2016 ~ Sunday March 20 ~ Roaming Assembly # 4 ~ FAILURE TO TRANSMIT: ‘The Necessity of Not Understanding / 👍👍👍👍’, talk by Mary Ellen Carroll

The Necessity of Not Understanding / 👍👍👍👍

by Mary Ellen Carroll

To stop answering the ‘quality question in art’, the researcher Seth Siegelaub developed a framework that would qualify other people to make these decisions. This structure for distanciation was predicated on trust and paradoxically, it privileged the artist. It was not an algorithm designed to reinforce unanimity, as in the binary coded, jpegable system of today. Nor, was it the audition, wherein ideas are tried out by the institution or market—and based on the number of likes rather than the development of a genuine discourse, and lacking what the Kenyan writer, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor refers to as the ethical imagination.