Tuesday, March 19, 2024
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Newsletter / Intelligence is to potential as wisdom is to application.

Intelligence is to potential as wisdom is to application. This week, we observe two artists who have escaped the revolving door of self-analysis bearing the memory, rather than the sensation, of dizziness.

Only an archive as grand as the anthropological collections at her disposal could contain the existential ruminations of visual artist Ania Soliman. Soliman’s winding career path through illustration, theory, cultural studies, and recently, dance, betrays an unflagging urge to settle an inner turbulence. Recognized at the core of her practice is a constructive rivalry between the diagrammatic and the gestural, the structural and the subjective. Listen to her relieving interview to witness the fortunate outcomes of her occupational and emotional experimentation, from conceptions of the body through diverse historical standpoints to the repurposing of artifacts as a dynamic semiotic landscape.

Architectural scholar and designer Kazys Varnelis tracks behemoths by their indisputable footprints. Entertaining the grand task of top-down cultural analysis, Varnelis documents the changes in the forest left by the wake of roaming technological, economic, and psychological colossi. In his engrossing interview, Varnelis enumerates the impromptu and gradual opportunities that have dotted and shaped his extensive career, guiding his interest in ubiquitous systems away from scholarly contexts and into an exhibition-oriented practice. Varnelis is currently busied with the immense dilemma of applying Heidegger’s notion of dwelling to the alienation and isolation of the virtual age, identifying the loss of communal practices and mindsets in the sour disposition of an internet-deprived teenager.

Additional interviews include: Julie Tremblay, Pablo Helguera, and Laurie Palmer.

Looking for reading suggestions? Don Ritter, one of our users, is imbibing The Art of Being by Eric Fromm, a cautionary and instructive sermon that suggests a return to primordial sensitivities to regain existential autonomy within artificial systems of consumption and dissatisfaction. Christoph Heinrich, another user, is grappling with the highly renowned Sapiens by Israeli historian Yuval Harari, a philosophical text that renders an accurate portrait of modern society from the black, dehumanizing paint of technological progress and the white acrylic of spiritual inclinations.

If time were granted a corporeal form, how would it dress? Would it occupy space as a static emblem or elude sense as a vibrating network of strings? Designpreis Halle has posed the question and is awaiting worldwide responses until January 31st. Bring into being a compact but multifarious vision that epitomizes the principles of elegant design for the chance to win international renown and a generous prize. Free to apply and open to all mediums, anyone at any experience can articulate how civilizations are investing their invaluable resource.

Do not readily accept the image for its meaning, nor the meaning for its image. There are no bones in the face of a clock.

As always, here are the links to the interview archive and free resources page.

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