#but poetry is different i want to be able to underline and annotate it

[daughterofhecata]

Since the beginning of this year, the amount of poetry books I own has gone up from one (1) to five (5).

[rajon007]

All you need is data

Interview Jan Kratochvil / Simon Denny for Rajon 5

I read in the interview of Hans Ulrich with Julian Assange about his concept of three types of history: First, knowledge, like how to refine oil for instance or how to make a plastic bottle and so on, which are maintained and sustained by production, economy around it. Second, historical records, telling us various stories from the prehistory till today, being always present, slowly disintegrating or being reinterpreted, thus manipulated, but without an existing intention to get rid of them. Last type is something people put lots of energy and economic power to willingly destroy it or keep it as a secret. The last type is obviously something Assange is interested in. In your case it’s more complicated I would say, even though you were working with Snowden files, these leaked informations are not the single core of your interest. Compiling past and present, even if past means yesterday and present possibly could be perceived as tomorrow. So what highlights topics of interest for you work? First of all thanks for the careful questions - they are complex, so my answers might also be. I hope you'll forgive that! Secondly I love that interview, its my 2nd favorite Assange and my favorite Obrist interview. I also read in the "When google met Wikileaks" book that it was an interview Assange also felt very happy with. I am very interested in the way organizations, particularly tech-related organizations, present themselves to each other and to the world. I'm interested in the language they use and the information they prioritize, as well as they way they use images, objects and systems in service of these priorities. This usually involves telling stories of some kind. If we want to relate it to your interpretation of Assange's three histories, maybe this activity relates more to the second and third kind of history you identify here. We could also say most tech companies implicitly or explicitly have claim on the first kind here too. I guess if I had to choose, I am most interested in your/his second kind of history. I feel like the kind of history-storytelling my exhibitions hover around and frame is about imaging the way we might see recent history through characters from the present. So in more concrete terms, my exhibitions often involve picking a organization, a practice or an individual, and reiterating or recontextualizing an existing story through them. With the Snowden-related material, I chose a Creative Director to recast as an artistic master in a longer lineage of state-commissioned images, using themes and aesthetic memes to unpack the value systems that might be found in the intelligence community's visual choices. In my Serpentine exhibition, Products for Organizing, I played many voices against each other, trying to visualize the relationship between a marketing-oriented view on the history of hacking and how that might be used to service commercial and governmental organizational innovation. In both cases histories of a present were told from a biased position. As you say I compile recent history and kind of posit a view on the present and past that demonstrates its interests.

Tell me more about this always present durational aspect of your work. Passage of time around us is super fast nowadays and iOS6 (was it 6?) with skeuomorphic design already looks like an antiquity when you’re using iOS9. More subtle changes in UI like the change of the typefont in case of Apple from Helvetica to San Francisco is less visible for most of costumers, still you reflect on it. What does this timeline you’re creating actually saying besides the obvious? I believe in design as a time-stamp. I think objects, graphics, fonts and GUI's capture a moment in a very rich way. Popular interfaces to communication carry something of a worldview and a representation of what's possible and what's important at a certain moment. In this way Tim Cook's decision to have a custom typeface not a modernist classic as the universal system font of one of the world’s most dominant platforms says something about the world in 2015. Maybe this could represent a look inwards for the powerful tech giant? The fact that iOS was skeuomorphic also says something about 2007-2012. Maybe we were learning to use and carry touch screen portals or learning to want them. Environments you’re forming holds the essence of some utopian repositories of knowledge. Very specifically selected knowledge. Do you relate to some ancient utopian urban plans and structures? I mean, besides the Tower of Babel. Thinking about New Atlantis, De Civitate Dei, Moore’s Utopia, Civitas Solis, Civitas Veri and so on. In other words, is there a long-term political ambition behind organising all that data into exhibition set-ups? (Funny thing is that you’re mentioning in youtube guided tour through “Babel”, that the idea of a tower came from the curator, so I’m just not sure if it’s something you would yourself find interesting or if it comes out of a process of preparing the show with another person). Yeah in this case, the babel commission really came out of a conversation with Daniel Birnbaum and Hand Ulrich Obrist, along with Luma, where me and Alessandro Bava worked on researching and reinterpreting not only the tower of Babel but also a history of radical exhibition making and design at the Moderna Museet. So that was really a very group-authored thing - which also involved performances and poetry crated by Simon Castets and Giovanna Olmos and many more people. So while it was an amazing project that I am really proud of, and I took it in directions close to my personal interests where it made sense, it was also about learning from other voices and approaches, and the Babel proposition was one of those things that originated with another voice.

