Philosophy of adaptation at Nighttimestory

Artist: Max Kesteloot, Christian Lagata, Katarina Zdjelar, Tommy Malekoff, Carl Andre, Matteo Cremonesi, Zhou Li Yang

Exhibition title: Philosophy of adaptation

Venue: Nighttimestory, Los Angeles, US

Date: June 23 – July 4, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Nighttimestory, Los Angeles

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’’ — George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright.

The world we’ve constructed, created, and coerced for ourselves is far from the real world — the raw, raucous, rough one. The scorching sun has yielded hats, sunglasses, and air conditioning. The wild wind has produced walls and sturdy shelter. The flurry of snow has demanded coats, shovels, and furnaces. The crashing rain has created umbrellas, windshield wipers, and rubber boots.

Adaptation (from the Latin adaptio) is a process in which the adaptation of the system (i.e., maintenance of its basic parameters) is established or maintained when the conditions of the external and internal environment change.

Often the adaptation is also called the result of such a process – the availability of the system’s fitness for a certain factor of the environment. Much like a biological organism, the field of Culture is also constantly evolving in re-sponse to changes in its environment.

On a basic level, the field is concerned with the “transport of form and/or content from a source to a result in a media context”.

For theorists such as Linda Hutcheon, the term adaptation has a multi-layered application, referring simultaneou-sly to the entity or product which is the result of transposing a particular source, the process through which the entity or product was created (including reinterpretation and re-creation of the source), and the process of recep-tion, through which “we experience adaptations as palimpsests through our memory of other works that resonate through repetition and variation”, or in other words, the ways in which we associate the entity or product as both similar to and a departure from the original.