Who Controls the Future? 

 

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason.  

Or it can be thrown through the window.” 

 

“There will be a number of ‘trials’ throughout the duration of the exhibition, where a jury composed of members of the archive/ staff at UAL and student alumni will debate the relative merits of each submitted object before an audience, with the aim of inclusion in our Room 2084.” 

 

In fuzzy set theory, there are DEGREES of inclusion 

 

“In classical set theory, the membership of elements in a set is assessed in binary terms according to a bivalent condition — an element either belongs or does not belong to the set. By contrast, fuzzy set theory permits the gradual assessment of the membership of elements in a set; this is described with the aid of a membership function valued in the real unit interval [0, 1]. Fuzzy sets generalize classical sets, since the indicator functions of classical sets are special cases of the membership functions of fuzzy sets, if the latter only take values 0 or 1.[3] In fuzzy set theory, classical bivalent sets are usually called crisp sets. The fuzzy set theory can be used in a wide range of domains in which information is incomplete or imprecise,…” 

 

Authenticity/Trustworthyness – Is it the genuine article = False/Fake/Corrupt 

 

Integrity – Is it complete and reliable. = Dishonesty 

 

Provenance – Does the item have a history, is it connected with the donor/creator.  

 

Evidentiality – is the record a testimony of the creator’s activities, personality, cultural identity. 

 

Informational value – the importance of the information contained in the record. 

 

Educational/research use – Is the item/record of educational/research use for the collecting organisation. 

 

Accessibility – Is it useable by researchers, does it require specific access or storage equipment/materials.  

 

Conservation – fragility, risks and storage costs of the record. = Ephemeral  

 

Inter-relatedness – are there related items that are being offered or that already rest in the archive centre. 

 

Uniqueness of the record. 

 

Collection policy – Does the item fit into the collection policy 

 

“we need to turn our attention to the silent fascism that is becoming normalized through the systematic violence seeping into the laws and everyday administration practices of the nation-state, and to assess the mechanisms of oppression and the various symptoms of contemporary fascism that are being presented as unavoidable, pragmatic necessities.” 

 

“It now becomes clear that consistency is not a property of a formal system per se, but depends on the interpretation which is proposed for it. By the same token, inconsistency is not an intrinsic property of any formal system.” 

 

“You’re not serious, don’t say serious 

Cause I say serious, you wanna get serious? 

Let’s get serious, you can’t act serious 

So don’t say serious about serious.” 

 

“If I decide to be an idiot, then I’ll be an idiot on my own accord” 

 

“I force myself to contradict myself, so as to avoid conforming to my own taste” 

 

“We adore chaos because we love to produce order.” 

 

“I’m terribly confused,” 

 

“All generalisations – perhaps except this one – are false.” 

 

“…a consistency proof for [any] system … can be carried out only by means of modes of inference that are not formalized in the system … itself.” 

 

“Contrariwise,….if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.” 

 

“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.” 

 

“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love 

which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”  

 

Derek Walcott