Rejunte creativo

Por "we make money not art", blog hiperactualizado sobre el mundo cultural, me enteré sobre el encuentro Postopolis, que se a realizó en México DF:

From 8-12 June 2010, Storefront for Art and Architecture, in partnership with Museo Experimental El Eco, Tomo and Domus Magazine, will host the third edition of Postopolis!, a public five-day session of near-continuous conversation curated by some of the world's most prominent bloggers from the fields of architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, music and design. 10 world-renowned bloggers from Los Angeles, New York, Turin, Barcelona, London and elsewhere will convene in one location in Mexico City to host a series of discussions, interviews, slideshows, presentations, films and panels fusing the informal and interdisciplinary approach of the architecture blogosphere with rare face-to-face interaction.

Each day, the 10 participating bloggers will meet in the magnificent courtyard of Museo Experimental El Eco, designed by Matthias Goeritz, to conduct back-to-back interviews of some of Mexico City's most influential thinkers and practitioners – including architects, city planners, artists and urban theorists but also military historians, filmmakers, photographers, activists and musicians. The talks will be conducted in either Spanish or English, and translations will be available. Each day of talks will end with an after-party hosted by some of Mexico City's most influential music blogs.

¡Muero de envidia por quienes pudieron participar! Por supuesto, a quienes cuestionan la utilidad de estos encuentros. Un problema evidente es la dificultad para darle continuidad a los objetivos casi siempre grandilocuentes que se plantean como conclusión. De todos modos, lo que importa es el encuentro por el el mero gusto de encontrarse ya que, al fin y al cabo, este tipo de reuniones no son más que la puesta en evidencia de redes. Y las ciudades que "hostean" estos encuentros constituyen nodos en permanente colaboración y competencia. Vale la pena leer la reseña publicada por el Financial Times sobre el fenómeno TED porque captura muy bien lo excepcional del networking en estos tiempos:

These slick homilies may sound glib but it occurs to me that they may turn out to herald something of an intellectual revolution. As I slope back to my bedroom at my old Oxford college where I have chosen to stay for the week, I am taken back to my undergraduate days, studying philosophy in a room in this very quadrangle, where I am once more bumping my head against intransigent wooden beams.

I recall that we spent an entire term on Descartes’ Meditations, the work that led the French philosopher to his famous declaration: “I think, therefore I am.” It was a slim volume, yet we micro-analysed every last semi-colon of its tortured arguments. To do well, we had to find flaws in the philosopher’s reasoning. Our adolescent critiques spoke to no one outside our precious circle. To be a successful scholar was to regard inwards, and wade into an ever-denser intellectual world that made scant connection with contemporary realities.

Thirty years on, in the very same venue, TED is doing the precise opposite. It regards ideas as a kind of currency that has not been circulating freely enough to achieve its full potential. The most important thing about them is not that they should withstand the obsessive scrutiny of guileless teenage minds, but that they should be original, inspiring, accessible, and that they should do good. They are catering, in Giusanni’s words, for an “incredible thirst” for knowledge and information, and projecting a “new sense of possibility in a world that is becoming submerged by bad news”.