The Conference On The Conference
The Conference On The Conference
Friday, March 4th, 2011
12:30 pm - Ground Floor Lobby SFU Woodward’s
Registration
1:00 pm - Room 2270
Plenary Session
Commencements. Announcements. Acknowledgments. Itinerary...
1:30 pm - Room 4365
Panel 1/Invocation. Is it possible to proceed after this acknowledgement?
Chair: Michael Turner
Respondent: Donato Mancini
Andreas Kahre
Director
Gabriola Institute of Contemporary Art
Typefacing: Imploding the Stance
In the context of a predominantly recursive culture, such as governs the conference, branding—and typeface selection in particular—functions as a key signifier that articulates both the premise and the outcome of the event, effectively replacing and obviating its physical performance. Reflecting —while to some extent also implicitly denying—the role of externalities such as material constraints, power relations, and especially the of the conference event as it articulates stance, typeface is deployed as both a normative assertion, and paradoxically, as a performative act which effectively implodes the conference, creating a space both hyperarticulated and contaminated, and as a result, we argue, mute.
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Laura U. Marks
Dena Wosk University Professor in Art and Culture Studies
School for the Contemporary Arts
Simon Fraser University
Conference Food, Conference Clothes
With the high stakes of conferences in terms of recognition, jobs, making friends, ad finding love, lot depends on staying fueled and looking smart. What to eat and what to wear at a conference are perennial sources of anxiety and spurs to invention. Regarding food, this paper discusses graduate-student coping strategies; free food and getting invited; etiquette of conference street food; the cost-nutrition ratio of conference food; and (time permitting) what to eat in a job interview. Regarding clothes, the paper will touch on the grand-entrance outfit; how to make a grand entrance on no budget; how to look like you spent less that you did; comparative sartorial aesthetics of art, film, literature, and science conferences; and related issues.
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Michael Turner
Writer, Independent Scholar
Vancouver, BC
0 Minutes
A conference is a temporal regime comprised of activities where actors with common interests perform one or more roles within a predetermined time allotment. Overseeing these activities is a moderator who, though entrusted with introductions, segues and summations, is responsible for the maintenance of these allotments. Greater than the potential for professional disagreement is the potential for conflict between the moderator and the time-indifferent presenter, a conflict that often goes unnoticed. This presentation will use single case analysis and conjecture towards a theory of temporal indifference in relation to conference participation.
2:30 pm - Room 2270
Panel 2/conference on the conference on the conference on the conference. [“more multiple apings of self-reflexive problematics.”]
Chair: Lori McGillvray
Respondent: Eric Deis
Nikolai Gauer
MFA Candidate
School for the Contemporary Arts
Simon Fraser University
A Conference on "The Conference on the Conference"?
I question the legitimacy, purpose and under-lying motivation for the so-called "Conference on the Conference" orchestrated by the eminent expanded cinema director Dylan Cree. Why are we participating at this conference? What do we want to achieve? Well, we are here to play our respective roles in Mr. Cree's thesis production 'The Conference on the Conference'. Mr. Cree is a grad student here at SFU School for the Contemporary Arts, and is trying to fulfill his thesis requirements so he can graduate. We are here to achieve 'The Conference on the Conference' with Mr. Cree, but most importantly, we are here to achieve it for Mr. Cree. Before we move ahead and indulge ourselves in 'The Conference on the Conference' and with issues related to the topic of 'the conference' (like the non-exhaustive list Mr. Cree provided in the call for submissions), we must take a minute and reflect on what we are participants of. I suggest we have a short conference on 'The Conference on the Conference'. Not only would it be purposeful to somewhat establish what 'The Conference on the Conference' is, but a conference on 'The Conference on the Conference' would, in my humble opinion, be vital for the success of 'The Conference on the Conference' itself.
(Examples of topics to discuss: audience participation, audience passivity, non-medium artists, expanded cinema etc. A non-exhaustive list of topics related to The Conference on 'The Conference on the Conference' will be produced at the conference itself)
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Henry Daniel
Associate Professor
School for the Contemporary Arts
Simon Fraser University
The Report
The place of the performing arts in the research-oriented, knowledge-based, science dominated, modern University has always been and still is a particularly unstable one. Dance, for example, relies by and large on a mode of non-verbal ‘textualities’ to express its artistic vision in a variety of staged settings. Sprechtheater, or theatre of the spoken word, relies more on verbal texts or scripts in its own stagings. Tanztheater, dance theatre, and physical theatre are hybrid forms that I argue, are attempts to destabilize the logocentric nature of our understandings - or at least resituate these understandings in a more embodied place - in the interest of a different kind of engagement with research, with the intellect, and with the project of knowledge that is the raison d'être of Universities. For this Conference on the Conference we will present The Report, a performance work based on Franz Kafka’s Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (1917), known to English speakers as “A Report for an Academy”. This textual adaptation by Mark Diamond is grounded in Kafka’s short story about an ape that is captured in Africa and brought to Europe. After undergoing a tortuous transformation to become human-like, Red Peter - our ape - makes a report on his accomplishments, or I should say a defense of his position as an ape/human, to an ambiguous scientific community. In our Report, we are problematizing a set of well-known issues that revolve around the situation of the artist working within the context of an academic institution. Our position is that the modern University, with all of its institutionalized rituals, is still very much guided by a set of rules and traditions that, too often, work to prevent change. Our Report today asks you as members of this Academy to consider the implications of the following question. Are we, as one of Canada’s most “liberal” and “interdisciplinary”universities, contemporary enough, liberal enough, and innovative enough in the exploration, presentation, and dissemination of new modes of knowing? Be careful how you answer, as it may become an agenda!
