An interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist

[curator]

Part II. 

(Read Part I. HERE)

Hans Ulrich Obrist is famed for his undying curiosity, an appetite for knowledge that makes him a familiar figure at obscure exhibitions, conferences and book markets around the world. The conversation has here turned to the limits of knowledge, about the possibility, and desirability, of knowing everything. The White Review has proposed that the role of the curator is comparable to that of the editor, making selections on behalf of their intended audience, and suggested that the curator’s role has become more important with the advent of the digital age and the accompanying proliferation of easily accessible information. –Ben Eastham

Hans Ulrich Obrist: The notion of the curator has changed a lot. When I told my parents I was going to be a curator, they thought I wanted to enter the medical profession. The fact the profession was quite obscure at the time led to A Brief History of Curating [in which Obrist collected together interviews with influential curators], an attempt to discover the history of curating. But the use of the term ‘curator’ has grown exponentially over the past couple of years. It has to do with navigation; we live in an age with an abundance of information and people need guides, editors.

The big question now is how are we going to edit for the digital world? Because there will be a different way of editing, of selecting. With these extraordinary abundances of information how can one make sense of my 2,000 hours of film, without just adding more noise? What could we do with the tapes I made with [influential British architect] Cedric Price? I would always go at 8am to his office, the famous all-white room, and we’d have a whiskey and record the interview. Sometimes he would make a demonstration with umbrellas, or he’d show me his boxes full of drawings, it was really magical. He never wanted to do more than half an hour, so we did twenty sessions of thirty minutes. I have ten hours of tape now, but to just throw them online would be pointless. One possible way around it is by tagging phrases and themes, so that the viewer can skip to them. We started to tag all the material, so now you can type in ‘Fun Palace’ and get the five passages in which he talks about that, or ‘Umbrella’ and see the one moment that Cedric opens his umbrella on a sunny day in his office. And that gives me a lot of hope that I can crack the issue of what to do digitally with these interviews in the long run. If...