The Study of
Curatorial Culture
Curatorial Culture
One morning, I read the news about the latest exhibition of the Mori Art Museum, in Tokyo, entitled “Machine Love: Video Game, AI and Contemporary Art.” It immediately reminded me of the book Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan by Gary Genosko and Jay Hetrick, edited 10 years ago, which was a collection of Félix Guattari’s writings about Japan. Uncreativity rules. Instead of actively and creatively diagnosing the basic structure of our world society and seeking the artworks and the exhibitions we need to modulate or gradually change the status quo, the very last pages of the book deal with contemporary art’s role in the “Age of AI, Anthropocene, or Geopolitical conflicts,” daring only to mention art’s “imaginative” functions in such an age. What we witness today is the contemporary art world’s arguments of the very least, the very conservative, and the very worst, vis-à-vis the crises of “the hypertely of AI, the Anthropocene, and the geopolitical conflicts.”
Art in the Age of AI, the Anthropocene, and Geopolitical Conflicts
In fact, most of the monographs in the contemporary art world deal with only one of the above-mentioned crises. Few pieces addressing issues in contemporary art deal with two of the above-mentioned crises, and regrettably, none of the pieces in this context examine the above-mentioned three crises in an artistic way.1 For example, Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (eds) in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, after making an “extrapolation beyond geology,” discussing “aesthesis” and “perception,” demarcating “contested territories,” and “pondering over the survival of the worlds,” name the last section of their introduction “Futures Worth Imagining.”2 Giovanni Aloi, in his Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene, after probing into the “taxidermy surfaces,” the “natural history panopticon,” and “animal visibility,” while neglecting the actual complexities of human/animal interconnectedness and the multi-dimensionality of “scientific/capitalistic optics,” ultimately show only the propitiative as well as perceptual-and-empathy-generative “symbolic imagination.” Jan Rogodzinski, in The Interrogating the Anthropocene: Ecology, Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Future in Question, awkwardly showcases the “imaginary” between the homological “media and artistic responses” and unprepared “capitalist framings.3” Susan Ballard in her magnum opus Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics, before poetizing the “Holocene,” the “Anthropocene,” and the “capitalistic acceleration,” mentions the “labor-doing,” “making-visible,”, and hence the “imaginative” power of the works of art.4 Salma Monani, in Cinema of/for The Anthropocene: Affect, Ecology, and More-than-Human Kinship, names the main title of his foreword “Created to ‘Dream’.5” Also, in the introduction of the same book, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz mentions that the main aim of the book is to challenge the dichotomy of our “natural exclusion,” henceforth to make us “aware” of our own roles in nature.6 Bill Gilbert and Anicca Cox, in Arts Programming for the Anthropocene: Art in Community and Environment, maintain the notion of the “utopia of the edge,” whose main goal is to uphold the “imaginative aftermaths” of whatever remains of rural and urban utopian ideals.7
The author of Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, along with Elaine Gan, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt, call for the “imagination” of the “haunted landscape” of “the ghostly contours of a stone, the radioactivity of a fingerprint, the eggs of a horseshoe crab, a wild bat pollinator, an absent wildflower in a meadow, a lichen on a tombstone, a tomato growing in an abandoned car tire.”8 Jennifer Fay, in her Inhospitable Worlds: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene, provides the thesis of the “artificial-world making,” hence the “image-making” capabilities of film in the age of the Anthropocene.9 Kaya Barry and Jondi Keane, in Creative Measures of the Anthropocene: Art, Mobilities, and Participatory Geographies, celebrate and anticipate the “imaginatively leading” power of the processes of artistic creation.10 Julie Reiss, in her edited piece Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene, calls for “the potential for art to help us imagine other worlds and possible futures” as the most important task, stated in the introduction of the book. T. J. Demos, in his Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing, before studying contemporary necropolitics, media ecologies, geoengineering, ghosts, visual politics, animal cosmopolitics, and the “radical system change,” opens the area of a “rift zone” that enables us to “re-imagine the worlds.”11 Last but not the least, Travis Holloway, in his How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene, before proposing a “counterhistory,” “the transition from postmodern art to the Anthropocene,” and “Democracy at the End of the World,” abstractly and meaninglessly argues that we should invent and imagine the “zoocracy,” which is a kratos, or a rule of life over itself.12
The Importance of Drawing the Picture of the Structure of Digital Technical Individuation
Given these thinkers’ approaches, it seems that we all have already had a view to the consensus about the structure of individuation in the “Age of AI, Anthropocene, or Geopolitical conflicts.” Even so, we have continued to produce and are producing so many “based-on” books, pieces, monographs, leaflets, and exhibitions. In fact, we know nothing about the basic structure of our individuation; that is, the basic structure of our world society. Without the understanding of this basic structure, no books, pieces, monographs, leaflets, or exhibitions could really be thought. No efficacity of the books, pieces, monographs, leaflets, or exhibitions can really be assessed from this, let alone really making them.
