[artinfo] Fair Assembly - Making Things Public

[Steve Dietz]

Making Things Public: http://makingthingspublic.zkm.de
Fair Assembly: http://makingthingspublic.zkm.de/fairassembly/

"We live in rather discouraging times as far as political life is
concerned. Just the right moment, then, to make a fresh start by bringing
together three modes of representation that are usually kept apart: How to
represent people? Politics. How to represent objects? Science. How to
represent their collective gathering? Art. The main idea behind MAKING
THINGS PUBLIC: ATMOSPHERES OF DEMOCRACY is that politics is all about
_things_. It's not a sphere, a profession or a mere occupation; it
essentially involves a concern for affairs that are brought to the
attention of a _public_. The public is not cast in stone for all time.
We're not talking here about the people as represented by their elected
officials. The public has to be created for each new issue, for each new
matter of concern. So the question we wish to raise is: 'What would
happen if politics were made to revolve around disputed states of affairs?'"
-- Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel

MAKING THINGS PUBLIC opens Saturday at ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany). 
Artists and other interested parties are invited to submit projects 
to the FAIR ASSEMBLY open database for presentation in the exhibition 
and as part of
a long term project.

Assemblies have traditionally been forums for disputation, where
decisions are made but not necessarily where the knowledge on which the
decisions rely is formulated. MAKING THINGS PUBLIC not only brings the
idea of the Assembly to sites of knowledge production but insists that
the =B3means, tools, tropes, tricks and knacks,=B2 which are integral
tools for assembling knowledge, are also useful to the Assembly. In this
sense, FAIR ASSEMBLY is a participatory platform to which anyone can
submit a web-based or software project, which relates to the thematics of
the exhibition, and have it be part of MAKING THINGS PUBLIC.

Steve Dietz
Fair Assembly, a project of Making Things Public: Atmospheres of
Democracy
http://makingthingspublic.zkm.de/fairassembly/
- select "Submit" to add a project to the database