Modernity
has had so many meanings and tries to combine so many contradictory
sets of attitudes and values that it has become impossible to use it
to define the future. It has ended up crashing like an overloaded
computer. Hence the idea is that modernity might need a sort of
reset.
Not a clean break, not a “tabula rasa,” not another iconoclastic
gesture, but rather a restart of the complicated programs that have
been accumulated, over the course of history, in what is often called
the “modernist project.” This operation has become all the more
urgent now that the ecological mutation is forcing us to reorient
ourselves toward an experience of the material world for which we
don’t seem to have good recording devices.
Reset
Modernity! is
organized around six procedures that might induce the readers to
reset some of those instruments. Once this reset has been completed,
readers might be better prepared for a series of new encounters with
other cultures. After having been thrown into the modernist
maelstrom, those cultures have difficulties that are just as grave as
ours in orienting themselves within the notion of modernity. It is
not impossible that the course of those encounters might be altered
after modernizers have reset their own way of recording their
experience of the world.
At
the intersection of art, philosophy, and anthropology, Reset
Modernity! has
assembled close to sixty authors, most of whom have participated, in
one way or another, in the Inquiry
into Modes of Existence
initiated by Bruno Latour. Together they try to see whether such a
reset and such encounters have any practicality. Much like the two
exhibitions Iconoclash
and Making Things Public,
this book documents and completes what could be called a “thought
exhibition:” Reset
Modernity!
held at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe from April to August
2016. Like the two others, this book, generously illustrated,
includes contributions, excerpts, and works from many authors and
artists.
Contributors
Jamie
Allen, Terence Blake, Johannes Bruder, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Philip
Conway, Michael Cuntz, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Didier Debaise,
Gerard de Vries, Philippe Descola, Vinciane Despret, Jean-Michel
Frodon, Martin Giraudeau, Sylvain Gouraud, Lesley Green, Martin
Guinard-Terrin, Clive Hamilton, Graham Harman, Antoine Hennion,
Andrés Jaque, Pablo Jensen, Bruno Karsenti, Sara Keel, Oleg
Kharkhordin, Joseph Leo Koerner, Eduardo Kohn, Bruno Latour,
Christophe Leclercq, Vincent-Antonin Lépinay, James Lovelock,
Patrice Maniglier, Claudia Mareis, Claude Marzotto, Kyle McGee,
Lorenza Mondada, Pierre Montebello, Stephen Muecke, Cyril Neyrat,
Cormac O’Keeffe, Hans Ulrich Obrist, P3G, John Palmesino, Nicolas
Prignot, Donato Ricci, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, Maia Sambonet, Henning
Schmidgen, Isabelle Stengers, Hanna Svensson, Thomas Thwaites, Nynke
van Schepen, Consuelo Vásquez, Peter Weibel, Richard White, Aline
Wiame, Jan Zalasiewicz
Exhibition
April
10, 2016–August 21, 2016
ZKM
| Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
