We have been organising a curating course at AIT since 2001. My team from last year's Curation Practice course orgnaised '12 Moons: Communicating with the Full Moon', an instruction art website and event based project.
You can read and realize the instructions here.
On the full moon of May 9, we organised the first event at AIT. Over 50 people came, 20 or so staying through the night until dawn. The curating team presented ideas behind the project including a survey of Rudolf Steiner's lunar thinking and a short history of instruction based art. A special guest also came, Yumikino san, who runs one of only two bio-dynamic farms in Japan (near Narita, Chiba). In between treating the earth with special elixirs of cow horn and planting seed according to lunar cycles, he renovates a beautiful old farmhouse which he hopes to eventually turn into a bio-dynamic center. We set up a bio-dynamic cafe, serving food and drinks made from this method.
At midnight we asked those present to collectively realize the instruction work of the Swedish artists IC98 . This was one of the most powerful moments of the night, transforming a room of thirty or so people into a space of silence and non-electricity.
We intend to continue adding instructions to the website and making further full moon events. As I wrote on the website introduction, the project conceives the full moon to be its principle audience. The Enlightenment equation of Artist Producer - Curator Mediator - Public Audience feels awkward and strained now. I propose that there are really no privileged knowledge perspectives, no place from where a curator or an artist can 'pass on' knowledge. We today all share the same hallucinations. The age is psychedelic. Laterally shifting the attention of our activities away from human audiences to a cosmic dimension is perhaps one way to probe our hallucinatory predicament. By doing so we may temporarily re-align ourselves away from what Felix Guattari refers to as 'Integrated World Capitalism', and be open to the felt experience of the body in Space.
Some pictures from the evening.
'Ninjas', Peter McDonald, 2008.
Small exhibition of moon related objects.
Yumikino san.
Realizing Tranquility Base in AIT Room, IC98 instruction.
Tsukimi-Udon served at dawn.
One of the key images for us in thinking about this project was Charles Duke's family photograph left on the surface of the moon during the Apollo 16 mission. The photograph is in a plastic bag and on it are written the words: 'This is the family of Astronaut Duke from Planet Earth. Landed on the Moon, April 1972.' An interesting essay on the moon photo can be read here. We thought about this as perhaps the first intentional curatorial gesture to be held outside the atmosphere of earth.
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