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Subject:

Re: conference economies

From:

Curt Cloninger <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Curt Cloninger <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 11:17:34 -0500

Content-Type:

text/plain

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Parts/Attachments

text/plain (137 lines)

Hi Alena,

It seems like the way a conference is economically structured is 
going to affect the type of people who present at it.  I attended 
FILE in Sao Paulo last year .  It was not my first year to be 
invited, but it was my first year to be able to attend, because now I 
am teaching and was able to get some money from my university to 
defray costs.

The artists who presented at the symposium were not necessarily the 
most interesting artists exhibited at the festival (although some 
happened to be).  Instead, they were the ones who could afford to 
attend; in other words, they were the ones in academia.

There were some non-academic exceptions  --  Olivier, whose history 
of VJ culture referenced MTV more than Baudrillard. Karina and Mikal 
from http://www.5uper.net ,  who told me of their friend who made a 
tattoo robot, strapped it to his arm, and gave himself a bezier curve 
tattoo.  Stephen from Prague who collected vintage analog film 
projectors and scratched them as a DJ would scratch vinyl (he wasn't 
even a presenter; he was just there to perform at the Hypersonica 
event).

When finances largely determine an artist's ability  to present at a 
conference, you are going to wind up with:
1. artists who teach at institutions with travel grant money.
2. artists from countries that support new media (there were a 
disproportionate number of Canadians at FILE  2004).
3. artists who get research grants involving travel to said 
conference/country (I met at least four presenters who were staying 
on in Brazil after the conference to work on research grants).
4. artists who have discretionary money to spend on conferences 
(often DJs/VJs who view the conference as a promotional gig).
5. local artists who don't have to pay to get there.

I'm not sure what the solution is to broaden this demographic, other 
than paying presenters, which may involve charging admission to the 
public, which then changes t he nature of the conference.

Another solution might be to hold the conference in conjunction with 
another fee-oriented event that is able to pay the artists.  Pay the 
artists to perform at the fee-oriented event, charge attendees to 
cover the costs, and then get those same artists to speak at your 
alter-symposium for free.  (This assumes that the artists are 
performance-oriented.)   http://bd4d.com conferences used to follow 
http://www.flashforwardconference.com conferences around and poach 
all the paid Flash Forward speakers to speak at their 
alter-conference after-hours for free.  Transmediale has a Club 
component.  FILE has a Hypersonica component.

Another approach invoves building "critical mass" around an event. 
http://2005.sxsw.com/interactive/ has grown into a kind of "must 
attend" event for US bloggers.  SXSW charges a fee to attend, but 
they waive the fee for speakers.  So speakers who were already going 
to be there anyway talk for free to avoid having to pay the attendee 
fee.

peace,
curt




At 8:26 AM -0500 2/25/05, Alena Williams wrote:
>Hi Nina, Simon, and list:
>
>I guess from my perspective, I'm a bit more dissatisfied with the
>actual content of the conferences rather than how they are
>organized. But I understand what might be difficult about trying to
>touch upon the critical issues that everyone's talking about, at the
>same time please the masses.
>
>Unfortunately, what gets lost in the midst of all this is the reason
>why conferences should be held in the first place-- not to make
>money, but ideally to bring people together whose work can inform
>and extend the parameters of scholarship in general. But this
>doesn't happen when the themes are set in stone and organizing a
>panel means plugging people into pre-configured slots, or when
>everyone is working from the same body of knowledge because we all
>took the same media courses in school. Somehow many of the
>conferences on media art/history (particularly academic
>conferences) that I’ve attended and participated in have felt
>hermetically sealed in some way.  Too much emphasis was placed on
>the "presentation" of projects rather than on the sharing of ideas,
>and the exchange one might hope for at a conference never
>sufficiently emerges as a result. Very often the work is completely
>redundant, and to sit in on a panel is effectively to sit in a
>vacuum.
>
>Because I live and work in Berlin at the moment, the distinction
>between what and who gets presented and discussed over here—as
>opposed to in North America and the major international
>festivals--has become relatively clear. There seems to be a split
>between content (political, historical, cultural) on the one hand,
>and style (form, technique and notions of originality) on the
>other. The more focused we are on content (which seems to be the
>case over here), the less important aesthetic and technical
>sophistication seems to be, and visa versa. However, it is clear
>that there really are no platforms that manage to address this
>divide successfully. And curating new media follows along the same
>lines, supporting the work of artists who generate work that is
>cool to look at for about a minute but ultimately does not live up
>to the revolutionary potential it claims to have. I think in many
>cases this is why so many people are dissatisfied with the
>direction that new media scholarship and new media curating has
>taken. It may also be why so much that is being written or
>organized fails to resonate beyond the walls of this very insular
>field.
>
>So I wonder if standardizing this field would actually lead to
>better scholarship, exhibitions, etc, when media studies tends to
>become either grossly imprecise or overwhelmingly self-reflexive
>the more removed it is from other disciplines (politics, history,
>anthropology, comparative literature, art history, philosophy, area
>studies, etc)?
>
>Maybe its better if we resist the urge to institutionalize our
>field, in the way that the discipline of art history has already
>been. Maybe the orientation of one’s work (toward technology and
>media) from within another discipline like anthropology,
>comparative literature, etc can be a way of getting out from under
>the
>traditions and terminologies which define these pre-existing fields.
>I have to say I’m not too interested in meeting people at
>conferences who know everything that I know—which is exactly what
>would happen at these conferences if the field continues along its
>current path. I’m a bit more interested in meeting people from
>other disciplines who really introduce something new to the table.
>People who also work on the margins of other disciplines, and whose
>work comes out of other intellectual traditions that meaningfully
>inform their practice. This would introduce more differentiation
>into the field, and might also preserve the use value of
>conferences devoted to media.
>
>Cheers,
>Alena

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