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Making and Breaking Models
Get PDFModels and modeling are polysemous terms that take on distinct but related meanings in the sciences, humanities, arts, and everyday language. Models can be material entities or mathematical constructs, they can be living organisms or makeshift frames for found objects, they can be of a system or for a project. This workshop will focus on how the meaning of models changes as it travels between different domains, and on how a given model is constructed and broken depending on how tightly it is bound to its reference. Opposing the idea that models are mere representations, contributions will inquire into their generative properties: to make a model involves abstractions and idealizations that can have very real effects in its target system. Likewise, to break a model often leads to novel theoretical insights, revealing hidden presuppositions and opening up the possibility of making, and breaking, again. Since the inception of the project in Fall of 2022, several foci have emerged in the collective research into model theories and modeling practices. These include the formal or relational qualities of models, their temporal dimensions, the incommensurability between a model and its object, and models’ world-building potential. This workshop aims to bring together and extend these perspectives in a broader, interdisciplinary dialogue
Archival Reenactement and the Role of Fiction:Walid Raad and the <i>Atlas Group Archive</i>
Get PDFThe Atlas Group created a digital mixed-media archive of contemporary Lebanese history, made up of produced and found documents. These archives look immediately ambiguous: they don’t collect historical documents; they actually contain visual artefacts created by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad. These digital mixed-media archives — partly accessible on the web but also physically exhibited and performed — are not intended to preserve the memory of the past, but they become indeed useful to actualize history by giving it back in the form of a historical fiction. What if archives should not deal with memory, but with amnesia? And what kind of historical temporality do they re-activate
‘We Are Gathering Experience’:Restaging the History of Art Education
Get PDFIn recent years, critics and art historians have pointed to an ‘educational turn’, a rise in participatory pedagogical art projects and artist-led experimental schools. This essay considers artist-led projects and museum programmes that restage or reenact educational experiments from the past, analysing their limits and possibilities in the study and presentation of modern art history. Much like performance art, pedagogy is ephemeral and contingent, and yet it differs in that it does not establish a fixed spectatorial role. To be understood it must be participated in, for, as Josef Albers described his teaching, ‘we are gathering experience’