Episode 053 Paola Antonelli

Show Notes

This week we’re visiting the the one and only Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design and Director of Research and Development at the Museum of Modern Art. Paola is quite frankly is a legend  – not only because she made MoMA’s first ever homepage on the World Wide Web in 1995 – but for decades she has been pushing the envelope and really reshaping what it means for museums to collect. For instance, what does it mean for a museum to collect something that is in in the public domain, and something that is rather intangible, such as the @ symbol? So far on the show we’ve visited with many curators of contemporary art, but the picture would be incomplete without design – after all it is all around us – the device you’re reading this on, the app you use to download this podcast every week, the ATM at your bank, the building where you go to work, the chair you sit in every day, and the video games you play – it’s all design. Curators like Paola help guide us to see and understand these things more closely and learn about the who, what, where, when, and why of the designed world around us. Tune in to hear Paola’s story!

Links from the conversation with Paola
> https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1995/mutantmaterials
> https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence
> http://momarnd.moma.org/salons/
> https://www.instagram.com/design.emergency/

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Transcript 

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. And this week we are visiting with a curator. 

[00:00:18] Paola: Hi, I'm Paola Antonelli I work at the Museum of Modern Art, where I am as senior curator of architecture and design and director of R and D and in particular, my passion and expertise is contemporary design.

[00:00:29] Ben: I was so excited to sit down with Paola, so far on the show, when it comes to curation, we've pretty much exclusively heard from curators of contemporary art. The world of design, of course, is all around us. The device that you're using to listen to this podcast, the app you used to download it, the ATM at your bank, the building where you go to work, the chair you sit in every day. And yes, the video game you play to unwind at the end of the day, it's curators like Paola that help guide us to see and understand these things more closely and kind of snap us out of seeing things as defaults and learn about the who, what, where, when and why of the designed world around us. Paola is quite frankly a legend, not only because she made MoMA's first ever homepage on the worldwide web in 1995, but for decades, she has been pushing the envelope and really reshaping what it means for museums to collect. For instance, what does it mean for a museum to collect something that is in the public domain and is kind of intangible such as the, at symbol, like, you know, the one on your keyboard. Well, stay tuned and you will certainly find out. Quick reminder before we get started if you can't get enough of the show, I highly recommend clicking on the link to our Patreon in the show notes, where our lovely little community of supporters enjoy all kinds of extra and exclusive content. Hope to see you over there soon. And now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Paola Antonelli. 

