Reconstruction of Giraffedae Camelopardalis Tippelskirchi [Masai Giraffe] Museum of Natural     History, Rome, Susanne Isa 2013

Cabinets of Wonder in the Age of Abundance

Imagine a collection, bridging a period of great uncertainty, at the intersection of postmodernity and a new era of Anthropocenic super-modernity…

This paper will reflect on the origins and driving passions behind great collections of historical Arcana and Natural Curiosa, originating in the private collections of 16^th and 17^th Century Europe, through to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in California today. We will consider the resistive boundaries between conventions of science and art practice through the unconscious wanderings of true amateurs, unburdened by the corrupting pressures of profit or professionalism. We will examine an unorthodox landscape of curatorialism, a practice presented in a stilted silence with meticulous facts, scientific footnotes, exhibit cards with careful catalogue listings, sources, citations, provenance and a copious use of Latin, all supported by the reassuringly confident tone of a taped narrator.

In an age of on-demand content, encyclopaedic inventories and self-authorship, everyone can operate as their own curator. Holding a mirror up to the role of the exclusive curatorial practice, we will explore complex strands of interwoven narrative and seemingly inexplicable facts, finely balanced on the edge of reason and deliriously bathed in doubt.

Pictured here are some clues: Nature relocated at a zoomorphic juncture of pure metaphor; a curious collection of Presidential vitrines; Rocket Man as ultimate hero, reconstructed with forensic certitude; the self-taught amateur physicist Jim Carter’s alternative theory for the creation of matter - the Other Theory of Physics and the Living Universe.

Simon Herron

Abstract Future Cities 3 - Conference University of Greenwich April 10th 2014

Thursday 10th April 2014
9.45am – 6.00pm

• Howe Lecture Theatre [QA080]
• Greenwich Maritime Campus
• Old Royal Naval College
• London SE10 9LS

Much of our current urban view is characterised by a swingeing human fall-back position that values sophism, tardiness and economic stringency. This view is predicated on a concern, and a commercialisation of this concern, that we have finite resources and runs hand in hand with a distrust of exuberance, creativity, for its own sake and “out of the box” thinking. This Future Cities 3 conference is themed “Abundance”. It will posit new ways to find abundance in the city, whether through synthetic technology, augmented reality, Utopian thinking or the digitally fabricated Baroque.

The conference will be an antidote to architectural urban Methodist-ism and worthy nothingness. It will be a tsunami of ideas, images and speculations facilitated by a timely optimism – an optimism founded on new materials, new ways of thinking, new tactics and protocols of space, and finally the syncretic opportunities of architecture in the 21st Century.

Keynote speaker:

EVAN DOUGLIS 
Evan Douglis Studio

Speakers:

NEIL SPILLER
University of Greenwich

MARK MORRIS
Cornell University

RACHEL ARMSTRONG
University of Greenwich

FLEAFOLLYARCHITECTS
University of Greenwich / The Bartlett UCL

MARK GARCIA
University of Greenwich

ED WALL
University of Greenwich

NIC CLEAR
University of Greenwich

MAX DEWDNEY
University of Greenwich

ELIZABETH ANNE WILLIAMS
University of Greenwich / Louisiana State University

SIMON HERRON
University of Greenwich

An accompanying exhibition is open from Monday 7th April – Friday 11th April in the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Queen Anne Building, Greenwich Maritime Campus.

Exhibition Private View – Thursday 10th April 6pm (following the conference).

To reserve a place at the conference, please contact: as71@gre.ac.uk.

Admission is free.