Curation
See the exhibition here.
Curatorial Statement
August 2023
I read a book – an actual book, with pages made of paper – for a half hour this morning.
Sometimes I have this lingering sense of my time having passed for certain things, like oh I should have read more when I was younger… but you can learn, you can be influenced at any age. It all matters. Deciding that you’ve passed the window of opportunity is just that, a decision.
Putting together the tech show is making me think about AI a lot more than I want to. I have a lot of fears, many of them perhaps unfounded or naive. Maybe I don’t have enough fears. Those fears are part of my own piece, whispered desperately in the audio track. I want this show to be engaging and at least slightly terrifying.
Reading the book this morning – it’s called The City, Not Long After -– I think I have discovered that I am far sighted. Perhaps it’s also a function of reading most things now on a screen, with glowing letters that I can enlarge without even thinking about it.
I feel that, increasingly, there are generational shifts associated with tech. I think this happens more and more rapidly, with shorter and shorter timespans between generations. The tech shifts are so massive that they change thought patterns, ways of perceiving and interacting with the world, maybe even brain structure. Talk about generational gaps. What does that do to societal relationships?
I have heard people divide sci-fi into hard and soft. “Hard” sci-fi is the mechanics. It concerns itself with the immediate, not the future. To me it is ultimately less interesting, less important, than its “Soft” counterpart. The soft tissue is what lives, what moves and grows. This is what fascinates us, and what actually directs the future.
My main purpose for my own “tech” work is to explore the idea that all of our creations have their own life. Whether they are technically “alive” or not. We focus so much on the HOW and the WHAT of our inventions. What about the WHY? How about the WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
The small tree right outside my window is sprouting new leaves. It bends in the wind, as the morning traffic speeds by. Tech exists alongside Nature. Maybe we’re reaching the point where the two have a lot in common? Can tech be regenerative? The standard poetic trope is for persistent leaves to poke through cracks in the concrete after the downfall of a high tech civilization. Could that be different in the future, our actual future, not sci-fi? I understand so little.