The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler and his student Yuk Hui have stated that what we now endure is the so-called process of “disindividuation.”13 This is the result of a cultural abstraction and alienation, against which the great French philosopher they admire, Gilbert Simondon, has argued. In fact, what we endure now is the digital technical individuation, by which we individuate and differentiate from others in a digital technical way. This digital technical individuation forms the most fundamental course of our everyday life, on which the subjectivation and subjectification arise. We can draw a picture of the structure of this digital technical individuation by borrowing the “theory of line” extracted from the Manuscript on the Constitution of Spatial Things – from the D-Manuscripts of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, especially his 1917-1918 article “The Multiple Relativity of the Phantom Thing. Normal and Abnormal Functioning Bodies.”14
The Miss of True Individuation Nowadays
However, no theoretician, philosopher, or curator has mentioned this digital technical individuation, let alone make any pictures of the structures of it. It seems like the digital technical individuation does not exist, and what we have is only successful or failed subjectivation and/or subjectification. We see this in the now famous Byung-Chul Han’s writings, which signify the forgetting of individuation. We read this in the monographs of Bernard Stiegler, which gave us the monotone of individuation. We read this in the works of Yuk Hui, which represent the confusion of individuation. We sense this in the pieces by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, which symbolize the mis-location of individuation. Finally, we also read this in the books of Benjamin H. Bratton, which manifests the misrecognition as well as the rigidity of individuation. Even the smart and brilliant Hito Steyerl, in her latest book, Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat, missed the “whatever Weberian iron cage” that we include, such as the engineers, CEOs, and shareholders, who have all been trapped therein.
1 We see how Yuk Hui, in a non-contemporary art fashion, exceptionally tried to deal with the above-mentioned three crises in his book Machine and Sovereignty: For A Planetary Thinking, albeit in a “given” and hence, “meaningless” way.
2 Heather Davis & Etienne Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), p. 20.
3 Jan Rogodzinski, The Interrogating the Anthropocene: Ecology, Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Future in Question (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. xiii-xv.
4 Susan Ballard, Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2021), p. 132.
5 Katarzyna Paszkiewicz & Andrea Ruthven (eds.), Cinema of/for The Anthropocene: Affect, Ecology, and More-than-Human Kinship (London: Routledge, 2025), p. xi.
6 Ibid., p. 1-18.
7 Bill Gilbert & Anicca Cox, Arts Programming for the Anthropocene: Art in Community and Environment (London: Routledge, 2019), p.137-138.
8 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Arts of Living On a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), p. 12.
9 Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable Worlds: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 1-20.
10 Kaya Barry & Jondi Keane, Creative Measures of the Anthropocene: Art, Mobilities, and Participatory Geographies (London: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2019), p. 1-24.
