Diagonal Argument

View of the exhibition "Diagonal Argument", Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2008.

An exhi­bi­tion for those who like gar­dens of forking paths

Artists: Bad Beuys Entertainment, Gilles Barbier, Claude Closky, Collectif 1.0.3, Eric Duyckaerts, León Ferrari, Alexandra Grant, Julien Prévieux, Michael Snow, Mürüvvet Türkyılmaz, Keith Tyson

Curators: Isabelle Le Normand and Florence Ostende

Collaboration with the lab­o­ra­toire MSC (Matière et Systèmes Complexes), Paris 7

View of the exhibition "Diagonal Argument" with Michael Snow, High School, 1979, spiral-bound notebook. Collection Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou. Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2008.

In the six­ties, American philoso­pher and soci­ol­o­gist Ted Nelson started taking com­puter training classes to help him write his phi­los­ophy books and organise his ideas, because he could not con­trol the stream of thoughts run­ning through his head. He was hoping to find a way “to create a doc­u­ment based on a vast body of non­struc­tured and non-sequen­tial ideas". He wanted to be able to write a para­graph where doors could be opened to reveal thou­sands of new pos­si­bil­i­ties that could not be seen at first sight.

Dreaming of a super brain with unlim­ited poten­tial for knowl­edge, this new pro­cess could store end­less tree struc­tures and func­tion by an asso­ci­a­tion of ideas and hyper­links. Ted Nelson coined the word “hy­per­text" in 1965 and cre­ated the Xanadu pro­ject which pre­fig­ures the Internet. Conceived as a wide com­puter net­work, it would make books avail­able at any­time to everyone every­where. Unfortunately this pro­ject failed and Nelson him­self admits he still scrib­bles his ideas on Post-it notes clas­si­fied by date.

Inevitably, with an intense organ­i­sa­tion and clas­si­fi­ca­tion of thoughts, one risks having the “tree" struc­tures start to resemble a labyrinth. The ini­tial ideas get lost. The exhi­bi­tion Diagonal Argument mir­rors the pro­gres­sion of a method trying to seek and find its way through and strug­gles through the entan­gle­ment of its own thought pro­cess. It is is the story of a method making the hope­less attempt to con­trol the maze of hyper­linking and the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of ideas.

As a tribute to one of Eric Duyckaerts’ per­for­mances and Georg Cantor’s well-known math­e­mat­ical demon­stra­tion, Diagonal Argument is a pro­ject in the shape of a zigzag that embraces forking method­olo­gies, oblique strate­gies and the dizzying analo­gies. Far from fol­lowing a linear struc­ture, this exhi­bi­tion gathers artists whose works deliver the secret of their own method by exper­i­menting with alter­na­tive rea­soning and con­cep­tual tools to create an equiv­a­lent to the system of mind-map­ping.

To under­stand this pro­ject, pic­ture a crab dancing in a garden of forking paths while demon­strating the fun­da­mental rules of graph theory.

The exhi­bi­tion will be accom­pa­nied every Saturday by a com­pre­hen­sive pro­gram of per­for­mances, lec­tures, screen­ings and talks, gath­ering artists, philoso­phers, writers, cura­tors, art critics as well as the excep­tional par­tic­i­pa­tion of sci­en­tists from the Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes located next to Bétonsalon in the heart of the University Paris Diderot. Diagonal Argument is an exhi­bi­tion specif­i­cally curated for
Bétonsalon, a unique center for art and research in Paris.

Isabelle Le Normand and Florence Ostende

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