Curate, Curation

cura saz:

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I chose curate as my Word of the Year for 2024 and found these passages in my exposition:

...It strikes me as an important thing, more than ever, to make the connections, to enable connectedness and relatedness.
(Hans Ulrich Obrist)

and

...one needs to make order within the chaos of acquisition, and order is nascent within the collector's mind: the task is to facilitate orderly access to and display of the manifold richnesses of the collector's acquisitions —to coax from them the Narrative of the whole, via the stories that attach to and bind together the diverse items.
(my own very very self)

...and found this statement of intent (December 2023):

Collections I hope to exert curatorial influence and serious negentropic mmmmph over in the coming year:

• in photography
  the Abandoned Ancestors project and State Street Bank, 1964-1965. And there's a Hinges of Reality project, mostly reposing in Fearful Symmetries. and the bottomless territory of the Lithosphere, lots to be seen in Flickr Albums. And the photography book (sub-)library would enjoy a thoughtful reorganization (which would of course spawn new photography projects).

• all that music
  in so many formats, its organization a figment of my imagination (that is, nobody else could navigate it), but *the 'Musics' file drawers need to be quarried for what they contain (a new scanner has arrived to help with that); and the many many Music books want a visit from the Curator. The Instrument collection wants a good run, lots of new strings, and access to recording equipment.

• all of the bookshelves
  want visiting and browsing, and of course the proceeds will delight and inform the waiting yellow pads.

• and the yellow pads themselves
  now live in two good-size bins, and would benefit greatly from some sort of indexing.

• Finding Aids
  are a specialty of archives and Archivists, developed to help seekers find what they seek in a mountain of paper, stored in boxes in perpetuity. Every collection needs such an interpretive guide.

Looking back over 2 1/2 years, I can claim some progress in "serious negentropic mmmmph", but the challenge remains and enlivens and inspires.

So how am I doing? What am I doing? ...a reasonable personal Conundrum, intricate and difficult.

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A couple of hours of morning yellow pad writing, documenting my summary of process with the bulleted points above, and skating on the thin ice of illegibility:

Turning such fodder into nicely tamed html would take a while, and include multiple html-link digressions, and I might get around to that... but for the moment those yellow pages are data on mental process. It's a long way to wisdom.

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Nuance is of the Essence:

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