Catalyst gallery has slid on Hollywood road, 218
Time to Pretend
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then pretending to be something we’re not could simply be the utmost resentment that smiles – to dream of illusions, rancid yet organic. Time to Pretend is 3rd Wave’s latest experimental excursion into the deep time of relations between visual arts, science (sometimes fringe and even pseudo) and technology to engage the students to question our serial-produced realities, to challenge the poetics of failure where confrontation with and digression from social norm occurs.
This horror of the real is now a world where we suffer the total saturation with information where unlimited amounts of data, at our finger tips at all times, backfires at us as a perpetual reminder of a danger that we do not know enough, only at the huge expense of confusing knowledge with understanding. Is it still okay to pretend things are okay? Can we avoid the seemingly inevitable cancellation of tomorrow? Whether you’re an engineer, manager, actor-activist, ecologist, actor, or huckster of ideas, maybe it’s about time to pretend you’re something else.
Come this fall 2024, Time to Pretend welcomes participants to finish it off once and for all, to be definitively done with all that has happened and what has failed to happen, to offer a different kind of divergence where finite transcendence ends but a new, infinitizing start awaits. Some say the value of art is its ability to take us away from here, to which 3rd Wave will add that the act of pretending to be something else may be seen as an underlying human condition to adopt and impose institutional fictions, of structuring thoughts and behaviours to make others believe: to pretend is also a form of play, of story-telling, growing out of observation and experiences of the particularity and fantasy of individual and / or collective lives and histories. The programme seeks to elicit an imaginative response through swapping the roles of participants, i.e. artist to conduct scientific research and experiment, financial consultant to produce genuine work of art and using arithmetic computational data to map human creativity, etc. Through these diverse synergistic conditions, 3rd Wave invites you to bring your own memories and desires into play in order to develop and rearrange the myriads of potentially volatile and unpredictable fallouts.
Warning: All participants will be required to take part in learning musical instruments and notations to cover MGMT’s Time to Pretend in various genres, working with an experienced producer to deliver the renditions in studio recording sessions, where filming also takes place. Failure is not an option.
Dates: Creativity Course from November 2024 . Final graduation exhibition in October 2025 at the Catalyst.
