“A recent piece in the New York Times collected incidences of people taken adrift by their GPS. It reports of a couple that “plunged off a bridge in Indiana” last year because it ignored «Road Closed» signs, and of park rangers in Death Valley that are confronted with so many incidents involving drivers following disused roads and disappearing into remote areas that they gave them a name: «death by GPS.» In each of these cases, the GPS had insisted and the drivers had readily or finally abandoned doubt. The map has taken priority over the territory. The world is no longer the measure for the accuracy of the map, but the other way around: an imperfect reality is measured by the standards of what is considered to be increasingly “perfect” map. For a GPS to be wrong, would not the entire order of the cosmos and the course of the planets (or satellites) have to be upset? In this talk I will speak about a series of curatorial projects from 2010 until today. In diff erent ways, these projects sought to engage with the question of positivist forms of knowledge and vision, their history in relation to exhibition making, and their resurgence in the form a new data-positivism. I will discuss a research-intensive curatorial methodology that seeks to transform the exhibition into a space of cognitive (un-)mapping, and apply a binocular vision onto aesthetics between power and technology. How can the exhibition as a medium un-ground knowledge and epistemological certainties? How can a completely controlled and scripted space like an exhibition engage with the possibility of the unscripted and unpatterned? Is art perhaps off ering ways of leaving a scripted space or a cognitive scheme, refl exively inducing a cognitive crisis, an experience of ontological groundlessness?” 

ANSELM FRANKE is Head of the Visual Arts department at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, where he was part of the curatorial team of the Anthropocene Project and organised exhibitions such as Animism (2012), and together with Diedrich Diederichsen The Whole Earth (2013), Forensis together with Eyal Weizman (2014) and Ape Culture together with Hila Peleg (2015). He was chief curator of the Taipei Biennale 2012 and the Shanghai Biennale 2014. He completed his PhD at Goldsmith College in London in 2015. The evening is the public part of the one-year colloquium “Thinking under Turbulence” that frames the curriculum during the transition of the CCC Master Programme in 2015/16 at Haute école d’art et de design in Genève. Contributors to the Colloquium are invited guests in conversation with CCC-students and faculty members. The one-year Colloquium takes place at a transitional moment of CCC, the research-based programme on curatorial concerns in globalizing times and in techno-politics under new direction of Doreen Mende. It will off er time to think how such a programme can process itself further and against itself in times of accelerationist imperatives brought by fi nancial global capitalism. The Colloquium departs from literally “a speaking together”: from com- “together” + -loquium “speaking”. A speaking together outside/inside the academy. Therefore, the concept of the Colloquium does not propose thinking to be a philosophical method to study a subject matter but departs from a moment under conditions of turbulence when knowledge is in crisis that makes it necessary for us to think, to think differently.