emerging art worlds, and between ideologies in the online art community itself.'

Excerpts from an account on the curation of new media artwork during the Whitney Biennial 2002.

The curation of new media still reflects Lichty's account of 6 years ago, with Flash designers and coders being seen as separate practitioners with very different concerns. It is taking time for these concerns to be consolidated together under the common core concern of 'artist' or 'art'. I would personally like to explore the possibility of curating another show with set parameters for its content in the form of a software package (Flash, PowerPoint, IMovie) or display mode.

Lichty is a curator and artist who has worked at the Whitney and Venice Bienniales as well as the International Symposium on the Electronic Arts (ISEA). He is Editor-inChief of Intelligent Agent, an electronic arts/culture journal based in New York.

Kurator Software

The KURATOR is a free software application designed as a tool for curating source code which is in early stages of technical development. It offers one way of developing a model of curating that is open source and open for collective development.

There is an analogy between the use of the term 'programming' here - both in the curatorial work of programming events (traditionally in a museum or exhibition but also clearly in organising something like an event/conference/structure) and in programming of the technical system that facilitates the work.

It might be useful to think about the work of curator as analogous to the work of programmer: from artist-programmer or software artist to curator-programmer or software curator. Indeed curating source code is standard practice in this field of software production and so is a collective production process involving various agencies including a programmer and a curator.

http://www.kurator.org/wiki/main/read/Introduction+to+the+conference

curator as validator

‘Curator as … ’ constructions speak of a welcome self-reflexivity and plurality of approach, but they also almost inevitably stick in the craw. There’s a faint atmosphere of subterfuge about them, of borrowing the glamour or gravitas of another profession in an attempt to graft it onto one that we’re aware is, for all its possibilities, also commonly bound up with the grey, clerk-y stuff of fundraising and filling out loan forms. (Among these constructions, the worst offenders I’ve come across include ‘curator as anthropologist’, ‘curator as stylist’ and once, unforgivably, ‘curator as DJ’.) More importantly, the fashion for analogy in framing the figure of the curator points to a certain lack of self-confidence in the field, as though curating is an activity that can only be understood, or even validated, with reference to activities that exert a greater gravitational pull. Despite the explosion in curatorial discourse over the past couple of decades, despite the foregrounding of ‘star’ curators in innumerable biennale press releases, the feeling remains that the profession is at times still closer to the advertising copywriter who claims to ‘work in the creative industries’ than to the novelist who is simply and unapologetically a novelist.

Tom Morton, Frieze, March 2006

Morton raises a probing finger at the schitzoid nature of curatorial identity and a self-doubting nature verging on multiple personality disorder. Not long ago I had a conversation with two other artists on the curious necessity for the artworld to cleave to removed and isolated genres, ideas, or identities other than itself. Not to in order to speak about the world legitamately, but to give itself the legitamacy of speech. The 'hook' or 'treatment' of a cultural trope (Deller on anthropology), (Hirst on God), (Koons on money) gives artists a way in, but are these topics and correspondences necessarily rendered into titbits and buffet picking as the curator pays passing attention to a highly complex area? The gravitas of a gravitational pull is expanding, and does this drive for a heavyweight cause inevitably lead to a greater state of anxiety as curators desparately skim away at the surfaces of overlooked depths?

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/what_is_a_curator_by_tom_morton

Correspondence Theory

Qualitative analogies have much in common with the Correspondence Theory of truth

The theory states that something (for example, a proposition or statement or sentence) is rendered true by the existence of a fact with corresponding elements and a similar structure.

The theory maintains that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world, and whether it accurately describes (i.e., corresponds with) that world.

Historically, the most popular theory of truth was the Correspondence Theory. First proposed in a vague form by Plato and by Aristotle in his Metaphysics, this realist theory says truth is what propositions have by corresponding to a way the world is. The theory says that a proposition is true provided there exists a fact corresponding to it. In other words, for any proposition p,
p is true if and only if p corresponds to a fact.

Snow is White

Remarking that the proposition's truth is its corresponding to the fact that snow is white leads to the request for an acceptable analysis of this correspondence.

Presenting his theory of logical atomism early in the twentieth century, Russell tried to show how a true proposition and its corresponding fact share the same structure.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus approach to curating.

Fumerton, R. (2002), Realism and the Correspondence Theory of Truth (Studies in Epistemology and Cognitive Theory)

Cabinet of Curiousities

Wunderkammer - Cabinet of Wonders
. . . holy relics from a Spanish ship; earthen pitchers and porcelain from China; a Madonna made of feathers, a chain made of monkey teeth, stone shears, a back-scratcher, and a canoe with paddles, all from "India"; a Javanese costume, Arabian coats; the horn and tail of a rhinoceros, the horn of a bull seal, a round horn that had grown on an Englishwoman's forehead, a unicorn's tail; the baubles and bells of Henry VIII's fool, the Turkish emperor's golden seal . . .

