Bassam El Baroni

Bassam El Baroni is a curator, writer, and associate professor in curating and mediating art at Aalto University, Finland. He was previously lecturer in art theory at the Dutch Art Institute, ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem and served as the artistic director of the now closed non-profit art space Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF) in Alexandria, Egypt (2005–2012). El Baroni's work explores artistic and curatorial practices in relation to technology, political economy, financialisation, and new forms of activism. Recent publications include: Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (editor, Sternberg, 2022). His curatorial projects include: Infrahauntologies, Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg, Germany; La Box ENSA, Bourges, France (2021 - 2022); What Hope Looks like after Hope (On Constructive Alienation) at HOME WORKS 7, Beirut, 2015; Agitationism, the 36th Eva International–Ireland’s Biennial, Limerick, 2014; Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain, 2010 - 2011 (co-curator).

The Synthetic Curatorium, Curating under Computation

The talk briefly introduces The Synthetic Curatorium, a research project and group at Aalto University investigating how computation, with generative systems as its most visible instance today, is transforming curatorial knowledge and practice. For most of the last century, curating meant caring for collections and staging exhibitions. Across the last thirty years it widened into a broader apparatus of discourse and knowledge, the work the field came to name the curatorial. Computation is now folding the making, circulation, and valuation of culture into one continuous transaction run through its platforms, recoding the rules that have organised curating and the curatorial alike. The aim is to develop the concepts, methods, and learning that curating needs to reposition itself within this computational economy and to take part in setting its terms.