Curating is a form of trust and accepting the results that come along the way, even when they go along or beyond the initial intention. It is more a process than it is a result // Xiaoyu Weng

The Autumn School of Curating is organized by the Cluj Cultural Centre in partnership with the Art Encounters Foundation, and it was initiated by Corina Bucea and Diana Marincu.

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Xiaoyu Weng, 2023 course leader, is a curator and writer based in New York. Her curatorial and writing practices focus on globalization, identity, and decolonization, the intersection of art, science, and technology.

The process of becoming: we need to have more courage to talk about vulnerability and failure

Yutong: I now think art is a technology, close to magic.

Johana: related to blind trust, archeologists say “I know this is the truth, because I have the laser”. So for me, when it comes to curating, the question arises: how do we critically reflect on something like this, on this blind scientific truth?

Andres: after being here with all the conversations, it came up this possibility of working with technology, more specifically about framing the technology; how certain ideas or frames are put into and how AI can create more liberty also for the art practice.

Erfan: the translation of the aesthetic and the relation to beauty is such a wrong thing. Aesthetics has nothing to do with beauty, more like with perceiving the perceptible. In that sense it is all about epistemology. Art and philosophy are cousins trying to grasp the ungraspable.

Taylor: digital technology to preserve time.

Donika: technology is also about how to frame time because any tech development marks a point in time, so is a way to understand time.

Olivia: curating can be a different way to search for the truth, through art you look into individual perspectives, and those are very phenomenological aspects.

Still contemporary in a way, still in the present.

Xiaoyu: integration of philosophy, phenomenology, and art would be effective against AI algorithms’ uniformization. Learning about all kinds of cosmologies can be done by working with artists.

Andres: tech/AI is creating this normalization of everything.

Xiaoyu: even the term art industry is questionable. There is this complicated relationship between artists and institutions. Mistranslation between artist ideas and institutions’ perspective. Art is a bigger idea than being flattened into art as an object.

Olivia: maybe a good question is how do you make philosophy fit into the programming of AI.

Xin: it is female because the technology is perceived as serving, so the feminine is somehow submissive. But I think technology is gender fluid or gender in power because this gender is a sort of social construct.

Diren: what are the possibilities of the gender of AI and robots, as human beings creating this kind of infrastructure we tend to recreate what we’ve been doing so far and probably we customize with a specific gender. But how would it be for AI to choose their gender? What will it create?

Una: a lot of technology is female. Because they are assisting, a lot of the technology is sexist from this perspective, in a capitalist patriarchy logic. But I think if technology could choose its gender it would be male.

Una: art entertainment is a very dangerous road. The curator needs to create exhibitions that raise a question mark, and create meaningful conversations that push society further; maybe not now, but in the future.

Olivia: I guess there are these exhibitions, like blockbuster exhibitions, which are more about entertainment and selling tickets.

Xiaoyu: personally, I’m struggling with populism: the museum as entertainment, ticketing, especially in the U.S., where institutions are much under pressure to make exhibitions popular. There are blockbuster exhibitions and academic exhibitions; this is more of a thing of museum director/ manager...

Taylor: the effectiveness of digital art when trying to offer solutions to the risks of technologisation; what if this is becoming part of the problem? Maybe there’s pressure on artists to overcomes the previous experience, something outstanding. In this case, building a monument to the machine.

Xiaoyu: we need to come up with alternative models of funding. The big question is how do we counter the singularity of what artistic institutions are becoming as well. Technology is also pushing for singularity, uniformity.Museums are a very specific form of cosmology, is a western thing ...

...which often does not come from art as a background and has very different responsibilities and KPIs. I guess it is very important to think of different ways of funding for museums, for the sustainability of the museum. Is important not to rely on the ticketing, because this creates a pressure.

Alice: Project - first internet memory, regardless of demographic differences, it was very much about connecting

... and is about the desire to possess. We need different models of self-organizing; strategies to navigate the institution’s system. Museums don’t have only curators or directors, have you ever thought about starting a revolution from the front-house employees, communication or PR?

... It is a real challenge, this increasing pressure of funding.

Xiaoyu: I don’t think art should particularly keep the pace with the technological language, is more of a medium to slow it down, to be more reflective, more like a conversation process instead of a quick reaction to what’s happening.

The curatorial department is quite snobbish so there is not too much conversation between parts.

Una: hope - is not relevant anymore.There is hope, but this is not the question, is just that we need to stop complaining and act.

Una: never been an age in art history where artists were paid as good as the rest of the workers, that’s why I believe unionization is a tool.

Xiaoyu: forgotten technology is also about cosmology, things that have been forgotten or erased. One way of discovering I think is to see the totally different purpose from what it supposed to be, it is radical act of refuting the capitalism, to go on this playfulness or counter efficiency ...

Lucia: what about the figure of curator in an era when engineers or scientists can be also involved in curating exhibitions? Can they be recognised as curators? And if they are not, how can we give them proper recognition?

...A lot of wisdom has eliminated through the capitalist imposing of competition and progress; this framework is not working anymore, because if we are not reinventing how the economy works and how we organize ourselves, we’ll just be a bubble, like in California in the 60’s or the counterculture...

Xiaoyu: everybody calls himself a curator. Curating shopping lists, curating fashion pages, so it should be a bit of a threshold on this. Especially when talking about engineers in Silicon Valley, they are engaged in art, but they don’t believe particularly in arts and culture as added...

movement of the hippies, will not have an impact to radically change. How do you go outside of the romantic vision of coming back to nature?

...value; they believe they are the ones who are changing the world, not artists. I think that’s a one sided perspective… or politicians which believe art funding is only a leak on energy…yet, there are now many institutions or NGO or other types of professionals into this curating practice...