Joao Ribas is curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Last March we met him in Milan, at Miart Fair where he was invited to contribute to the talk The Ethic(s) of Images. Contemporary Perspectives on Reality, Representation and Realisms.
Thomas Hirschorn, Touching Reality, 2012, video.
What happens to images, in terms of critical circulation and reproduction:
- in a post-broadcast TV environment informed by the Youtube kind of fragmentation
- when memory is everything we have construcded to contain the anxiety of not knowing what is memorable
- where algorithms replace ethics
- when the acts of sorting and searching are as antithetical as the ontological nature of an analog versus a digital archives
- when the autenthicity of the images, in the new knowledge digital network, is decided by the viewer
- if we commit our entire knowledge to the volatile metaphore of a Cloud
- when social media are triggering new patterns of events and images circulation?
We tried to talks these issues out in relation to both curatorial and artistic practice, wandering in the open field where Pierre Nora, David Joselit, Hito Steyler, Thomas Hirschhorn and Wolfgang Pauli meet.
The music that goes with the interview is by Ongaku2, by Umin @Bad Panda Records, by Johnny Ripper available on Free Music Archive.