11 T.J. Demos, Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), p. 1-42.
12 Travis Holloway, How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), p. 1-14.
13 Please see Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 1: The Hyper-Industrial Epoch (London: Polity, 2014), p. 2; Yuk Hui, Machine and Sovereignty: For A Planetary Thinking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024), p. 186.
14 Edmund Husserl, Manuskripte zur Konstitution von Raumdingen – Aus den D-Manuskripten (Leuven: Springer, 2024), p. 35-70.
Pluralize the Critical Points
So, what is to be done in curating? No matter if it’s in the brain-rackingly abundant, or reluctantly deficient sense, no matter if it is in the ordinary locutionary context, or if it is in the Marxism-related Chernyshevkyian, Leninian, Althusserian, Badiouan, and Nancyian proper context, the answer to “what is to be done in curating?” is to diagnose the society, the world or the age we live in, to draw the structural picture of it, and to modulate or to change it, by curating practices. In other words, it is to draw the picture of the structure of our digital technical individuation, to re-orient us, and hence to modulate or to change us, by curating practices. Or, let us put it in another way again, in a curating way, it is to multiply the Simondonian critical points in our daily life, that is, to draw us to the contemporary art spot, and to make the tufted mental lines of us to intersect and to form the very different critical points in correspondence with, or in replacement with, the unconsciously or partially consciously formed points of pre-individual reality, while photographing, retreating, exposing, appreciating and trans-individuating amidst the works of art, in such an age of capitalistic communism we all share, for example, when we take out our smartphones finding and sharing the best dining spot with our friends or in corresponding with other people.
The Lineage of the Question “What Is To Be Done?”
For French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, the “critical point” is the ideal point or the goal of every different kind of individuation. It is the “plus one” of the individuation process. From the social-commune-oriented utopian ideal of Nikolai Chernyshevsky in 1863, the Bolshevik-party-forming urgency of Vladimir Lenin in 1901 and 1902, the historicism-and-ideological underpinning of Louis Althusser in 1978, the re-idealization of communism of Alain Badiou and Marcel Gauchet in 2014, to the inoperative, goalless, wandering, being-exposing relocation of the question of Jean-Luc Nancy in 2016, what we have all witnessed is a zealous spirit of the critical point, of such an impossible but necessary and unfailing communism.
In fact, the question “what is to be done?” as a proper political, or even communist-socialist problem arose from the Russian philosopher and writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel, while responding to Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons, What Is To Be Done? (Что делать?) The novel depicted the protagonist, Viéra’s seemingly failed, but ultimately successful socialist commune experiments and occupation-and-free-choice-related breakthrough. It shows the “happy ending” of two America-hated, socialist-oriented couples. This ideal and “happy ending” inspired Vladimir Lenin, who used the same title in his long essay What Is To Be Done? from 1901 to 1902. Starting from the inspection of the situation of “criticism,” the “freedom of criticism,” and Friedrich Engels’ notion of the “theoretical struggle,” Lenin proposed to theorize the “spontaneity of the masses” and the “consciousness of social democracy.”15 Against “slanderers” and “mystifiers,” Lenin hailed the working class as the “champion of democracy,” and the most important thing, the urgency of the “respectful” restoration of the Bolshevik, that is, the Communist party.16
Later in the twentieth century, the French Marxist Louis Althusser responded to this question with the same article titled “What Is To Be Done?” Progressing from the primacy of the political line over the party, Althusser insisted on the importance of the political analysis of the workers’ class struggle, which equals “Marxist Theory or political consciousness of the conditions for knowledge.”