17 June at 4:30 pm

Valentinas Klimašauskas will talk about his ongoing research on invisible exhibitions.

Inside the time capsule.
– On the acceleration of imaginary exhibitions

This presentation is based on the presumption that an exhibition functions as an accelerative network of heterotopias (from Greek hetero, “different”, and “topos”, place) and heteroorgans (a special unit of an organism’s framework, an agency or an instrument via which the heterotopia operates). The ideal model of a network is a circle as it has the smallest possible distance between its members, i.e. between its points. It is not surprising that the most debatable and expensive gadget of today, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has the shape of a ring, a circle. The world’s largest and highest energy particle accelerator, LHC, is intended to address the most fundamental questions of physics, in order to advance our understanding of the deepest laws of nature including the existence of the mysterious and hypothetical dark energy. No doubt, LHC functions as the accelerator of the imagination. During the experiment two atoms of gold are accelerated in LHC until atoms nearly reach the speed of light and, according to scientists, the crash between those two atoms recreate for a very short moment of time a small model of the Big Bang itself. If we are to believe the physicist Frank Tipler, all history and all possibilities will happen between 10-10 seconds and 10 -23 seconds before the singularity of the Big Crunch – both you and I will be resurrected again and again.

The presentation will analyze the use of this concept of acceleration of the looped imagination within visual arts. We will inspect a few examples of the time capsules as the externalized memory including Lascaux’ cave drawings, records of The Pioneer plaques at the Pioneer 10 (1972) and Pioneer 11 (1973) spacecrafts, Voyager Golden Record from Voyager 1 (1977) and Voyager 2 (1977), a short fragment from the film Contact (1997, dir. Robert Zemeckis) and the novel The Voices of Silence (1953) by André Malraux.

Valentinas Klimašauskas is a curator, writer and editor and is currently in residency at BAC. He has been invited as part of the Artist-in-Residence programme for Nordic and Baltic artists and curators funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers.

Further information http://archive.balticartcenter.com/valentinas-klimasauskas/