[00:02:13] Paola: I never had the calling. I never had the mission of wanting to become a curator or wanting to be in design or in the arts. I grew up in Milan and Milan is a city of design. So I guess it was kind of unavoidable, but I'm the daughter of two doctors and my dad was bringing me in the OR when I was like nine and then I would draw the slides for his lectures so I can draw a larynx or a cochlear by heart and I figured out that I didn't wanna become a doctor. And then I wanted to become an astronaut of course we all do right who doesn't. And then I wrote to NASA when I was nine and NASA told me what I had to do to become an astronaut. And they told me to be good at school and learn all the science topics and math and especially take good care of your health, your teeth in particular, they told me, I don't know why I still have the letter, so age 12, I get my first cavity and it's tragedy. I can't be an astronaut anymore. So astrophysics and then from astrophysics, nuclear physics, and then journalism, I mean, really I've gone through the whole gamut of possible professions. I was still in Milan. In the meantime, I was also temping, you can say, or being an intern in Armani's PR office, because my sister's best friend's mom was Armani's PR. So it was really like everything, very organic. Throughout school, I was like working. And then I did two years of economics before understanding that that was not what I wanted to do. I remember that I was one summer in Sardinia which by the way is where I was born and I was sitting on a rock by the sea and I thought, oh my God, how much do I hate economics? it's like, I hate it so much. And so without saying anything to my parents, I went back to Milan at the end of the summer and switched to architecture, which was really like the den of all depravities, you know, at that time. We were 15,000 students only in architecture, only in Milan, it was completely free, like maybe $200 a year. And it was a mess, you know, basically nobody told you what to do. I was going from economics university, which was private and perfect, and I had, uh, all of these amazing professors. I was going into this total chaos where I had great professors too, but I was left to my own device and my own devices worked out because when I was still there, I started temping interning doing whatever you want, you know, just like working on exhibitions as a gofer and that's how it all started. In Italy, you don't go to journalism school or to curation school, you learn something and then you articulate it on different platforms, right? So you study architecture and then you write about architecture, you practice architecture, you do exhibitions of architecture, you design exhibitions that are not of architecture, but are still designed. So that makes for very deep knowledge of the subject. Many Italian architects do buildings and furniture and installation, design, and interiors. So they don't have a specialization. They are really like multifaceted on different scales of design. And so it's kind of natural for that to happen also in school. Right. So I remember I was in class and one of the teaching assistants came in and said, they're looking for people to work at the Triennale to put up this exhibition about the design of cities in the future. I tried to be cool and I asked them, so how much are they paying? And they said like, you know, $10 a week. And I'm like, okay, in that case, you know, so I was trying to be cool and, and professional, but of course I wanted to do it. And so the curator of the exhibition was an architect that also was working on the master plan of Berlin after the fall of the wall, and he was, uh, running as a deputy editor of Domus and then he was installing the exhibition as a curator. So that's typical, right? So I just followed in this mode and that's why I was writing, I never practiced really. I practiced as an architect for six months, but I realized I was a disaster at it so I just moved away from it. There was more adventures. There was this thing called International Design Conference in Aspen, which was fantastic. It closed a few years ago, but it was founded in 1951 by Walter Paepcke who was the industrialist that developed the city of Aspen together with Charles Eames and with George Nelson. And the idea was to put together great industrialists and great designers. Right? So it was this idea of improving industry that conference led me to Aspen. And in Aspen, I decided that I had a crush on this surfer. That was the AV guy, right, and it was not really true that I had a crush, but it was almost like a way to get away from Europe. So the conference was in June and in August here I am in Los Angeles, stalking the poor guy the guy couldn't care less about me and frankly, I didn't care that much about him either. So what I did is instead I landed a teaching position at UCLA as a lecturer. nothing ever happened with the guy. I forgot about him, but I started going to UCLA. So. That was for three and a half years. I was living part of the year in Milan, part of the year in Los Angeles. I was teaching at UCLA and I was sending back stories to Domus first and then to Abitare another magazine that I switched to. And I was curating exhibition. It was just amazing. I was in my twenties and and I was just having a ball. And I remember I had become a little tired of this going from Milan to New York. Cause there were no direct flights looking for stories in New York, then going to San Francisco where I had my boyfriend then renting a car, packing everything up and going to LA and you know, all this with 2,500 slides in my carry on, it became a little tedious. And I remember I opened ID magazine and there was the ad for the position at MoMA. And, uh, I answered an ad, I literally answered an ad. The chief curator at that time of architecture and design was Terry Riley. And I knew him already because I had I had stopped in New York and I had interviewed him. I had interviewed Kara McCarty who was here and it was her departure that opened the position. So that's how I got it. And then I moved to New York in the worst winter in history, February, 1994, it was like notoriously bad 17 snowstorms. And I was in shock. At that particular moment in the history of design and in the history of architecture too, there were a series of new materials that made it so that architects and designers themselves could design the materials instead of going back to chemical engineers or, to companies, they could actually modulate the materials, for instance, composites, composites, like of course fiberglass, but also carbon fiber. Composites are fibers and resins, you know, so there's a scaffold and then there's something that holds it together. And in many cases they're almost like laid by hand, right? So it's a, it's a sculpting kind of way of doing things or plastics. Forever to make a plastic chair you had to go and invest tens of thousands of dollars to make a mold in either steel or aluminum, and then bring the pellets of plastic to a certain temperature, certain pressure. And you know, so it was a big deal. You needed really a company to do that, but in the mid nineties, there were all these new resins that could be cured at ambient temperature and that may be required on a composite mold. So all of a sudden designers could do things themselves, and there were all also all these new materials, the first ideas about recycling, all these almond shells made in that, that came out of Spain that could be made into a paste, and then you could make the back of a chair. So there was so much happening in materials. And there was an exhibition that was planned, that fell through and so a gallery was available and they told me, do you wanna do something? And I was like, hell yeah. And I, just came up with this idea of thinking of materials in design. So Mutant Materials happened really fast and that's a little bit my history at MoMA. It's always like, finding a way to insert design, in, I don't know, fissures or interstitial places. Like in that case, doing an exhibition that was about either objects made with new materials or objects made with old materials used innovative ways, right? So that's what it was about and there was so much to show and the objects were so spectacular. And also there was another trick. People could touch most things. That was the first and last time that I could do it, but you had the sign, please touch. I mean, hello, you know, when you have something like that, people go crazy. When you say touch, they eat. And when you say that you can manipulate, they sit on it. It was just like they were going crazy. So it was really a lot of fun it's not really possible to do it every time but next year I would like to think about how materials have changed in the past 25 years. So we'll see maybe I'll do a redux.

