The Alchemy Of AIR
with Vic Brooks

What are you looking forward to most at AIR?

It’s not only one specific event or performance, but the unexpected connections between ideas and artworks that will emerge as we all move through the rhythm of each day. As a curatorial team, we’ve been deeply attentive to how the audience will experience the dramaturgy of the week and to the subtle threads that weave between the projects and events, and we hope that will really come to life in real time. But the real alchemy usually occurs in the exchange between the audience members and what’s unfolding onstage. It’s in this shared space of experience that I hope perspectives might shift and new ideas and insights will be conjured in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

 What were some key things you had to consider when organizing an inaugural program?

We started by talking to artists, scholars, and trusted colleagues whose work could help us think critically about what such a program could offer at this specific moment. We were also asking ourselves: Why launch a new multiyear initiative of this scale now in Aspen? With amazing conversation partners like physicist Sara Imari Walker, artists Paul Chan and Aria Dean, and poet-technologist Zoë Hitzig, we dove into both the history of gatherings in Aspen and how the arts can act as a necessary mediator through which the unfathomable scale of computational capacity might begin to be understood at a human scale.

This first edition of AIR explicitly builds on the Museum’s last four years of live programming during summer, and we hope to continue to expand the intergenerational ecosystem that’s already emerging—both onstage and off. For us, it’s important to design a program with multiple points of access by combining moments of intellectual debate with sensory encounters. Our goal is to create a program that cultivates trust both within our communities and for new audiences, so we can help them feel confident that, while they may initially be drawn in by household names, AIR will also be a place for unexpected encounters with artists and thinkers they might not yet know. That’s also why AIR has been announced from the outset as a ten-year initiative; it’s designed as both a platform and a place to nurture ideas that can spark new lines of thought and inquiry over time.

What does it mean to curate a program that’s as much about process and dialogue as it is about outcomes or objects?

Working with contemporary artists and experimental thinkers from all fields, the dialogue and process obviously continues to evolve beyond the moment of presentation. However, the ideas at the heart of each project will condense and come into focus through talks, performances, or encounters with artworks. The events are designed to distill complexity through experience.

This is also why we are organizing a small-group retreat before the festival, to provide space to test ideas that might not yet be ready for the public stage. Themes and participants from these closed-door conversations will flow into AIR’s public presentations, and since retreat participants will also be active members of the audience, we hope that informal conversations will also shape the broader discussions that will take place during and after the festival.

How do you see AIR contributing to the Museum’s evolving role as a site not only for exhibitions, but also for experimentation?

AIR is designed as a moment when ideas, artworks, and people come together over a very compressed period of time. At their core, museums are spaces for building knowledge across cultures and history, and artworks have the power to challenge traditional epistemological and temporal processes. Together, through exhibitions and programs, they can reveal new ways of thinking about and experiencing the time and space of the world we live in. The event-based nature of AIR amplifies the intensity of this process. It’s an opportunity to learn from both what we know and what we don’t, and to tune our sensory perception so we stay open to new ways of thinking and feeling.

AIR also emerges from Aspen’s long history of interdisciplinary convening, and the memories, stories, and ideas generated in previous gatherings very much linger in the air here. Sara Imari Walker talks about the way in which physical objects hold memory, as the particles from which they’re made carry their history with them. Conceptually, I would say AIR taps into that potential, foregrounding how people, artworks, objects, and landscapes are always evolving in relation to what has come before—and what is still to come.

Do you have any tips for someone making their first trip to Aspen, especially during AIR?

Drink lots of water! Seriously, but also, take a moment to pause and let the high alpine air slow you down. AIR is all about creating space for sensory awareness and tuning into how we perceive the world beyond language and description. One of the inspirations I keep returning to for the spirit of AIR comes from Álvaro Enrigue’s novel Sudden Death: “Art and dreams don’t stick with us because they have the capacity to move things along, but because they stop the world: they function as a parenthesis, a dyke, a moment of rest.”