Can you please elaborate more on the question about the tower. i’m interested in a way how you think about those specific set-ups of your work with changes and differences you’re making for different shows. do you consider those changes (for example different statues in exhibiting dotcom project etc.) to be a result of some specific system which develops the narration or are those mostly random? and what about reiterations of projects in different context: “venice” in kunsthalle vienna for instance?

Changes to how my material is presented in different situations aren’t random Exhibitions appearing in different venues are also not based on a system of rules that carry across every presentation. I look at each exhibition opportunity as it comes up and think what fits best, within what’s possible in terms of time and resources and also what the situation demands or proposes. A group show with a curatorial voice is not the same as solo presentation. With the Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom this was kind of written into the work – in that case, the reiteration was kind of a system. Each time the show is made, the host institution and I gather material as best one can, according to the list of confiscated Dotcom possessions. That always reflects a budget, time, ingenuity, and effort – all sorts of factors that change from place to place. The contrast with what it would be to present the “real” collection is always huge. But this discrepancy is folded into the logic of the project, where the gap between the crazy value of Dotcom’s collection is always underlined. He is a very wealthy man and his business and lifestyle have always been about performing material success to a certain extent. Art budgets from New Zealand to Austria cannot match this, at least not within the framework I have been able to create. That is part of a work that is about articulating copies and placeholders for value. With my Venice project’s sister participation in a group show at the Kunsthalle Wien it was also a lot about what the curator Nicolaus Schafhausen was interested in and what worked within the constraints of what he had in mind. It was a much more general presentation, with less of the pointed tensions of the presentation in Venice emphasised – but that’s what the show seemed to require. So its different in each an every situation. But that doesn’t mean what is presented is random. What about the idea of constructing repositories of knowledge? how could this gathering of data work much later when those informations are not current any more? just basically if you’re thinking about it as a statement of here and now or if you think about a universally usable system of data distribution and interpretation.

I think this relates to your question earlier about design for me – what about when design ages and looks out of date? For me this question about data and relevance of events and data of another time is the same. We value cultural objects of the past that contain beautiful reflections of the place/time they were created in. The logic of those objects becomes a summary of what is important to the people/forces that made them. Reflecting current events and ideas and the way things change for me is about that entering into the presentations I make. If something has a strong resonance now it will be valuable in some way in a future that cares about the past. Do you write? I mean in terms of essayistic format. (Haven’t found anything, but it could be really interesting). Unfortunately not so much. Most of my writing is inside my artwork - I very often write or contribute significantly to press releases and wall texts/didactics. There is also increasingly a lot of text annotation on sculptures and paintings, which I have been co-writing with Matt Goerzen. More long form essays are something Ive not really had the time to write up until now. And its a craft I don't really know, nor have I worked on. You were saying once that visitor can interpret your work in his own way, obviously, that one can interpret it either as a serious political/ economical critique, and also just as a parody or some kind of nostalgia-aesthetics joke. Well, Simon, tell me please, where is the boundary in between joke and critical work? That’s obviously a quite an issue in realm of “post-postinternet”. With an obvious example of Hito Steyerl and difference in between her original documentary work, her essays, lectures and…for instance Factory of the Sun. I think I would define my terms a bit here before I comment on this. I think ultimately the viewer always completes the artwork in the act of experiencing it, which is a conventional assertion in contemporary art, right? I also would say that I find the tone of other artist's work addressing similar topics is often divergent. I am a fan of Hito Steyerl, I think she does an amazing job. I don’t read humor in her work as something that obscures critique. I also see her work as something that contains critique as a central structural element. Now to the question whether my work is a joke or not I would firmly say no it is not. I think any kind of exploration of a topic can involve humor, or elements that propose unlikely assertions. That doesn't necessarily follow that the whole endeavor is therefore a joke. It’s just a language of exhibition making that has a range to it. I am always a fan of the material I use in my work though - and if any humorous elements emerge its always out of playful admiration rather than anything close to sarcastic critique.

Simon Denny (b. 1982 in Auckland, New Zealand) is an artist working with installation, sculpture and video. He studied at the the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and at the Städelschule Frankfurt. selected solo exhibitions include: Serpentine Gallery, London (2015); MoMA PS1, New York (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); MuMOK, Vienna (2013); Kunstverein Munich, Munich (2013); and Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2012). In 2012, Denny was awarded the Art Basel Statements Balouse Preis. Selected group shows include: After Babel, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2015); Europe, Europe, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2014); Art Post-Internet, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2014); Speculations on Anonymous Materials, Fredericianum, Kassel (2013); Image into Sculpture, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013); and Remote Control, ICA, London (2012). Denny represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and was included in the central curated exhibition in 2013. He participated in the 13th Lyon Biennale (2015), Montreal Biennale (2014), as well as the Sydney Biennale and the Brussels Biennale (both in 2008).

