The blog

We have just returned from Karlsruhe (Germany) where we met the ZKM team to prepare an exhibition that will start in April 2016. We consider this exhibition as a great opportunity and a fourth medium to experiment with the inquiry along with the book, the platform and the face-to-face meetings we’ve done so far.

Please find below a first statement of intent (Bruno Latour 15 December 2014) that will help us to move forward (we are just at the the beginning of the process, as you can see!) :

The Reset Modernity project (provisional title) is based on the AIME project developed in French and English by the AIME team and accessible on the following site www.modesofexistence.org

The goal is threefold:

To document the project, as it has been going on for a quarter of a century, and to connect it to many germane projects claiming to advance an anthropology of the Moderns, specifically the Europeans, a century after the Great War and at a time of comparative weakness of Europe. (Exhibition as a document of the history of the inquiry)

To offer a completely different occasion to experiment with the methods and the results of the AIME project, thanks to the medium of the exhibition, so different and in a way complementary to books, sites and face to face interactions. The exhibition inverts the order and, in contrast with the paper book, starts from the experiences and only later suggests the technical philosophical apparatus as a way to account for those experiences. This experience based exhibition is the main challenge of the exhibition. (Exhibition as the experience of the inquiry -experiments of a mode / crossings)

Finally, the goal of the project is to obtain more information and in a different format that will feed on the original project and site; the catalog and its many avatars being a powerful way to enrich the collections and multiply the access to the concepts and arguments of this anthropology of the Moderns. (Exhibition for nourishing the Inquiry)

This exhibition is not spectacular. It has very few works of art to display. But neither is it an exhibition about documents in cases for people to read. It is more like a hands on science museum/lab where visitors can feel and test for themselves what sort of contradictory accounts they have of ''modernity," this most difficult term to define.

Technically it is an expansion of what we call the entry 2 on the website and of the ways the scenarios are proposed. The difference is that there are many more of them and they have to trigger the activity and involvement of the visitors, who are transformed into co-inquirers just like the readers of the book who are using the website.

We will try to keep you up-to-date on the further developments!

The AIME team.

Visiting ZKM from AIME team on Vimeo.