Artist Hilary Koob-Sassen and poet and writer Charlie Dark will manifest their advanced pedagogical techniques to teach poetry and biology classes amidst the installation THE SYNTAX OCTOPUS.
Artist’s Studio (dates below)
Hilary Koob-Sassen is in residence during the Gustav Metzger: Decades 1959 – 2009 exhibition. He is conducting an experiment to write the DNA of a world organism inspired by Metzger’s work and the upcoming Mass Extinction Conference: A Call to Act (18 and 19 February 2010) curated by Metzger. Koob-Sassen welcome visitors to participate in this quest to share, shape and propose a vision of the future, exploring evolution and creating a narrative song.
In Koob-Sassen’s words this project has 3 aspects:
1) A performative presentation using three objects, to convey and test out a proposition…
2) A proposition –
Towards what is our systems-making headed? I propose that life makes its systems by blindly groping backwards, in a succession of realistic errors able to negotiate new realities. Highly elaborated built structures support a secondary – almost alive – complexity – as a built trellis supports a living plant. As the train tracks, courthouses, and wires support The Market, The Law and The Web. Highly elaborated structures evoke narrative outcomes: an apocalyptic collapse onto neglected foundations; or a platform for a leap out into heaven on earth: a systemic navigation at a new scale of experience. We can see how our current copper wires support the self-elaboration of the web. We can imagine how much more organ-like this activity would be if there were a truly global fibre-optic network. In the same way that the economies of our bodies allow our cells to stride through human-scale life and time and experience, what set of trellis economies could support enough of that secondary activity to constitute the first ever systemic navigation of global experiences such as global war/warming/poverty?
3) A discussion –
The proposal song gets more realistic through the experience of the public.
This project is open to the public and takes place in the Serpentine Gallery Artist’s Studio on the following times and dates:
Friday 30 October 11 – 6pm
Saturday 31 October 11 – 6pm
Sunday 1 November 11 - 6pm
Tuesday 3 November 11 - 6pm
Wednesday 4 November 11 - 6pm
Friday 6 November 11 - 6pm
Saturday 7 November 11 - 6pm
Sunday 8 November 11 - 6pm
For further information contact:
Eleanor Farrington
+44 (0)20 7298 1516
eleanorf@serpentinegallery.org
