curious george

This week I finally got along to see Olafur Eliasson’s Your Curious Journey at Auckland Art Gallery|Toi o Tāmaki. Eliasson is an Icelandic-Danish artist who does installations that often reflect on the environment around us. I first fell in love with his work when he installed The Weather Project in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall the year I was studying for my masters in London.

In the artist statement for the Auckland exhibition, he says:

When you enter Your curious journey, you will have completed some sort of voyage to get there. It may be a trip from a street around the corner or across the globe. By journey, I also mean the process you have been through emotionally or intellectually to be prepared to view the work. This may be the sum of your experiences. It might reflect your education and upbringing, or it may be the result of a chance encounter. The artworks, too, have completed a journey to meet you. Each bears the marks of its creation and the challenges that led to the particular form in front of you. They carry within them a mixture of intentions, interpretations and contexts that can never be reduced to a single thing.

Being curious, to me, means being attuned to all of this and being open to listening. It is about paying attention to things we take for granted. Your curious journey is a journey in which you do not give up on your curiosity.

One of my favourite quotes is from film critic Roger Ebert, who was writing an essay about the backlash he received for saying that Michael Bay’s Transformers was a terrible movie. In it he says, “what I believe is that all clear-minded people should remain two things throughout their lifetimes: curious and teachable.”

All of my favourite people are curious and teachable — open-minded enough to continue to learn new things about the world and themselves, and genuinely interested in finding those new things to learn.

I was thinking about this in the context of my latest YouTube rabbithole — Mormon history (the hand-drawn video game map for this, if you’re curious about what my brain does, looks something like: Mormontok and family vloggers → the new Mormon temple in Tāmaki Makaurau → finding out tiktok biblical scholar Dan McClellan was also a Mormon → realising all I knew about Mormonism I learned from the musical → dozens of hours of the LDS Discussion series, learning just how incredible, heartbreakingly made up the whole thing is).

When we’re kids, we dive down rabbitholes all the time. We ask questions constantly: why, and how, and when. Children at the Eliasson exhibition were given a curiosity journal. I asked for one too.

I’ve been thinking about curiosity in the context of our lives online. I enjoyed this video about algorithmic complacency (the presenter has a slow cadence, you might need to speed him up if you, like me, are the most impatient person in the world) — the ways in which we’re increasingly reliant on the things technology chooses to show us, rather than things we’re seeking out ourselves. Offloading our curiosity in favour of a “for you” page. Worse still, as search experiences degrade, people are taking algorithmic slop answers at face value, abstracting us from our curiosity even further.

As I work on my Sunrise keynote about the good internet, it struck me that even our metaphors have changed. Jean Armour Polly, the librarian who is credited with first coining the term “surfing the internet”, says that she liked that metaphor because, like the sport, finding your way around wasn’t easy – it required some skill. Now, we spend our time on “platforms”. Flat, static structures. You get on and off platforms, but you certainly don’t go anywhere until you leave the station.

What was the last thing you were curious about?

more good stuff

• This fab article, Day 1,509 in the Big Brother House (register to read for free), in which the writer reminisces about spending his teen years on an early internet fan forum:

  In 2024, most of us live in constant dialogue with people online, be it through WhatsApp groups, Slack channels, Twitter, TikTok, et cetera. But back in 2009, with social media in its infancy and smartphones still inaccessible to many, it was unusual to live your life in a perpetual and uninterrupted group conversation, particularly with friends made on a Big Brother forum who you’d never actually laid eyes on.

• This amazing thread (bsky login required) about sprayed edges on paperbacks (now extremely fashionable) — brought back for the paperback edition of Wicked when printers had removed all their old, unused spray lines.

  Remember, no one had done this on a real binding line in 30 years. I don't know if anyone at the printer even knew how to do it; I assume they got their oldest pressmen to come share their legendary wisdom.

• This is very math, but if you’ve ever yelled “PIVOT!” in a Ross Geller voice while moving furniture, you’ll get a kick out of: The largest sofa you can move around a corner.

finally, in my lego city