“The people must recognize the defects of the old invention, and someone must make a new one.” – Margaret Mead “Warfare is Only an Invention not a Biological Necessity” (1940)
What can happen in a museum? In 1945, representatives of fifty countries convened in the War Memorial Veterans Building—SFMOMA’s original home—to draft the United Nations Charter, imagining a global system of government designed to produce peace through consolidated power. “User Agreement” is an ongoing artwork centered in research and performance, beginning at SFMOMA with a focused series of performances, installations, workshops and a website, then continuing at 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica. The purpose of this artwork is to reverse engineer the technologies of peace—treaties, protocols, symbols and systems—in order to learn from what has already been invented, to repurpose and re-contextualize, to create new possibilities for interaction, and to fix existing bugs. Working backwards from the ways peace has been put to use through images, actions, and language, we will unpack and re-imagine techniques of mediation, conflict resolution, and treaty-making as performances, workshops, and interventions. Translated, abstracted, dispersed—the goal is to develop and make available new technologies for peace, conditions for engagement that preserve difference and acknowledge unanswered questions.