thanks for your reply, Roger,
and you are quite right, my questions were caught up with an older logic of institutions or organizations that tended to the business of curating,
so i was trying to see what you thought could be evolving & different forms of what you called "curating the planet,"
and in your recent mail you also brought up the fascinating perspective (referring to Denisa Kera's proposal)
of "designing" for the anthropocene, in regard to evolutionary and geological conditions and the future of the earth's ecologies.

You quoted her, and this seems to chime with your argmentation:

>>
How does design based on open data and DIY (do-it-yourself)
approaches, participatory and critical design methodologies, and humanitarian engineering,
differ from cybernetic and technocratic dreams of control of complex systems?
>>


So last night i thought about your question and curating for the anthropocene,
and did not come up with an answer but by accident stumbled across an allegory, of sorts,
in filmmaker Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the end of the world."

It was shown on Arte Channel in Germany, with his voice over as he travels to the Antarctica and lands on McMurdo-Station, Ross Island,
explaining that he didn't know where exactly he was going, and then he meets a motley crew of folks studying life at the south pole,
some are scientists, technicians, others drop outs or people who like traveling, others are philosophers and musicians.  He interviews
cell biologists, vulcanologists, physicists and zoologists, and the camera man dives under the ice to film the dance like undulations of a neon-pink jellyfish
in the cerulean-blue glow of the ice that covers the vast sea; a glaciologist describes how our understanding of Antarctica has changed since Shackleton's day; 
instead of seeing the continent as "a cold monolith of ice" to be conquered in the name of empire, scientists view it now as a dynamic, living entity that is constantly producing change,
and they are collecting data and seeking knowledge about what we call sustainability of the earth, climate change, human-non-human exchanges on various scales, etc.

The film comments on this, with extraordinary and humorous scenes, how at Antarctica, what becomes overwhelmingly clear – when asking biologists or talking to people who study climate or who try to detect high-energy neutrinos – it's that our presence, our physical presence on this planet is not sustainable and that one has to anticipate that other species are much more successful (e.g. sponges,  that have seen hundreds of millions of years and probably have several hundreds of millions of years more, or snails, or cockroaches, and microbes..... that there are many other things that make us much more vulnerable than other species that ever roamed this planet; that when one looks at evidence of biological life on our planet, it is a constant chain of cataclysms. Herzog thinks we have no chance at all; whether we will disappear in 2,000 years, or 20,000 years, or 200,000 years, it doesn't really matter, but it will be fairly quickly.....


So now i wonder whether the motley crew down at the southpole is not engaged in some kind of trendspotting, and i wonder whom they spot for (or whether it matters who funds them? the National Science Foundation?), since the ones that speak in the film never seem to worry much about an affiliation.  They are affiliated to the planet, though, and they care about what they do, it seems.  (The nation flags, by the way, that were planted in the ice by Amundsen, Shackleton and Scott and the others way back, they look a little silly now, like a funky outdoor sculpture). The care comes across as vastly eccentric. 

regards
Johannes Birringer





[Roger schreibt]:

johannes

indeed we are so use to the tree of knowledge metaphor that we
always think in terms of hierarchies, gate keepers, authorities

you ask

But who regulates the flow, and the exchanges, who selects and ships,
and receives the ongoing dynamic and how are
> the protocols and filters agreed upon?

when knowledge making organised itself around the tree of knowledge in
the 18/19C no one anticipated
the institutional consequences- and as we go into a networked
knowledge environment somehow authority has
to develop through networks of networks its hard to anticipate how
human institutions will be re organised
over the coming century

i always like jon ippolitos's "pool" concept (hi jon- i didnt reply to
your other question) where the good stuff
floats to the top and the less interesting stuff sinks reflecting a
collective judgement although the pool
methaphor still has a top and bottom, whereas networks are gravity free

i bumped into Alain Chesnais at siggraph and he has a new start up
company called trendspottr

http://trendspottr.com/welcome.php

which goes beyond what jon did- with other limitations- buts its multi
dimensional

one could imagine how 50 years from now authoritative collective
trendspotting might
develop that would replace

"But who regulates the flow, and the exchanges, who selects and ships,
and receives the ongoing dynamic and how are
> the protocols and filters agreed upon?"
with a networked equivalent

roger