[-empyre-] "Death of the Curator"

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all


regarding writers,

Ana schreibt
<<
But writers need to make the transition to next level of work, to the collective creation of spaces where cooperation and support substitute individual infatuation and rediscover the power of the words as revulsive.
We wordmakers are the heirs of Socrates, poisoned by the State for his words and his teachings and his ability to subvert the minds, we are the heirs of Ovidius, in exile far from Rome because his words were far to critical for the ruling class, we are the heirs of Hildegarde von Bingen, accused for being a heretical, we are the heirs of Emile Zola, who wrote one of the most emotionally powerful alegate of our times, we are the heirs of Primo Levi and Simone Weil and Victor Frankl and Miguel Hernandez and Federico García Lorca and Haroldo Conti and Rodolfo Walsh and so many others showing than words are indeed powerful tools to perform changes...
But there is a challenge, again, how to jump to the next level and redefine all these roles, the role of the artist, of the curator, of the writer...
>>

And currently visiting the quiet German countryside, i read the papers there,  and the daily outpouring of commentary on the bad poem that Günter Grass published/released worldwide last week. 
What a curious event, a storm in a waterglass caused by a badly written ideological poem by a well known  writer, touching on some wounds, nevertheless, predictably.  The media and the papers now act as "collectors," curating the national and international response and reactions to this poem. 

Indeed interesting to ask what happened to "languages" in the larger context of new media arts and the discussion here on curating; and issue of other kinds of writing (in the digital age) have certainly come up, I am sure,
also on this list (empyre June 2010 on publishing?) - it's a short step, then, to include the question of "curating" electronic writing or multimedia writing. 
At the university in  London where i work, they recently hired a writer to be a professor of contemporary thought, and he began working in the english department with an interesting proposal, a gesture towards
collaborative production on a literary essay on Kafka  ("Kafka's Wound") he got invited to produce to be hosted later on the BBC online platform, and writer and BBC had the idea to make the essay multimedia-ready for the digital age, thus my colleague is now suggesting others can participate in the cross-media generation of audio-visual or other sensorial mediatable hypertextual dimensions of a "literary text."   Not an interactive collective writing experiment, but something similar yet different, where the paratextual or paramedial dimensions can emerge without a curator or director but in "solidarity" with the idea for the project.  I am quite intrigued by this. And by Kafka's Wound.

with regards

Johannes Birringer
dap-lab
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap