Beginnings, Beginnings, Beginnings: A Letter
A letter from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Hou Hanru Dear Hanru, Thanks so much for your message and many congratulations on your Lyon Biennale. This is an occasion to think about the Internet and John Brockman’s annual Edge question, which this year asks, “How has the Internet changed the way you think?” Some thoughts about this in order to resume our exchange, which I have tried to summarize in an incomplete A to Z PARS PRO TOTO ever PARS PRO TOTO. C is for Curating the World The Internet made me think towards a more expanded notion of curating. Stemming from the Latin word “curare,” the word “curating” originally meant “to take care of objects in museums.” Curation has long since evolved. Just as art is no longer limited to traditional genres, curating is no longer confined to the gallery or museum, but has expanded across all boundaries. The rather obscure and very specialized notion of curating has become much more publicly used since one now talks about the curating of websites and this marks a very good moment to rediscover the pioneering history of art curating as a toolbox for 21st-century society at large. D is for Delinking In the years before being online, I remember that there were many interruptions by phone and fax day and night. The reality of being permanently linked to the Internet triggered my increasing awareness of the importance of moments of concentration – moments without interruption that require me to be completely unreachable. I no longer answer the phone at home and I only answer my mobile phone in the case of fixed telephone appointments. “To link is beautiful. To delink is sublime.” (Paul Chan) D is for Disrupted narrative continuity Forms of film montage, as the disruption of narrative and the disruption of spatial and temporal continuity, have been a staple tactic of the avant-garde from Cubism and Eisenstein, through Brecht to Kluge or Godard. For avant-gardism as a whole, it was essential that these tactics were recognized (experienced) as a disruption. The Internet has made disruption and montage the operative bases of everyday experience. Today, these forms of disruption can be harnessed and poeticized. They can foster new connections, new relationships, new productions of reality: reality as life-montage / life as reality-disruption? Not one story but many stories……… D is for Doubt A certain unreliability of technical and material information on the Internet brings us to the notion of doubt. I feel that doubt has become more pervasive. The artist Carsten Höller has invented the Laboratory of Doubt, which is opposed to mere representation. As he told me, “Doubt and perplexity … are unsightly states of mind we’d rather keep under lock and key because we associate them with uneasiness, with a failure of values.” Höller’s credo is not to do, not to intervene. To exist is to do and not to do is a way of doing. “Doubt is alive; it paralyzes certainty.” (Carsten Höller) E is for Evolutive exhibitions The Internet makes me think more about non-final exhibitions and exhibitions in a state of becoming. When conceiving exhibitions, I sometimes like to think of randomized algorithms, access, transmission, mutation, infiltration, circulation (and the list goes on). The Internet makes me think less of exhibitions as top-down masterplans, but rather as bottom-up processes of self-organization like “do it” or “Cities on the Move”. F is for Forgetting The ever-growing, ever-pervasive records that the Internet produces make me think sometimes about the virtues of forgetting. Is a limited-life space of certain information and data becoming more urgent? H is for Handwriting (and Drawing ever Drawing) The Internet has made me aware of the importance of handwriting and drawing. Personally, I typed all my early texts, but the more the Internet has become all-encompassing, the more I have felt that something went missing. Hence the idea to reintroduce handwriting. I do more and more of my correspondence as handwritten letters scanned and sent by email. On a professional note, I observe, as a curator, the importance of drawing in current art production. One can also see it in art schools: a moment when drawing is an incredibly fertile zone. I is for Identity “Identity is shifty, identity is a choice.” (Etel Adnan) M is for Maps The Internet has increased the presence of maps in my thinking. It’s become easier to make maps, to change them, and also to work on them collaboratively and collectively and share them (eg, Google Maps and Google Earth). After the focus on social networks of the last couple of years, I have come to see the focus on location as a key dimension. N is for New geographies The Internet has fuelled (and been fuelled by) a relentless economic and cultural globalization, with all its positive and negative aspects. On the one hand, there is the danger of homogenizing forces, which is also at stake in the world of the arts. On the other hand, there are unprecedented possibilities for difference-enhancing global dialogues. In the long duration there have been seismic shifts, like that in the 16th century when the paradigm shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. We are living through a period in which the center of gravity is transferring to new centers. The early 21st century is seeing the growth of a polyphony of art centers in the East and West, in the North and South. N is for Non-mediated experiences. N is for the New Live I feel an increased desire for non-mediated experiences. Depending on one’s point of view, the virtual may be a new and liberating prosthesis of the body or it may threaten the body. Many visual artists today negotiate and mediate between these two, staging encounters of non-mediated intersubjectivity. In the field of music, the crisis of the record industry goes hand in hand with an increased importance of live concerts. P is for Parallel realities The Internet creates and fosters new constituencies, new micro-communities. As a system that