[00:12:02] Ben: The moment that you arrive at MoMA was in many ways, the dawn of the worldwide web and you know, most of the general public's exposure to the internet. Did this factor into your practice as a researcher and as a curator?

[00:12:19] Paola: You're gonna love this. When I came to MoMA, I had never seen a memo in my life cuz you know, in, in Italy you tended to like pick up the phone, or meet people for coffee or whatever. And so I had never seen one and I remember the first memo that I received I found so rude. it was a culture shock. But the first memo that I wrote was a two page memo on why I needed a Mac. I got here and I found myself staring at this PC with like the big floppy disk and I'm like, oh my God I had already smuggled my own Macintosh classic from the United States three, four years before. I'm like, what the hell am I doing with this? So I wrote this memo and why I needed a Mac. And that was quite hilarious because for so many years, people owning Macs at MoMA were like this little tight knit circle of people that had to go to Tekserve to get any kind of like assistance. When it came to the web, it was even worse. in the sense, I think that I made . Also a case on why we needed to use email and how much we would save with email instead of making international phone calls. So it was the beginning also of the whole email system at MoMA. But what was really fascinating was that Mutant Materials was the first MoMA website and I kind of coded it almost by myself with this student from SVA. So basically I wanted a website for the exhibition and the idea of why I wanted it is because I wanted to have the checklist and a few materials there. So my idea was longevity, right? So if you put it on the worldwide web, it's gonna be there forever. So if people need the checklist and they cannot find the catalog, they can still find it here, which is true. It's still accessible. But so MoMA didn't really know what a website was. They didn't know who should sign off, whether it was communications or publications. And they didn't really know how much money I needed. So they gave me a budget of $315, something like that and I used it to take out to dinner this student from the SVA that taught me HTML. So basically it was coded directly by myself and her, I learned HTML and you see, it's still there. It's still on the MoMA website. If you Google Mutant Materials MoMA you get to the exhibition page and you can click on the website, which is still there. And it's so mid nineties, but you know what it survived. 

[00:14:42] Ben: Before we kind of like dive really deeply in, I want to take the thousand foot view. You know, so when it comes to your role at MoMA I guess like, what do you view as the job of a curator?

[00:14:54] Paola: Well, it's a very good question. And actually the very first MoMA, R and D salon was dedicated exactly to this. What is a curator? That was 10 years ago, but I still believe the conclusions we came to, which is a curator is basically a trusted guide. You have to earn your trust, right? You have to prove yourself and then you guide people through whether it's the life of one artist or whether it is the 111 items of clothing that had an important impact in the past a hundred years, or whether it is abstract expressionism. So people trust you and you give them an aspect or a tour of it. This is a definition, but what I think is my mission is not telling people what's good and what's bad, but rather, especially now at this time of discombobulation and propaganda, it's to develop people's own critical sense. That's what I'm hoping, I'm hoping that I'll make people look at objects in a critical way and evaluate whether these objects are well designed. And when I say well designed, I don't mean pretty, I mean like the whole ecosystem of design, so sustainability, good use of resources, also formal elegance that's important too. And we can go on forever, but so that's what I want. I want people to understand the way they understand music or cinematography, you know, at this point, if you talk to almost anyone, they know what a director of photography does, right.. And they kind of know what an arrangement is and what a music producer does. I would like them to get to the same when it comes to design both physical and digital. I would like them to be able to think of the amount of plastic that goes into vacuum forming. I would like them to think critically of the new trash bins in a city and I would like them to think critically about the interface of the ATM machine at their bank. I would like them to understand that somebody is responsible for the design of everything, of every single object and they should be held responsible, not just it happens. And the opposite of, beautiful is not ugly, but it's lazy or indifferent. Right. So that's what I would like to do. Stimulate people's sense of criticism. I run this series called MoMA R and D salon and it's kind of a, play on words because usually R and D is like in a, in an industry or technology, but instead it's a department that started in, after the crisis of 2008, to prove that museums can be the R and D of society, that it's better to trust the cultural sector than the financial sector, right? So, and this salons are about topics that everybody cares about because it's about the R and D of society. So the first one. It was about curation and the speakers there's always like four or five speakers. The speakers were Anne Temkin who's the chief curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA. So like, you know, the pure curator, then there was Maria Popova, who at that time, she called herself a curator of interestingness on the web and now she runs, well, it was called Brain Pickings. Now it's called the The Marginalian which is this exquisite blog. If you wanna call it blog, but it's almost like an encyclopedia of just really interesting things in literature that spans the past and the future and the present and poetry and illustration and classics. So it's really amazing way to look at human knowledge. Then there was Jeff Jarvis who is a professor at CUNY and was a journalism professor and he was one of the first to say that you can curate news sources and present them to the public on social media. The last one was Tor Hermansen, who is part of a duo of music, producer and writers called Stargate that write these amazing super hits for like beyond Beyonce or Rihanna. And he was talking about how to look for beats online and there are all the kids that upload the beats. How do you curate that? So it was really amazing because we came to that conclusion. One was that a curator is a trusted guide and the second a curator needs an audience so that's also quite beautiful, but it is about helping people pursue their own passions and just be fuller and more critical citizens, that's really what it's about. In the past it was arbiters of elegance, it was taste makers. I mean, it was all these like creepy descriptions, but right now to me is really, I'm a trusted guide. 

[00:19:36] Ben: I love that. I think building off of that, one very specific dimension of your practice that has always fascinated me, and I think a lot of people, is you know, what it means for a museum to collect something that is not scarce. Something that already kind of lives diffused throughout culture. I think it's easy for people to wrap their heads around this when it's a physical mass produce object, be it like a Mies van der Rohe chair, or, the Kenji Ekuan designed soy sauce dispenser that you've collected in your department, but when we're talking about things like the at symbol, which everyone has on their keyboard or the accessible icon, you know, it becomes really conceptual, I think for people. So what does it mean when the museum actually collects something like this that's sort of immaterial in a way?

[00:20:24] Paola: It's so subtle and it's so beautifully complicated and complex. So, first of all one very simple consideration. You know, we were talking before about the process of design and the goals and means the means sometimes are code or draw or like, uh, vinyl, you know, whatever, you know, so the means don't have to be necessarily wood or plaster or concrete they can be code. And the means are at the service of the goals as usual. Right? So thinking about it that way in this kind of conceptual way can be helpful. But the idea of ownership is a layer of complexity that I find exquisite, like really delicious. So when it comes to the at sign, I think that's probably my proudest acquisition , which is not an acquisition, it's an anointment right, because it's in the public domain. So usually when you acquire something, you pay something for it but you, kind of take it and put it in your place, whether it's your uh, safe or whether it's your museum or your warehouse in the case of the at sign. I always said to people, it's almost as if I collected the shadow of a butterfly in the sense that it doesn't belong to anyone. It belongs to everybody. And why should I not put it in a museum just because it cannot be taken out of circulation, right? So the idea of museums as places to preserve objects and artifacts is safe with the acquisition or anointment of the at sign, it's in the same kind of philosophical course. And the fact that it belongs to everybody is perfect because then it belongs also to the museum. So it's okay. And once again, trusted guide, I explain to people that the, at sign is a wonderful piece of design. Now, why is it a wonderful piece of design, this must be said. Well, it is pretty elegant, right? Super elegant. It is very meaningful and added bonus. It has existed since the middle ages. It was found in manuscripts. So the monks that were copying manuscripts would try to save time by fusing the two letters of the Latin proposition ad add, which meant the same as the at sign in relationship with connected to right. It meant the same. They were saving energy by doing the little a and the swirl on top. It continued throughout history for all those centuries. It was used by merchants to connect price with quantity. It was used by accountants and it was in the American type writers in the 19th century. And when Ray Tomlinson, which was one of the engineers at BBN that were in charge of designing the internet for DARPA, he was in particular in charge of the email service of the email part of it. So he found himself always having the name of the person and then lines of code. And then the place in the machine cause at the beginning, email was not across the world it was in the same room sometimes in the same machine. Right? All these cabled machines. So he was using a teletype and he had this repetitive code that he had to type in every single time and so he said, can I just use a symbol? And he looked at the teletype keyboard and there was this sign. He did a little research and he figured out that it meant exactly what that code was standing in for. And he adopted it and the first email that he sent with it was to talk about the, at sign. So it was all beautiful. So round and circular and Ray Ray Tomlinson was still alive when we acquired the, at sign, it was 2010. And so he was super happy and it was just beautiful. And the idea that it was in the public domain was even more fun because people would call us in the department of architecture and design at MoMA. And ask us for the permission to use pictures of the at sign and we were like, you know what, go for it. It's on your keyboard. And they're like what, uh, what I'm like, yeah, it's on your keyboard. And if you want to use the font, that's closest to the appearance of the teletype, use American Typewriter, use that and you're gonna get really close to it. And people were just really perplexed. So that was an impossible acquisition according to the description of an acquisition of the past, but very possible when you come to think of curators and museums, as places for trusted guide ship. And other acquisitions were less complicated because they were not necessarily in the public domain, like the on off sign, for instance, it comes from the IEEE so we just agreed with them, and the Google Map Pin or you were talking about the disability sign, that was beautiful because it was the switch from the static wheelchair with the vertical back to instead the, wheelchair in motion like, I don't need your help I'm already moving. Just make sure that I can access where I wanna go. So a big shift in agency and in view and vision of people with disabilities. So all of this goes to really talk about communication design and I remember there was this symposium that we had in 2006, behind closed doors with 10 experts from all over the world to try and think of what the future of MoMA's graphic design collections should be. Because, you know, MoMA was founded in 1929 and design was part of it since the beginning, but graphic design had been basically posters for decades. And I'm not saying that posters are bad, but there's so much more. So I remember that we started a list of categories that we needed to cover that was symbols. And that's what these were about. You know, we also have Creative Commons we have several symbols. Then we had film titles, and we also acquired a few of those, and we had interfaces and visualization design and video games, and so we went through them all and we kind of started all these different categories. And it's important because if we look at design in our lives, the parts that is interfaces and symbols and infrastructure, directions, et cetera, is so paramount, you know? So we should also take that into account. It's not only chairs and cars. Actually, these kind of acquisitions are much more complicated than acquiring a chair and you know, it very well. I don't know. Ben, am I gonna disclose that you were part of all these discussions, especially the video games since the beginning and you know, very well how complex the protocols are when you acquire something that is digital it's much more complicated. I mean, we used to say that code is more fragile than porcelain and so anything that is digital needs so much more work than a piece of wood. 

[00:27:27] Ben: So as a curator that has been, you know, in many ways tracking, the affordances of digital material in design, that's not completely what you focus on but that's certainly a part of what you do, I'm curious over the years if there are any major shifts that you've witnessed in how designers and artists are working with technology?