[careergrowthblog]

Curriculum Notes #1: Start out real, concrete, authentic.

Here’s the first of some short blog posts about detailed aspects of curriculum thinking.

I observed a science lesson recently where students were looking at cells and were asked to recall the differences between plant and animal cells.  A student I spoke gave me this response:  animal cells are round and plant cells are rectangles.   I asked him why he thought that and he pointed to a worksheet in his book that looked a bit like this:

Round vs Rectangle! You can see what he means! On further exploration, it transpired that this was the extent of his exposure to cells: these two diagrams. He wasn’t able to connect these dislocated representations to a wider concept of where cells are or how organisms – plants and animals – are built from cells of different types.

It seemed to me that ‘plant cell vs animal cell’ is not a good place to begin, nor is it wise to  kick off with a simple diagram.  Diagrams are representations of something real and they  don’t really make sense unless you know what the real things look like:

I would suggest strongly that, in science and anywhere else this applies, students will form a deeper understanding in the long-term if they are exposed to real, authentic, concrete artefacts and experiences before they study them through simplified abstractions.   Before you can understand that there are some general common properties of plant cells, you need to see that plants are made of cells of many kinds, organised in tissues of similar cells; they don’t typically exist in isolation.

The same applies to the practice of labelling diagrams.  Above we have a ladybird. I think it’s pretty strange to label the parts of a creature as a learning experience before you’ve actually seen what a real one looks like. If you’ve handled some insects  – eg by ‘pooting’ them from the grass at the back of the school in the summer – then a labelled abstraction serves a purpose: explaining your observations, making sense of your concrete experience.   Below, we have labelled plants.  For too many kids ‘stigma, style and sepal’ only exist as labels on a flower diagram – not as real objects that take a wide variety of shapes in the diversity of flowers you can find in any garden.  Let’s remember that the diagram is meant to help us learn about real things; it’ not that the real thing is an example of our diagram brought to life!  (And please, let’s not talk about Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality before we’ve exhausted Real Reality.)

Another aspect of this is with any natural phenomenon we can demonstrate.  Before we learn the equations and definitions, let’s see it!!  Why would you want to know Fleming’s Left Hand Rule before you’ve observed the ‘force on a wire’ phenomenon for real?  Make or demonstrate a motor… then talk about the theory behind it.  This is how stories unfold.

At a very fundamental level, I find that students typically don’t have a strong enough grasp of the particle model that underpins so much scientific understanding.  Often I think this because they are forced to conceptualise things that are beyond their experience; they confuse steam with smoke; they confuse wax melting with wax burning.  Typically, they don’t have enough tacit knowledge of changes of state –  they’ve not spend enough time in the kitchen seeing water boil or made ice for themselves. The Ice-Water-Steam ‘story’ offers so many opportunities for forming these ideas but teachers need to have the confidence that it is worthwhile investing the time in exploring the real things.  One of my favourite chemistry lessons is boiling water.. generating a head of steam that lasts a while.  Here students can almost see the water molecules zipping around with kinetic energy, jumping off the water surface… the same molecules in a new state; the same molecules that started off in the ice cubes you melted earlier.  These real experiences form a conceptual platform; without them the  molecular diagrams are abstractions with less meaning.  As Dylan Wiliam once pointed out, some people think that in the water molecule diagram, the white space between the molecules is the water, not that the molecules ARE the water!

These examples are all from science – my home patch.  But it applies elsewhere.  The general idea supports the need for field trips or to bring in real artefacts or at least to show videos of real things – mountain, rivers and castles – if we’re going to be studying them in any generalised form.

And what about poetry.  Too often you see poetry being taught as if poems are no more than a collection of literary features to be underlined and annotated.  But that’s not how they come into being or how they’re meant to be read.  ‘Start real’ with poetry means to let the poem speak for itself, as far as possible. Feel the words, form the imagery, capture the spirit…

Bayonet Charge by Ted Hughes

Suddenly he awoke and was running – raw In raw-seamed hot khaki, his sweat heavy, Stumbling across a field of clods towards a green hedge That dazzled with rifle fire, hearing Bullets smacking the belly out of the air – He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm; The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye Sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest, –

Taught well, read aloud, with time for the poem to breathe, Bayonet Charge packs a punch.  A great English teacher can do this,  before the analytical carve-up begins.  Of course a deeper understanding enriches the poem hugely – you go back to it time and time again. But that’s not where you start.  Here’s my son’s annotated copy of Heaney’s Storm on the island.   But this is not where he began…

I wonder where else this applies?  Start out real, concrete, authentic.

Curriculum Notes #1: Start out real, concrete, authentic. published first on https://medium.com/@KDUUniversityCollege