Week Introduction
This week’s theme is curation as teamwork.
Our subthemes are collaboration, in/exclusion, and change.
Our teams are given the practical tasks of creating a collection of their city, discerning what, how, and why we collect our artefacts. Discerning what/who we identify as important, and able to change our perspectives all throughout the week. To supplement the experience, we will receive input on different curatorial practices, tools, and strategies throughout online morning sessions, and spend each afternoon in our local contexts, collecting, reflecting & making, working on collections. At the end of each day, impressions of whatever we collected (words, insights, questions, photos, audio bites, video) will be shared in an online environment (to be defined) open to all, to get an inside into each other’s processes.
We knew that the proposition was to learn by doing and to push that further. I intended to learn by making. It was ok for collections to not get finished, as the process of defining a focus and framework together was more important than the end result. It is not about the collections as an end result, but about going through the process of defining a focus and a framework together, making decisions together, and learning from each other’s approaches, urgencies, and interests. The task of creating a collection together is a way to place capacity building at the core of the activities throughout this final week of the project.
Is curation at its core about bringing people/cultures/elements into proximity with each other, with an ability to make junctions in which different elements touch? Providing maps for artists and laymen to continue to pursuit of a theme/topic/idea?
Perhaps.
Ty’s introduction
Herein lies a journal which is a response to my experience that week. I have sat with conversations over that week and built a sonic collection throughout the week, from which compositions have begun to arrive. Keywords/notes from the morning sessions, a sound score in response to the week, then poetic reflections, free-writing in direct response to the music. Some of this is cryptic, but all of it is feeling. Fundamentally this week was about curation, and understanding this from a personal space. What I have written is a journal after all. Journals can be private, but in this case, I’ve chosen to make a journal personal yet shareable. I hope you can find some interest in this, albeit the exercises, and potentially the music. Feel free to respond accordingly, and most importantly, keep on.
–on 45 in 5 —
45 in 5. Here I am, waiting to fly from New York to Amsterdam. You never know when ideas come, but when they do, seize the moment. The task was to blend this 45-minute ambient recording (essentially my journey through an airport) with the actual song dancing in my “inner ears”, and create a 5-minute track. While making, I think about what it means to collect, and what it means to present. I think about gates, overflows & border control. All thoughts are symbolic of the current journey, and (God willing) the ones to come.
— On NYC to AMS —
NYC to AMS. Though some airlines make flight safety more aye catching, we still find it hard to listen. The baby cries in an instant, and I wonder if we share the same newness. Definitely not the same pain. It’s just all so new for them. I think of the carry-on luggage stowed above…and what it means to be in airplane mode…then funnels these thoughts into a composition.