[00:27:48] Paola: Well, because I have this training that is very theoretical I don't think that designers or artists are using technology in a different way. It's just technology has changed tremendously, but in a way today, we're seeing with NFTs the same moment of drunkenness that we were seeing with desktop publishing in the mid nineties. Right? So it's funny, you know, history repeats itself with just different ingredients. But I would say therefore that no, there's the same enthusiasm for technology, sometimes excessive enthusiasm for technologies. And then there are these beautiful peaks of people that understand how to use technology and exploit all of its intrinsic poetry without being completely. Swept away by it. So in 2008, there was an exhibition that I did that was called Design and the Elastic Mind and that was the beginning of us acquiring visualization design, so data visualization. And it's amazing to see we're talking about 14 years ago and a completely different technology, so much more rudimentary, but the aesthetic expression and the functional expression of so much of this visualization design that works by Ben Fry or by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are still so relevant today. And okay. Things could happen faster today, computing capabilities are not what they were 14 years ago, but you almost don't feel it like right now, as we're speaking, we are installing an exhibition. That's called never alone and the subtitle is video games and other interactive design. And so we are installing this work by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg we're installing work that we haven't seen in a while and it stands the test of time so well. So I think that great designers and great artists are the ones that once again, goals and means, bend the means at their disposal to their will and their imagination and not vice versa. It's not the means that take them over. So this is the use of technology that I am most interested in. You know, I wish we could have Space Wars in the collection, you know, the 1957 video game, the very first one, there's only two that are available. But that was this small screen. You can imagine what a computer was like in 1957, but still it was the best you could do with that technology. And my very favorite video game is Tempest visually, at least because it does so much with vector graphics. You know, it just like takes you into this. Four dimensional fifth dimensional space. So once again, it's about how you use technology. Not what technology is.

[00:30:31] Ben: Originally I wasn't going to ask you about video games, 

[00:30:34] Paola: Oh come on. How can you not ask me about video games? That's ridiculous. we worked on it together Ben, come on.

[00:30:42] Ben: Well, one thing I wanted to ask you about is it's always been fascinating and also kind of confusing to me why MoMA collecting video games was so controversial because, you know, when you look back at the history of the Museum of Modern Art, I mean, like from its inception, I mean, MoMA was showing propeller blades and hardware next to paintings. So, you know, this juxtaposition of utilitarian design next to modern art, it's in the DNA of the institution. So it was just, I guess yeah, surprising that it was so controversial. I'm curious, why do you think like, you know, ruffled so many feathers for people to see MoMA collect video games? 

[00:31:29] Paola: You're completely right. It's so fascinating because it didn't ruffle too many feathers, but it ruffled some very important feathers. let's put it that way and really it's super interesting. I have a feeling that it has to do with a value judgment. It's not only the availability of the object because you know, we have the PostIt note in the collection, we have jelly beans. We have, you know, you set the Kikkoman soy sauce bottle, you know, so we have a lot of mundane every day objects, the ones that I call the humble masterpieces, but I feel that video games really rattled some because when you think of high and low and the ivory tower, there's nothing that's in many people's minds, lower than video games. Right? It's like video games are evil, right? They rob kids of their minds. They rob them of their time, they teach them violence, they are everything that's wrong with digital media and with interaction design. So I feel that it's a knee jerk reaction. I feel that so many of these people never even paused to think of what video games really are that they're like board games, but online. Right. So what's the big difference. And in particular it was very funny cuz I was talking about one of the reviews that came out when we announced the video games and it was Jonathan Jones in The Guardian and he just had gone berserk and said, oh my God, you cannot show Pacman next to Picasso. And I was like, wait a second, there's like three floors in between number one, and number two, why not? Probably Picasso at his time was considered also like depravity and so on and so forth. So it's very funny because just four or five days later, the same Guardian published a rebuttal by somebody else inside The Guardian so when I read that review, I remember you know, when you feel, when somebody is on stage in front of a big audience and really hits the wrong note and you're like cringing inside, it's, uh, it's like this terrible feeling. I was not hurt. I was like, oh my God, I'm so sorry you wrote that. It's like, what did you do to yourself? And five days later there was the rebuttal and it was like an avalanche of, debate. I remember that I was not at MoMA yet, but there was an exhibition that Kirk Varnedoe, who's this great storied chief curator of Painting and Sculpture did with Adam Gopnik, who's the writer at the New Yorker they were best friends and I'm speaking in the past because unfortunately, Kirk died, but it was an exhibition called high and low. That was about illustration, cartoons and high art. So provocative. And it was panned like there's no tomorrow you cannot really take the ivory tower down and think that you're gonna be unscathed. And as usual, I sometimes am completely mindless of politics and I've done it so many times. I'm not regretting anything, but I feel that that's what happened. That so many people felt that, they were taken off the pedestal because MoMA was collecting video games. And also, you know, the usual thing of saying video games are not art. And I always kept saying, well, we're collecting them as interaction design. But yeah, those who got it, got it. And it was the absolute majority and those who didn't didn't and I don't think that they changed their minds.

