Why Is It So Hard To Describe Experience? Why Is It So Hard To Experience Description?

Abstract

The Reset Modernity! exhibition was collaboratively designed and curated by a group consisting of people from the aIMe Research Team, the Critical Media Lab of the Academy of Art and Design FhnW in Basel, and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Invited to contribute their thoughts on this process to this catalogue, Jamie Allen, Claudia Mareis, and Johannes Bruder of the Critical Media Lab have opted to trace and reflect on the far from equilibrium entanglements that emerge between the various modes of history and tradition, scholarly inscription and description, experimental design practices, and impossible scenographies in such processes. The authors describe the practice and thinking of the Critical Media Lab (Basel), dedicated to continuous questioning and critique that is “associated with more, not with less, with multiplication, not subtraction” (Latour, “Why Has Critique” 248), intertwining praxis-led art and design research with historical and theoretical reflection.