Maybe it helps to keep in mind that exhibitions, festivals, and conferences are three different "genres", have different goals and economics. Mixing "festival" and "conference" (or inother terms "performance" and "reports, demonstrations, reflections") has aways turned sour, when the conference is the driving factor and the performances are integrated in some way or other into that economic and organizational concept of "conference". On the other hand, programming and staging a festival and organizing a conference in the context of the festival allows a different modality. Artists get paid as good or as bad as the festival or exhibition can manage - and the artists may also attend the conference if they are around. And the conference can be handled in the typical manner of conferences. The conference is within the same time frame as the festival/exhibition, but is not identical with it - may be shorter for instance. The organizational/curatorial/scientific units for "festival/exhibition" and "conference" are kept separate in the sense that their needs are seen as quite different (organizational needs, logistics, printing and PR etc etc)
The mix of the academic conference circus with "artistic addenda" always results in the discrepancies described in this thread. These discrepancies are, as so well pointed out, of economic nature resulting in a confused situation for content, focus and quality. A case study may be one of the oldest conferences of "art and technology", the International Computer Music Conference, which started in the mid seventies and went through all the changes the development of technology and industrial products, the function of academic research and the evolvement of artistic approaches entail.
Maybe the major issue is that the academic environment does not support what exhibitions/festivals really require, especially on the curatorial and financial level, and quite often on the overall infrastructural level as well. The function of conferences is quite different from the function of festivals/exhibitions.
Conferences are an inherent part of academic exchange, career building and net-working (in the social and political sense, not in the technological sense). Festivals/exhibitions are directed towards an audience that (hopefully) wants "experience". Festivals/exhibitions are food, whereas conferences are a very specific way of digestion (and maybe result sometimes in new ways of preparing food). Cooks should get paid for cooking not for digesting.
Johannes
Johannes Goebel
EMPAC
http://www.empac.rpi.edu
|