INTERVIEW with JORGE CORTELL, curator
By Airida Rekštytė – November 4, 2016
According to your profound theoretical education (sic) it will not be difficult to present us in short your intentions for organizing this event.
When did the idea of making this exhibition occur and what inspired it?
I have spent years as activist defending free software and online privacy, and opposing censorship.
During a dinner with the director of an event that focuses on those themes (the Internet Freedom Festival, also known as Circumvention Festival), I told him how it would be a nice challenge to try to convey the main messages of the Festivals themes into an art exhibition.
The other day I received a letter from Buckingham Palace, inviting me to have dinner with the Duke of York (Prince Andrew) on Thursday at Windsor Castle.
I was curious to see the castle from the inside: it is a medieval style fortress, filled with military memorabilia (guns, swords, lances, armors…), banners and crests. It was more Game of Thrones than Harry Potter.
The reception was held at the Grand Reception Room.
For second consecutive year, my company has been named “Top Scaleup in the UK”. This means that we are growing fast, and also that I get invited to cool events. One of those events was a reception and a ‘Ten Years From Now’ series of keynotes at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, another one a mentoring session at London’s City Hall, and another one a series of talks at Google Campus.
Halloween has arrived in Wimbledon. The multicolored leaves paint their annual natural mosaic, one of the many subjective manifestations where we can observe our mind at work, interpreting events. Do you get taken away by the beauty of the color range? Does it make you wonder why everybody finds beautiful a cyclical natural event that occurs because tree leaves die, fall and rot? Do you associate it with annoyingly unpredictable weather and uncomfortably falling temperatures?
November 1 I attended Future Decoded, the annual event where Microsoft and Partners present their forward looking products and concepts.
Besides some cool “event attractions” (like the Back To The Future Delorean, seeing how data is not completely deleted even if you deep freeze a hard drive, the Bloodhound record-breaking car, or seeing the inside of a Rolls Royce plane turbine), the key for me was to be able to demonstrate my company’s software running on an amazing 84” Microsoft Surface Hub, and attending the invitation-only Microsoft Executive Party at the Sunborn Yacht Hotel.
The last couple of weeks in October I went to Valencia to attend the Digital Health Venture Forum, where I received the Best Presentation Award.
After spending a few days with my family and my Spanish team, and participating in an art installation by the SuperFlex collective on the 25th, I returned to London.
October 27 I went to the beautiful Oxford Science Park to have a couple of business meetings.
The last few days have been quite hectic. So much so that I`m going to “bundle” them into one or two very heterogeneous posts.
By the end of September I had to attend a few events, like being invited to a member of Microsoft`s Partner Advisory Council (we held the first meeting at the InterContinental London Park Lane Hotel), or an E2E networking dinner at Charlotte Street Hotel:
Tuesday October 4 I travelled to Paris to meet a South American Vice-minister of Health in IBM France:
