[D66] Reset modernity!

[Antid Oto]

[Tijd voor een RESET]


https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/reset-modernity


Reset Modernity!

Edited by Bruno Latour and Christophe Leclercq
Texts and images document the disconnection between modernity and 
ecological crisis: do we need to reset modernity's operating system?

Summary

Texts and images document the disconnection between modernity and 
ecological crisis: do we need to reset modernity's operating system?

Modernity has had so many meanings and tries to combine so many 
contradictory sets of attitudes and values that it has become impossible 
to use it to define the future. It has ended up crashing like an 
overloaded computer. Hence the idea is that modernity might need a sort 
of reset. Not a clean break, not a “tabula rasa,” not another 
iconoclastic gesture, but rather a restart of the complicated programs 
that have been accumulated, over the course of history, in what is often 
called the “modernist project.” This operation has become all the more 
urgent now that the ecological mutation is forcing us to reorient 
ourselves toward an experience of the material world for which we don't 
seem to have good recording devices.

Reset Modernity! is organized around six procedures that might induce 
the readers to reset some of those instruments. Once this reset has been 
completed, readers might be better prepared for a series of new 
encounters with other cultures. After having been thrown into the 
modernist maelstrom, those cultures have difficulties that are just as 
grave as ours in orienting themselves within the notion of modernity. It 
is not impossible that the course of those encounters might be altered 
after modernizers have reset their own way of recording their experience 
of the world.

At the intersection of art, philosophy, and anthropology, Reset 
Modernity! has assembled close to sixty authors, most of whom have 
participated, in one way or another, in the Inquiry into Modes of 
Existence initiated by Bruno Latour. Together they try to see whether 
such a reset and such encounters have any practicality. Much like the 
two exhibitions Iconoclash and Making Things Public, this book documents 
and completes what could be called a “thought exhibition:” Reset 
Modernity! held at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe from April 
to August 2016. Like the two others, this book, generously illustrated, 
includes contributions, excerpts, and works from many authors and artists.