////CURATING FUTURES//// Dr Dan Smith, Douglas Dodds & Mariana Pestana

https://jenksmuseum.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/palace-of-green-porcelain.jpg

This Alterfutures looks at how futures are embedded in artefacts through the lens of the museum as a site of temporal ambiguity. Our three guests engage with collections as foresight - dealing with past projections & keeping present objects on ice for viewers of tomorrow.

“This Palace of Green Porcelain ...was... deserted and falling into ruin… Within ...we found, instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side windows. Even at the first glance I was reminded of a museum. The tiled floor was thick with dust, and a remarkable array of miscellaneous objects were shrouded in the same gray covering...”

The Time Machine, H. G. Wells, 1895

Our first guest Dr Dan Smith, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Chelsea College of Arts often layers the speculative over the historical, expanding fictional universes into spatial. In his book Traces of Modernity, Dan draws parallels between the V&A, Crystal Palace and the Palace of Green Porcelain prompting a re-reading of the classic short story as future history of South Kensington. His research moves between the materiality of museum display to cultural memory, science fiction and comic novels.

Our second guest, Douglas Dodds is Senior Curator in the V&A's Word & Image Department and is responsible for developing the Department's digital art collections, which range from early computer art to recent born-digital works. Douglas brought into the time-capsule like collection of the V&A an edition of Agrippa - a work of art created by science fiction writer William Gibson, an artwork designed to defy the future. In order to archive it it must be read at least once yet every page of the book is treated with photosensitive chemicals and the floppy disk holding the poem is coded so once viewed the words and images disappear.

Our third guest, Mariana Pestana is a Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum working on an exhibition about the future of design, and she is currently developing a PhD about architecture and possible worlds at Bartlett School of Architecture. She will discuss notions of reality and fiction borrowed from literature and translate them to the field of architecture in order to discuss the extent to which spatial design work can generate – even if for a moment in time - alternative, non-actual possible worlds. She will discuss how, in depicting versions of the world as it could be, such work creates discursive platforms from where to re-evaluate and the world as it is and imagine possible futures.