Epistemic excess - Artists Space 2015

The exhibition - including works by John Miller, Mary Walling Blackburn, Lou Cantor, Rafael Kelman, Starship magazine, Harm van den Dorpel, Josh Tonsfeldt, Andrew Ross, and Time Farm - will address problems of excess that have long characterized epistemology, since information surpassed individuals’ ability to assimilate it. The contemporary explosion of organized access to excess drives what Joselit observes in After Art to be a not-yet-fully-realized departure from efforts of avant-garde formal innovation toward a kind of “cultural diplomacy.” This ethics of circulation and exchange in place of simple escalation is resonant with the project of philosophy as described by Negarestani: an “enabling alienation,” that forces us from “home” ideas of goodness and truth as ideal objects toward “piecemeal” projects of “navigation.” The works presented propose a use of craft subordinated to epistemic concatenation; like geometric coordinates, what they create is not a new object but a virtual vector in the movement of concepts.