School of Fluid Measures

ACTING THINGS VII

Learning should be less about knowing or memorising what something is than understanding how it continuously changes in relation to something else. At the School of Fluid Measures objects, numbers and values that have become fixed by universal standards are dissolved through scored interactions that leave traces in coloured sand. The patterns that emerge are an exploratory measure of the fluidity of meanings, and the colours represent exemplary values as resources to debate, distribute, and fuse into new colours and values. It references to the bazaar as a situation in which value emerges out of a unique yet similar negotiation process. 

Through an embodied process that surfaces situative intentions and relations, 18 measuring sessions invite participants to negotiate new colours and values. Viewed as a series, the 18 sessions intend to explore ways of mediating, materializing and notating the making of meanings and results, in a manner that embraces the fluidity of the constant socio-material becoming.

School of Fluid Measures is the seventh project in Judith Seng’s ongoing ACTING THINGS series, that since 2011 has asked: What if we look at production processes as if they were a dance, a play, a ritual? More about the project here

Year: 2018 / Location: Pera Museum Istanbul, 4th Istanbul Design Biennale / Curator: Jan Boelen, Nadine Botha, Vera Sacchetti / Team: Elena Steffan, Phoebe Morris / Video/Images: Studio Judith Seng / Video editing: Elena Petrach