WHAT IS PEACE? (ANSWER HERE)

A central concern of the exhibition was to explore curatorial practice as a means of disseminating a question and soliciting a response. The exhibition existed primarily as an active medium as well as an object of research by disseminating Filliou’s question-kōan, ‘what is peace?’ across and through online and offline spaces and behaviour. Where some imagined online space as potentially a new commons, a cyber-agora perhaps, there is also a demonstrably globalist, corporate tendency to undermine the potential of the Net as a wholly open, distributed network. Controversy over data harvesting and mining has resulted in the experience of online space analogically as an echo chamber leading to a disillusionment and realisation of a naïve belief in online freedom. Stop sharing. Your data self is publishing personal data, you have become an, at least partially, unconscious brand. Shift the platform offline to the social space of the urban agora, the city square (notwithstanding all its own fictions and conventions). To test the capacity of curatorial practice to instigate a dialogue through offline as well as online means, I performed an action for 60 minutes over solar noon each Friday of the exhibition where I will stand in Dundee City Square wearing a sandwich board bearing the text, ‘what is peace?’ This performance was also captured via the CCTV web camera surveilling the square which was also projected as looped video documentation in the Centrespace exhibition.