. Besides, Althusser also championed that the workers’ mobility should be and will be changed according to the mobility of capital. The “concrete analysis” of the mechanism of the mass production capitalist system must be maintained, and the “historical character” of the Marxist tradition should always be traced too.17 This is the answer to the question “What Is To Be Done?” that Althusser provided. In dialogue with the French historian Marcel Gauchet, while employing the same title “What Is To Be Done?”, the French philosopher Alain Badiou, after describing his encounter with Marxism, celebrated the insurrectionism of Marx and the “obscurity” of Lenin.18 In other words, it is necessary to bring out the so-called experimental “communist hypothesis,” that is, to put the “communist idea” into the testing practice and projection of a future possibility, in the three-fold understanding that communism is capitalistic-evil-saving, not-naturally-state-centric, and division-of-labor-oriented.19 There is always the possibility of maintaining the communist idea and communist hypothesis. This is the answer to the question “What Is To Be Done?” as stated by Badiou. Last but not the least, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, after stating the prerequisite of “re-making” the character of the question, iterated it again in the book with the same title “What Is To Be Done?”, showing therein that Kant, Husserl, Bataille, Derrida, and others have all in their ways responded to this question. Although dislocating, Nancy maintained, the different responses to the question are indeed the true “beginning” of the thinking of this question, according to the primacy of the “change of picture of the mind” over the real “change” or “making” (faire). What is to be done? Nancy, as a deconstructionist philosopher, provided that “being exposed to infinity,” or the “affirmation of the being in its exposition to infinity,” without an object, project, and/or effect, that is, the Celanian “make without shore” (faire sans rivages), is the real thing we should consider as the answer of the question of “What Is To Be Done?”, which is just the “condition of possibility” of “what is to be done?”
The Coalition of Resourceful Weaks and Shut-Down Curating
Hence, what if the “what is to be done in curating” question is facing the “Age of AI, Anthropocene, or Geopolitical conflicts”? The answer is clearly the same. We, as people around the world, are technically trans-individuating, and even digitally and technically trans-individuating ourselves, in forming the lived reality of such an age. In fact, the more accelerating our digital technical trans-individuation is, the more severely damaged are the groups being afflicted by the technological warfare, the Anthropocene and the geopolitical conflicts. Resources and Energy are the conditions of possibility of the functioning of AI, the expansion of the anthropocene, and the research and the development of the multiple weapons of geopolitical wars and conflicts. The rare natural resource and precious metal are mainly located in the global south. True equality is what we must strive for. Perhaps, instead of the Latourian “reset,” the “Coalition Of Resourceful Weaks” (CORW) and the “aesthetics of the shut-down,” the “art of the shut-down,” as well as “shut-down curating” are needed, in order to shut down whatever machine that maintains the vertical and unequal age we live in for a while, in order to answer the questions “what is to be done in curating?” nowadays.
Considering this, we are honored and delighted to invite three authors to probe into this question in a profoundly deep way. By applying the discourses of Michael Bhaskar, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Baruch de Spinoza and others, Jean-Paul Martinon forges the concept of “curatorial anarchy,” and urges in his article that it is only through this horizontal, leaderless, equaliberal approach that we can re-addressing the question “what is to be done in curating?”, hence facing the crisis we mentioned above in a meaningful way.. By reflexively recounting the experiences of one residency-program-participation, Esther Lu Dai-Ru illuminates for us in a detailed way how she was deeply touched by the slow, peaceful, and equal “becoming-with,” and the “queer curve” of the nonhuman species, and the non-anthropocentric “deep thinking,” which was found within the process rotating from “breathing” to “evolving” in her article. Last but not the least, by illustrating the process he encountered on the road of taking the porcelain photos as an artistic project of the “mobile museum,” in his article, Kalen Wing-Ki Lee traces the lineage of “porcelain photos” or “photoceramics” in Hong Kong, and pointing out the importance of the equality of everyday photography, photo artefacts, and photographic practices, in relation to the question of “what is to be done in curating?”. The Curatorial will become the horizontal and equal “technics of the self,” which each of us must heed, while facing the crisis mentioned above. Perhaps, this will be the best answer to the question we, as contemporary art practitioners, should forever ask: “What Is To Be Done In Curating?”.
