Change Encounters

2010
archived web project

Change is an encounter with difference that requires opening oneself to the unknown.

Change Encounters offers multiple complementary and conflicting vantage points on the nature and process of change. The website is designed to access an archive through a random number generator based on the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching, the classic Chinese book of wisdom, which is considered both an oracle and a philosophy. The archive parallels this predictive system that is ever changing, where meaning is mutable and constructed by the viewer/user. The 64 web pages collect an assortment of cultural and historical predictive devices, appropriations from popular culture, historical sources, academic scholarship, and personal interviews with people occupying diverse professional positions.

Judith Butler describes Michel Foucault’s understanding of self-transformation as “prompted by a form of knowledge that is foreign to one’s own.” In this spirit, we bring together and against one another, knowledges and practices that form a prism, casting different angles of light upon the state of our economy, psychic life, and physical surroundings. These inquiries contemplate the conditions for constructive future thinking within a climate of economic, environmental, and psychological instability, and set the stage for how we might anticipate today what is at stake tomorrow.

Interviewees:
Claudia Bader, Lopamudra Banerjee, Gregg Bordowitz, Andrew Culver, Orit Halpern, Rachel Harris, Benjamin Lee, Colleen Macklin, Cate Owren, Henry Weingarten, Robert Wosnitzer, and Margaret R. Zellner.