Historical Analogy
The Cabinet seems to be an ideal symbol for 'Romantic understanding' - Egan's term for the stage at which children are 'commonly obsessed with the extremes of human achievement and qualities' and 'while trying to master notational systems of alphabets and numbers, they are also becoming avid collectors, sorters and rankers of things'. This stage precedes the philosophic/scientific stage of understanding where children develop systematic and theoretical forms of inquiry.

Analogy with the brain
How the brain works often elicits metaphors of drawers, cupboards and 'tool-sheds'. Analogies with a cabinet that has different shelves and drawers for different kinds of thinking and for storing different kinds of memories could well be useful for discussing 'knowledge'. The variety and eccentricity of the way that objects were arranged within a cabinet according to their owner's personal notions of 'importance', similarity, historical and geographical connections, aesthetic appeal - make the cabinet of curiosities a far more interesting and useful analogy for the storage of knowledge and ideas than say the 'folk-wisdom' view of the mind as a filing-cabinet.

Analogies of loss of wonder
The dismantling of Cabinets of Curiosities or their assimilation into curated museums was a result of the rise of scientific/logical thinking as the accepted way of describing the world. The sense of a loss of wonder as 'scientific' thinking became the dominant way of looking at the world is expressed in Keats' lines on Newton 'unweaving the rainbow'.

Analogy with the Internet
In some ways, the Internet functions like a modern Cabinet of Curiosities - as a repository of curious, half-formed and extreme ideas - just as the vast new lands of the Americas inspired the senses of wonder and acquisitiveness in Cabinet owners, the sense of the vast amount of information stretching out over the Internet can provoke a similar delight at the possibilities of unearthing new and interesting things, and a desire to make collections/displays of links to favourite web sites through constructing personal websites and blogs. The recently defunct 'Nanohomes' system provided a close analogy with a collection of cabinets - with an on-line community where each user was able to place objects within a 3D room space and attach links to each of these.

http://www.curiosity.org.uk/whatisa.htm

Corner of a Cabinet of Curiousities, painted by Frans II Francken in 1636

analogy generator

http://www.museumofhumor.com/Analogy.htm

Need an analogy fast?

No problem.
Just fill in the blank with your topic.
Then click on the analogize button.
You'll get a pithy analogy to use in your next article, presentation or conversation.
Just keep clicking the button till you get one you like.

This ________ is like................

Crisis

Crisis in collecting.
Crisis in representing ethnicity.
Crisis in criticism.
Crisis in funding.
Crisis in cultural identity.

Curator as Crisis

‘After a time, you train yourself that once the work is out of the studio, it’s up to somebody else how it gets shown and where it gets shown. You can’t spend all your time being responsible for how the work goes out in the world, so you do have to let go.’

Bruce Nauman, interview with Tony Oursler, Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words, Janet Kraynak (ed.), 2002,The MIT Press / Cambridge, MA / London, England, 2003 p. 381

analogous projects

www.analogousprojects.org

'Our aim is to integrate mathematical or biologically-born concepts with intuitively-guided acts of expression to generate novel ways for people to perceive, gather, transact, communicate, collaborate, and connect. We hope to highlight the moment of interaction, examine the nature of interconnectivity, and exhibit the collaborative process. '

'Our guiding principle is the inherent intelligence of the superorganism -- the observation that independently functioning units (citizens, insects, genetic traits, musical notes, party guests, technological devices) operating within a shared context will create a non-hierarchical emergence "greater than the sum of its parts".'

'Through the act of weaving scientific logic with artistic creativity, our curators design catalysts and contexts in order that interaction experiments be conducted and, subsequently, exhibited from a systems-level perspective. Current Analogous-supported programs include Scrapcycle (a series of found-material music performances and experiments in barter economy), Mētis (an on-stage interaction between prepared text and improvised sound), likelike (a tape label and experiment in gift economy), nopurchaseisthenecessary (an experiment in the extension of a found-material's use-value to exchange-value), and Bread (a network-theory project donating to Millennium Villages).'

uh-Nal-uh-gus colours

Analogous (uh-NAL-uh-gus) colors sit next to each other on the color wheel. Perhaps each once removed. Orange, yellow-orange, and yellow. Yellow is the 'central thing'; the keystone quality.

A primary color and a secondary color analogously linked. Analogous colour schemes are all side by side on the color wheel (green, blue, and violet).