Exhibition-Making and Political Imaginary : On Modalities and Potentialities of Curatorial Practice

The Ph.D. project concerns itself with curatorial practice, its constituent modalities and potentialities. It consists of both a practical and a theoretical part. These are not separate entities, but immersed in each other. The point of departure is my own practice, but making claims for a general analysis of the politics of exhibition-making. Rather than proving or disproving certain proposition, ideas will be presented as proposals, as possibilities, and investigated as such. The dissertation departs from a claim consisting of three features:1.That the making and staging of an exhibition has to do with the establishment of political imaginaries, as understood in the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis.2.That an exhibition, through its ensemble of various elements, creates a certain world-view of what it is possible to imagine, and thus, conversely, what cannot be imagined (from a presented vantage point). 3.That any practice of exhibition-making creates a world-view in different ways, and thus invoking different imaginaries. Exhibition-making is placed within the construction of a typology, and discussed in terms of a ‘conceptual history’, as proposed by Reinhart Koselleck in The Practice of Conceptual History. This approach is contrasted with Michel Foucault’s ideas of archeology and genealogy (mainly as in The Archeology of Knowledge). The thesis looks at contemporary modes of exhibition-making, including case-studies of my own work. These are two previous projects, Models of Resistance (2000), and Capital (It Fails Us Now) (2005-6). as well as two projects conceived as part of the Ph.D., Vectors of the Possible (2010) and All That Fits (2011). The dissertation proceeds through the following three analytic terms: I. Institution Institution are seen in both the philosophical terms of Castoriadis, as ways of instituting, and instituting social relations differently, as well as in terms of art’s institutions, in both the broad and narrow senses of the word. Notions as such institutional critique and new institutionalism will be considered, as well as biennales as a major form of instituting in contemporary art. II. Articulation Articulation is understood as that which combines or recombines the various elements, whether in an exhibition or politics proper. I shall argue, that the articulatory elements of exhibition-making must be brought to the foreground in order to contribute to a different political imagination, and thus instituting. The usage of articulation is also an examination of the speaking subject in curating, reflected through Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself, exemplified by the research exhibition All That Fits, that was based on readings of Foucault’s use of the term Parrhésia). III. Horizon. Finally, such positionings is seen in light of their political imagination, that is their world-view, and thus the philosophical notion of the horizon. The notion of the horizon will be proposed as a possible way in which to think the relationship between exhibition-making and political imagination anew. The exhibition Vectors of the Possible will be presented in tandem with the book and conference entitled On Horizons

The roads of rage and ruin: contemporary art and its publics after the global

This essay will consider the possibilities for contemporary art and culture in the current age of anger, the post-public condition, the historical phase of deglobalization, and the demise of the international artworld and contemporary art as we knew it. First of all, I will outline how contemporary art came to be structurally and historically after 1989, and how this was aligned with the central notion and economy of globalization itself. In the second half, I will describe how this historical formation is changing, and arguably disappearing, and consider what can and will replace it. I will do so through a reading of Walter Mignolo’s outline of five options for the future: decoloniality, rewesternization, reorientation of the Left, dewesternization, and spiritual reawakening. To these, I will then add and consider a sixth option: neo-fascism, drawing upon the work of Rastko Močnik, which also provides a road map for the present and future

Hand Keypoint Detection in Single Images using Multiview Bootstrapping

We present an approach that uses a multi-camera system to train fine-grained detectors for keypoints that are prone to occlusion, such as the joints of a hand. We call this procedure multiview bootstrapping: first, an initial keypoint detector is used to produce noisy labels in multiple views of the hand. The noisy detections are then triangulated in 3D using multiview geometry or marked as outliers. Finally, the reprojected triangulations are used as new labeled training data to improve the detector. We repeat this process, generating more labeled data in each iteration. We derive a result analytically relating the minimum number of views to achieve target true and false positive rates for a given detector. The method is used to train a hand keypoint detector for single images. The resulting keypoint detector runs in realtime on RGB images and has accuracy comparable to methods that use depth sensors. The single view detector, triangulated over multiple views, enables 3D markerless hand motion capture with complex object interactions.Comment: CVPR 201

Relaxed Three-Algebras: Their Matrix Representations and Implications for Multi M2-brane Theory

We argue that one can relax the requirements of the non-associative three-algebras recently used in constructing D=3, N=8 superconformal field theories, and introduce the notion of ``relaxed three-algebras''. We present a specific realization of the relaxed three-algebras in terms of classical Lie algebras with a matrix representation, endowed with a non-associative four-bracket structure which is prescribed to replace the three-brackets of the three-algebras. We show that both the so(4)-based solutions as well as the cases with non-positive definite metric find a uniform description in our setting. We discuss the implications of our four-bracket representation for the D=3, N=8 and multi M2-brane theory and show that our setup can shed light on the problem of negative kinetic energy degrees of freedom of the Lorentzian case.Comment: 31 pages, no figure

Total Capture: A 3D Deformation Model for Tracking Faces, Hands, and Bodies

We present a unified deformation model for the markerless capture of multiple scales of human movement, including facial expressions, body motion, and hand gestures. An initial model is generated by locally stitching together models of the individual parts of the human body, which we refer to as the "Frankenstein" model. This model enables the full expression of part movements, including face and hands by a single seamless model. Using a large-scale capture of people wearing everyday clothes, we optimize the Frankenstein model to create "Adam". Adam is a calibrated model that shares the same skeleton hierarchy as the initial model but can express hair and clothing geometry, making it directly usable for fitting people as they normally appear in everyday life. Finally, we demonstrate the use of these models for total motion tracking, simultaneously capturing the large-scale body movements and the subtle face and hand motion of a social group of people

A Long Walk to the Land of the People: Contemporary Art in the Spectre of Spectatorship

An article discussiong the notion of the public in contemporary art practices, including curatorial modes of address

Once upon a time in the west: Or, the rise and fall of the (bourgeois) public sphere, as told by Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas’ famous description of the public sphere, and its central place in liberal democracy, has unfortunately become a normative model, both within arts and politics. However, as this article argues, Habermas’ proposition is not only historical, but was retrograde from the outset, and now functions more as a blacking of political action than an enabler, and must be contested in terms of counterpublic formations and experiences, as well as criticized from its insistence on rationality and negotiation in an era of post-political consensus within the former public sphere

A Contemporary Observatory for the City

Using the notion of teh observatory, this texts examines how an institution of contemporary art can become truly contemporary, exploring teh contemporary as a temporal and political condition