[00:34:57] Ben: Yeah. Well, so you mentioned that you're working on installing an exhibition right now that involves some video games. So it sounds like your work here is not done. Do you wanna share a bit about that project? 

[00:35:08] Paola: Absolutely. It will open September 8th here at MoMA and it will be on the gallery that is on the ground floor facing the street. So it's before the ticket barrier. So it's open to everybody and also there's gonna be this big screen on the streets, and you're gonna see a montage of the 36 video games that are in the collection. And also you'll be able to watch from the street people playing games. We have to decide which one we wanna put in the window, but it's gonna be really fascinating. So there are 36 video games in MoMA's collection. We can't let people play all of them because number one, some of them cannot really be played in a gallery, like Eve Online or Sim City I mean, it would take too long Dwarf Fortress. I mean, can you imagine? And also we don't have enough space, so 10 of them will be playable and the others instead will be presented in three sections. One is the input and the other is the designer and the player, and they're gonna be this montages of gameplay for each one of the games. So we're gonna give people really a sense of the video games and the collection, and also other interaction design, because we wanted to make sure that it was not only video games. Cause people have to understand the importance of interaction design once again, trusted guides, right? We want people to just navigate the world with a different, critical sense. Video games are the essence of interaction design because they are pure behavior design, right? Interaction design is about, of course, form of course, function of course, space and time if it's animated, but mostly it's about designing a behavior. You know, the MTA right now is retiring the MetroCard machines. Those of you that are not from New York don't know what a wonderful thing a MetroCard machine is. I had it actually in an exhibition in 2011 at MoMA. MetroCard machine is this amazing thing of interaction design that is meant to be understandable immediately by everyone, in every language and very easy to touch. So it has big buttons with big colors and the instructions are just, I mean, it's a masterpiece of interaction design. I want people to understand that there's a connection between the MetroCard machine and video games, and it's not only playfulness, but it's really the design of a behavior. Every time there's an interaction designed. There's a way to plot your behavior and to guide you to towards a goal that is your goal imagined by the designer. It's so hard to explain with words, but it's something that anybody that's listening can feel on their own skin whenever they open, the screen of their smartphone or when they're getting angry at the ATM machine that doesn't work, you know, so it really is everywhere and video games are connected to it. This exhibition and also all the acquisitions, Paul Galloway, who's the collection specialist here in A and D was fundamental and there were others, an army of people here at MoMA worked on the video games, including general counsel. , you know, the lawyers, because acquiring a video game means acquiring a relationship with the producer or designer, you know? It really is amazing, but all this just like any great design project disappears, you know, it, it almost like people don't see it. It's how the sausage is made, but the result is this experience that people have. They come to a place like MoMA, a place that is so august that is so important and authoritative, and they find Minecraft, you know, so children dragging their parents towards the exhibition of Minecraft saying see, see, see, and it's beautiful because children get this sense of belonging, you know, we belong in MoMA also and parents, all of a sudden look at their children maybe differently. I don't know. I think there's really so much to be gained by giving visibility to new forms of design and using, and I say using in a positive way, the power and the authority of MoMA to make people understand more of the world they live in.

[00:39:18] Ben: So, you know, we've talked a lot about the past, but I'm curious other than the exhibition you were telling us about what else is coming next for you?

