What are Museums? And What is World Culture? Our proposal for the extension to the Weltkulturen Museum seeks, primarily, to address such questions. Drawing from, Evolutionary Biology, Computational Neuroscience, and the Languages of Complexity which underlie each.
Generous parkland overlooks the River Main, and on to the surging skyline of Frankfurt, sited strategically at beating heart of Europe, at the intersection of flows of both water, and information, on which the city grows.
For an Individual, a City, or a Culture to have an identity, it must have a memory. Cultural memory. Material Culture serves precisely this purpose, by increasing the likelihood of such events happening in the future. Reshaping the landscape of conditional probability, a network of attractors. which form the basis of our narrative identities.
The unfolding computation of life itself, by settling into the attractor network, of which Material culture consists, can be said to constitute memory. A Continuous Hopfield Network of reciprocal interactions.
By offering a physical analogue of this branching network, in the recursive structure of our Vaults, as flexible exhibition space, we aim to close the loop and make explicit, or at least available to infer, that the actual landscape is an attractor landscape,
That Musuems can be viewed as reliquaries of artefacts of and interactions, constituting culture. That material culture constrains cultural memory, that cultural memory defines narrative identity, that narrative identity is constituted of adaptive strategies, and that adaptive strategies, are, fundamentally, directed towards minimising uncertainty.
Which is to say, by minimising the difference between expectation, experience and environment.
Gallery
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