Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency - Open House: A Portrait of Collecting
(2023)
author(s): Lauren O'Neal
published in: University of the Arts Helsinki
“Open House: A Portrait of Collecting,” a curatorial project held at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in 2015, is part of my doctoral research on “Assembling a Praxis: Choreographic Thinking and Curatorial Agency.” The "Open House" exhibition was initially about collecting and caring for objects, a traditional function of museums. Curating with a choreographic mindset encouraged me to address other questions, including how objects and collections foster emotional connections. My initial question for the project, “How to do things with objects?” soon became “How do objects arrange spaces of relation between people and ideas?” Themes include community, memory, identity, taxonomy, preservation, accumulation, value, story, exchange, and display.
[This exposition corresponds to Section Five: Arranging Spaces of Relation(s): What Can Objects Do? in the printed dissertation.]
they didn't bring enough water
(2019)
author(s): William Smart, Lindsey french
published in: Research Catalogue
In early 2016, Lindsey french and Willy Smart gleaned water samples during a series of anomalous rainstorms in the Southern Californian desert. Later, these samples were ‘released’ publicly via personal humidifiers.
Combining photographic documentation of humidity, the affected certainty of diagrams, and an associative written text that slips between theoretical and personal registers, the research exposition, “they didn’t bring enough water,” catalogs this process of reception and release.
The project floats on our attempt to follow a logic of water in our research — from the start then there is no pretense toward rigid methodology. We collected samples erratically, in line as much with our moods as with the sites we’d marked out in advance of the trip as potential intrigues. In other words, the bonds we seek out here aren’t those of solidarity, but liquidarity. Water is not then the tested object of our actions, but rather an active agent in our research. Crucially, the release was staged publically: the humidifiers fogged up the windows, our breaths mixed. Release here is meant in the sense of a record release — of circulation — rather than in the sense of a caged animal set free.
The materials collected in this research exposition include photographs of each water sample at the moment of its release, diagrams of forms taken by the released water vapor, and a written text. The text folds (but does not tie — liquidarity reigns here too) historic information on sample sites with personal associations and theoretical conversations initiated during the days of collection: during long drives, before sleep, and at the sites themselves. The text thus is loose — it slips between pronouns and landscapes and concepts — there’s not quite enough present perhaps for total coherence, like the sign we encountered at a trailhead at the beginning of the research trip — “THEY DIDN’T BRING ENOUGH WATER.” This apparent warning, with its seductive vagueness, would crystallize in the following days into an aphoristic methodology that is carried over into the presentation of materials here. What we didn’t bring perhaps we (perhaps you) will find here.
Archive, Collection, Museum: On the History of the Archiving of Voices at the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University
(2017)
author(s): Britta Lange
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Available today under the name of the Berlin Sound Archive (Berliner Lautarchiv) or the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University (Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) is a collection of now largely digitalized sound storage media begun in 1915 (https://www.lautarchiv.hu-berlin.de/, all internet references retrieved 24th June 2016). The collection includes shellac records with recordings of prisoners of war (1915-1918), sound recordings of the voices of so-called famous personalities (1917-1939), speech samples of German dialects (1921-1943), and recitations of poetry and literature in German (1930s and 1940s) as well as magnetic tapes from the 1960s that have not yet been transferred to a digital format. While, since its inception, the collection has repeatedly been referred to as a sound archive, prior to the digitalization of the shellac holdings in the 1990s this term never found its way into any of its official names. Against this background, this article traces both the Sound Archive’s early institutional history (1915-1947) as well as the use of the term “sound archive.” By considering the archiving of voices in the framework of an emerging history of knowledge, it explores the disciplinary contexts (the academic sciences) and configurations of conservation, research, and presentation (collection, archive, laboratory, library, and museum) in which the preserved human voice operates as an epistemic object. On the basis of a renewed examination of a number of sound recordings of prisoners of war, it should be shown how this historical material can be made productive for current research horizons.
Collecting Walks
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Elsa van der Linden
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
catching moments by collecting walks
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