15 Vladimir Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is To Be Done?” and Other Writings. New York: Bantam Books, 1966. EPUB File.
16 Ibid.
17 Louis Althusser, What Is To Be Done? (London: Polity Press, 2020), p. 23.
18 Alain Badiou & Marcel Gauchet, What Is To Be Done? A Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism, and the Future of Democracy (London: Polity, 2016), p. 14-15.
19 Ibid., 26.
1 We see how Yuk Hui, in a non-contemporary art fashion, exceptionally tried to deal with the above-mentioned three crises in his book Machine and Sovereignty: For A Planetary Thinking, albeit in a “given” and hence, “meaningless” way.
2 Heather Davis & Etienne Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), p. 20.
3 Jan Rogodzinski, The Interrogating the Anthropocene: Ecology, Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Future in Question (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. xiii-xv.
4 Susan Ballard, Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2021), p. 132.
5 Katarzyna Paszkiewicz & Andrea Ruthven (eds.), Cinema of/for The Anthropocene: Affect, Ecology, and More-than-Human Kinship (London: Routledge, 2025), p. xi.
6 Ibid., p. 1-18.
7 Bill Gilbert & Anicca Cox, Arts Programming for the Anthropocene: Art in Community and Environment (London: Routledge, 2019), p.137-138.
8 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Arts of Living On a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), p. 12.
9 Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable Worlds: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 1-20.
10 Kaya Barry & Jondi Keane, Creative Measures of the Anthropocene: Art, Mobilities, and Participatory Geographies (London: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2019), p. 1-24.
11 T.J. Demos, Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), p. 1-42.
12 Travis Holloway, How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), p. 1-14.
13 Please see Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Volume 1: The Hyper-Industrial Epoch (London: Polity, 2014), p. 2; Yuk Hui, Machine and Sovereignty: For A Planetary Thinking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024), p. 186.
14 Edmund Husserl, Manuskripte zur Konstitution von Raumdingen – Aus den D-Manuskripten (Leuven: Springer, 2024), p. 35-70.
15 Vladimir Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is To Be Done?” and Other Writings. New York: Bantam Books, 1966. EPUB File.
16 Ibid.
17 Louis Althusser, What Is To Be Done? (London: Polity Press, 2020), p. 23.
18 Alain Badiou & Marcel Gauchet, What Is To Be Done? A Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism, and the Future of Democracy (London: Polity, 2016), p. 14-15.
19 Ibid., 26.
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Author
Yenchi Yang is currently an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Transdisciplinary Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts. He is also the founding director of the Center for Critical Framework Studies (CCFS) and the Motricity Lab, both established in 2024. Prior to his current role, he served as an adjunct assistant professor at Taipei National University of the Arts. His past positions include post-doctoral researcher at the Project Office of Digital Humanities, National Chengchi University; adjunct assistant professor at the Graduate Institute of Transdisciplinary Arts, National Kaohsiung Normal University; assistant researcher at the Art Archive Center in Taiwan, Tainan National University of the Arts; and post-doctoral researcher at s.School, Feng Chia University. Additionally, he has been the exclusive collaborator of Taiwanese artist Ching-Yuan Hsu（許進源）
His main research fields include philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, Phenomenology of Digital World, Philosophy of Technology, Relationship between Contemporary Art and Society, Aesthetics, and Cultural Studies. He is currently making several video installation works, curating an exhibition concerning the point, the line, and the surface in “civil war” (stasis) and “nature” (phùsis), and translating Michel Foucault’s Le Discours philosophique and Gilbert Simondon’s L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information from French into traditional Chinese. He is also writing a short monograph concerning the relationship among AI, contemporary crisis, framework, and world philosophy. He has also implemented the “The Life Studies and Philosophical Fictional Project of Taiwanese philosopher Tian-Zhong Zheng（曾天從）”. In 2025, he will hold an international conference “On Now: Simondon, Stiegler, and the Crisis of the Humanities.”
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