#catalogue text

[melissa-holly]

The Idea Age

As something I was putting off for a while, it was time to give my project a title. I decided on ‘The Idea Age’. Originally, I thought of the title as something that illustrated the project as a fictional future, with the Idea Age meaning the time in which the project is situated. However many other meanings have also arose. Some think the title is commenting on the ideal age of idea generation, the age in which your ideas are the richest. 

I feel the title sums up the project well, with room for interpretation. I have also completed the exert for the catalogue, which is currently as followed;

A fictional future. An ideas economy. Children’s minds are in high demand.

With the notion that during the 'Idea Age’, children are the source of the wealthiest ideas and ideas are the route to success, two possible responses were designed. They both possess utopian/dystopian qualities and highlight social, political, economic and historical issues of the past and future.

The Imaginarium is a role reversed school, in which children reinstate the creativity of adults, lost through the traditional education system. In the past the system has educated the creativity out of students. The aim is to get back their willingness to take risks and alternative viewpoint on the world.

The Imagination Factory is a business set up to extract ideas from children and distribute them to clients. Posing as a creative summer camp to the outside world, the factory is a fully designed business, aiming to make money from the ideas of children.

[pataform]

Catalogue Text: "n^Billions Photographs | O Time, Your Pyramids"

In 1941, Borges encountered the sentence “O Time, Your Pyramids” in the permutated white noise of the letters in his Babylonian library. Suddenly, amid the potential abyss of sheer impossibilities, he found himself facing a magical hope - the utopian vision of omnigraphy. This same hope is what has propelled the ’pataphysician of the past and present who have set out to discover solid ground to explore in the ocean of pure fantasy. At around the same time, in New York, the cryptologist C. E. Shannon presented sentences in a language that vaguely resembled English, distilled from the pure code of cybernetics- the digital logic of the computer. And before the latter, thirty years on, came to define the present era, the Oulipiens banded together in Paris; using poetic combinatorics - McLuhanlike divorced from all content - they sought to explore Potential Literature. The most prominent artifact: Queneau’s permutative opus 1014 Poems, which consists of ten sonnets - imagination in a grid à la Compression-Artifact. Five decades have passed, and the word has become image. Light, as in Inge Dick’s zinnober, is now a numerically quantifiable parameter; the negative, an operable image database. In accurate montage but far removed from common serialism, its reproductive potential generates an epistemic gaze at imaginary objects: the sculptural database RaumTischBankHocker (RoomTableBenchStool) opens up a perspective on the concept of “scale,” just as the TimeScans, with their true and yet impossible pictures, visualize time. (Marek Bozuk)