Скачать или смотреть Nato Thompson | Infrastructures of Resonance (setting the stage for a new form of art and life)

Nato Thompson is an author, curator, and what he describes as a “cultural infrastructure
builder”. In 2021, he co-founded with Walid Raad and Josh Goldblum, the NFT art commissioning organization artwrld. artwrld takes the opportunities afforded by NFTs to craft and distribute historic artworks with the world’s most visionary artists while also building an art world worth believing in. In 2020, he initiated and now directs The Alternative Art School, an online global art campus featuring faculty such as Janine Antoni, Trevor Paglen, Mark Dion, Yael Bartana, and more.
Previous to his entrepreneurial endeavors, Thompson worked as Artistic Director at Philadelphia Contemporary, Philadelphia Contemporary, and Creative Time as Artistic Director and as Curator at MASS MoCA. He has organized major Creative Time projects including The Creative Time Summit (2009–2015), Pedro Reyes’ Doomocracy (2016), Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), Living as Form (2011), Trevor Paglen’s The
Last Pictures (2012), Paul Ramírez Jonas’s Key to the City (2010), Jeremy Deller’s It is What it is (2009, with New Museum curators Laura Hoptman and Amy Mackie), Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008), and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007), among others.
He has written two books of cultural criticism, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (2015) and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life (2017).

Summit One
Beyond the Horizon: Inventing the Reality

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.”

J.G. Ballard, Crash

Reality is not made out of representations but is what makes representations possible. The mind-independent reality withdraws from any direct relation and remains unseen and untouched. Furthermore, the thing-in-itself adds to the mind-independent reality of what we may term conditions of knowability. Therefore, our understanding of the mind-independent reality is continuously conditioned. There can be no absolute knowledge of reality nor a concrete representation of it. Everything falls into the realm of what we may call distortion, like a mere symptom of the hidden reality.

Beyond the Horizon: Inventing the Reality explores conditions of knowability and the relation between mind-independent reality and representation. It investigates how artists utilize different approaches to challenge “that which is” in favor of “that which is not” or “that which could be possible” through their artistic practices. How can artists, through dialectical relations, disclose and elicit new potentialities from reality and challenge our limited understanding of the world’s haecceities?