THE MARKET FOR USEFUL KNOWLEDGE AND NON-KNOWLEDGE understands itself as an interdisciplinary research about learning and unlearning, knowledge and non-knowledge. In a temporary show- and production space (Agora & Check-In) narrative formats of knowledge transfer present themselves.
>>>WHAT IS THE MARKET FOR USEFUL KNOWLEDGE AND NON-KNOWLEDGE?
- Market
Renaming
In Bogotá (2019) we called the project ‘Mercado clandestino’ and for the license in Hamburg (2020) we have parted ways with the Blackmarket label. From now on the project operates under the title MARKET FOR USEFUL KNOWLEDGE AND NON-KNOWLEDGE.
Tradition
For around 10 years now (it’s no longer possible to pinpoint exactly when) a banner featuring an Oswald Wiener quote hangs over every “Market for useful knowledge”: ONLY WHEN I FIRST HEARD HOW YOU’VE UNDERSTOOD ME, DID I KNOW WHAT I’D SAID. An elegant reminder that this market is about the impact of words and the impact of words on reality. In December 2019 the quote was hung over the Arena in Dresden, where our complex and entangled relationships to artificial intelligence was our theme. Here we could recall that in Oswald Wiener’s die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman (the improvement of central europe, novel) artificial intelligence was mentioned for the very first time in a non-scientific book in German. And in September 2019, Sarah Wiener was for the first time an expert in a “Market for Useful Knowledge”, in edition no. 20 on Red Vienna, where under the rubric of FUTURES she spoke about “The food of the future and the community of responsible eaters”.
The Archive
The MOBILE ACADEMY AUDIO ARCHIVE comprises 1127 talks accessible online, recordings of the various editions of the MAB. The talks in the online archive are carefully archived and tagged, can be searched based on the categories of theme, speaker, language or event, and each entry has a short excerpt. The recordings store the knowledge, imparted verbally, shared by an enormous variety of persons at the venues MAB has played over the last 20 years. While most of the files feature dialogues, there are some lecture talks; all were recorded live in the performative installations of the MAB. Around 70% of the material was recorded in the Arena of MARKETS FOR USEFUL KNOWLEDGE AND NON-KNOWLEDGE, selected from the murmurings of 100 dialogues taking place simultaneously. The conversations have not been subsequently engineered, remaining raw and thus mirroring the situation of the recording with its disruptive static and background noises.
The archive site: naturally online at: audio-archive.com but since 2014 the archive is also located at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.
Non-knowledge
The 21st century is regarded as the age of information, and in this discourse knowledge plays the role of an economic, political and cultural resource. But the notion of knowledge as a retrievable and continually growing entity oversees both its performative character as well as the limits and historical ruptures running through the field of knowledge. Knowledge – it would seem – needs to be understood as a hybrid concept: as a form of storage it is connected with principles of representation, discursivization and archivization; as a form of enactment it grows out of techniques, practices and experiences with/on/in the body of the learners. And not least, knowledge appears as the image and mirror of its purported opposite: NON-KNOWLEDGE and belief. To clarify their part in the production and distribution of knowledge, they have to be recognized as constituents and imaginative peripheral zones. They first reveal why we – to take up an idea of Dietmar Kamper – can encounter knowledge only in virtuosic perception, repetition and dreams.