[00:39:27] Paola: Well, what's coming next is something that is almost like a continuation of the past, but in different ways. So in may of 2020 I began an Instagram feed together with my friend Alice Rawsthorn who's this great design critic. She's based in London I was based in New York we were both in lockdown and she has already a great Instagram feed about design. And she was doing research about designing the pandemic. And, uh, I, so that was at home in New York and Larry, my husband was listening to Fat Joe doing these Instagram lives almost every night. And Larry said, you know what? You could do this too. And I'm like, Ooh, let me do it with Alice. And so we had this idea and in like, one hour on the phone, we had the title Design Emergency, and then we called a friend who's a graphic designer in three days, she had the image and the branding done. So it was, um, it was the same thing that I, well, the time an opportunity to show the world how multifaceted and important design is in the middle of the pandemic. Right? So it was called design emergency. And the designers were sometimes professional, sometimes accidental. For instance, we interviewed Alisa Eckert. Who's one of the two illustrators at the CDC at the center for disease control that actually branded the coronavirus. So the coronavirus is a gray blob with some dots around it. And it, the two of them. Alisa and Dave Higgins are the ones that made this like deep water mine, perfectly round with the spiky S proteins that are red, like hell razor. So all of a sudden the whole world has this branding design for this deadly pandemic. Right? So that was an example of an active design in a design emergency. Or there was instead an accidental designer like this anesthesiologist in bologna that devised a little valve to split ventilators to try and save two people at once on the ventilator. So it was just really amazing. We started doing this like weekly Instagram lives to show all the different ways in which design could contribute to. Alleviate or even solve this tremendous pandemic. And then when the pandemic ebbed, because it's not gone yet, let me remind everyone. We decided to talk about the future of the world, how to make the world better for all, and know, cuz the motto is that there is always a design emergency. So, from the Instagrams that we keep on doing, we also made a book and now we're going to maybe make it into a podcast, you know, we'll see. So we're looking at that, but really the motto that there is always a design emergency really speaks to the fact that design is intrinsic to life and that the different crisis that we are right now witnessing are all correlated. So the social injustice and poverty and, uh, environmental imbalance and disasters are all connected. And trying to highlight certain ways in which design can help either master this kind of complexity or have a more acupuncture, like kind of inter intervention.  It's something that we feel we can do. So we'll keep doing this I'm also part of the task force here at MoMA that brings the institution into web three. So we already had one first experiment with NFTs last fall together with  Feral File and Refik Anadol was the uh, artist. We offered Refik the metadata of the collection that our old colleague Fiona Romeo had put on GitHub. So we basically offered all this metadata to Refik and he created one of his artworks that came from this metadata and then we had an auction and now we're continuing that we're continuing exploring what we could do with tokens at all levels in the museum membership and retail and development and art and exhibitions. So that's also a big part of my life. And then I continue the salons, the R and D salons really make me happy. The next one will be number 40. It's the 10th anniversary, and then of course I'm working on new exhibitions that I hope I will announce soon.

[00:43:47] Ben: So Paola you have so much hard earned experience as we've heard in telling your story. So I'm curious, if there are any early career or aspiring curators, listening to the show do you have any advice that you'd like to leave behind?

[00:44:02] Paola: Well, I go back to the surfing metaphor. Work hard. So you have to paddle, to go out there and then take some risks. Of course I was lucky because I was, you know, I had some Italian parents that backed me and in Italy, you don't really come up with students debt because I told you it was $200. So I didn't have that like horrible debt. And I could take some risks, but I feel that it's really important to try many things. So try and curate your own shows, even if it's an experimental gallery that is as big as a cabinet or as a closet and try to get involved in as many things as possible, but working hard is really the way to go. 

[00:44:46] Ben: Well Paola Antonelli, my dear former colleague, it was so great and luxurious to get the chance to sit down and chat with you. I really, really appreciate you coming on the show.

[00:44:55] Paola: My adored Ben It was a delight and I hope it'll happen again. Maybe I will interview you.

[00:45:01] Ben: And thank you dear listener for joining me for this week's show. As always, if you want to help support our work and mission of equitably compensating artists that come on the show. You can join us over at patreon.com/artobsolescence, or if a one-time tax deductible gift is more your speed, you can do so through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts at artandobsolescence.com/donate. And on the show site, you can also find the full episode archive, including full transcripts and show notes. And last but not least you can always find us on Twitter and Instagram @ artobsolescence. Until next time have a great week my friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.