3:30 pm - Room 3420
Panel 3/The Conference: conditioning possibility?
Chair: Christopher Pavsek
Respondent: Nicholas Perrin
Ashok Mathur
Canada Research Chair in Cultural & Artistic Inquiry
Thompson Rivers University
Kamloops, BC
Improvising and Professionalizing the Cliché
There is a pedagogical strategy where the professor enters the classroom, reads the notes left on the black/whiteboard from the previous seminar, and proceeds to deliver a lecture based solely on these scribblings. While tongue-in-cheek, such a strategy speaks to the often-improvisational nature of our profession, which is nowhere more clearly indicated than at the Conference. As a research chair in cultural and artistic inquiry, I am intrigued by the creative possibilities afforded to us in conference settings, yet rarely taken up, such that the potential for an exciting exchange of ideas is too often overwritten by the clichés of standard presentation and delivery. In my proposed performance/presentation, I will deliver a ‘standard’ conference paper that is rife with the aphorisms we are used to hearing, but will also include tacit and implicit critiques of this conservative forum. To accomplish this, I will employ a strategy similar to the one I describe above, effectively improvising a talk based on materials found and borrowed on the spot from conference participants. This playful and humorous performance will engage with the body, technology, and audience to address the problematics (and possibilities) of the conference as a tool for communication.
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Olive Mckeon
PHD Student
Culture and Performance
University of California, Los Angeles
The Poetics and Politics of the CFP
The CFP is a literary form that is concerned with the formulation of problems and the composition of questions. What is notable about CFPs is the force of condensation from which blooms a succinct formulation of a set of concerns. The CFP is the setting of a stage, the laying of a terrain.
Hovering over every encounter will be the one page of text prepared in the CFP, its terms rattling through a conference like reverberating train cars. Not only does the CFP create the conditions of possibility for a conference, it also performs a complex political maneuver. One's politics are revealed not by how one answers a question, but by the kind of question one asks. CFPs set the table, politically. By crafting the set of questions, they function as political arbiters. They hold the power of the curator, the power to not only pick the subject matter but also to frame it. The best CFPs often fall into two categories: the oddly expansive or the oddly specific. Through a discussion of a series of choice CFPs, I work through the nuances of these two tendencies and the broader poetic and political concerns of the form.
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Chris Anderson
MFA Candidate
School for the Contemporary Arts
Simon Fraser University
Was That a Musical Performance at the Art Conference?
What is to be understood of a musical performance during a conference? Are the attendees paying for a concert or for the keynote speech? Is the art of the musical performance to be respected to the same extent of traditional concert settings? Is music presented as art or sometimes as background entertainment during the lunch break? Can performativity play a part in presentation? Is the idea of music as art lost in a conference on the art it is supposed to represent? In this paper, I propose to explore these questions and how an art form such as musical performance can be used or misused in many different contexts at an arts conference. I will also discuss how conference music has been implemented in the past and will expand on a genre that may be labeled “conference music”.
4:30 pm - Room 4955
Panel 4/Footnotes
Chair: Steven Hubert
Respondent: Am Johal
Azadeh Yamini-Hamedani
Assistant Professor,
World Literature Program,
Simon Fraser University
Sound Advice: Conference Do's and Don'ts
The presentation will be an audio-visual critical exploration of conference do’s and don’ts. A cacophony of lists will be set to music and ironic imagery.
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Stephen Collis
Associate Professor
English Department
Simon Fraser University
The Site-Specific Conference Paper
Following in the tradition of site-specific art's critique of the autonomy and universality of art, and, more generally, the exploration of "exchanges between the work of art and the places in which its meanings are defined" (Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art), in this paper I explore the little-known tradition of the site-specific talk or conference paper. Moving from an analysis of a number of historical examples of such talks, I will engage in my own site-specific discussion of the site of the "conference on the conference."
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Olivia Dunbar
Honors
School for the Contemporary Arts
Simon Fraser University
The Conference: Feel it, funk it
An academic conference is a conference for researchers (not always academics) to present and discuss their work. As a form, the conference provides an important channel for exchange of information between researchers. As a means of distributing and articulating that information, however, this exchange often fails to stimulate or provoke a sense of feeling. In other words, conferences can be, but are not always, boring. In an attempt to both engage with and re-imagine the conference form, this presentation will address the conceptual framework of The Conference On The Conference, using the House of Pain song (from which the presentation takes its title) "Jump Around" as a point of departure.
Saturday, March 5th, 2011
2:00 pm - Room 4955 (primary) and 4945
Panel 5/Squatting the “conference as site”.
Chair: John Anderson
Respondent: Reg Johanson
Abe Walker
City University of New York Graduate Center
After the Party It's the Hotel Lobby: On the Political Economy of the Post-Conference Wine and Cheese Reception
The contemporary academic conference is a totalizing environment designed to completely immerse its willing subjects. Just as the modern workplace has been reimagined as a playground, the contemporary academic conference has been reengineered as a site of recreation, chiefly through the requisite post-conference wine and cheese reception. This paper will argue that rather than offering a release, these receptions represent the expansion of conference-work into the realm of leisure. It is no secret that much of the real work of conferencing takes place in the more loosely structured but nevertheless highly regimented environment of the reception. Under the guise of "schmoozing", "mingling" or mere "diversion", these receptions shape and reshape scholarly alliances, produce and destroy job offers, and serve the
conference’s autopoetic function by generating ideas for new conferences. This project will ask: How might renegade conference participants forge a political subjectivity that is impervious to capture? Can the reception be reclaimed as a site of “pure” play? What are the vulnerabilities of the post-conference reception, and how might they be exploited? What might be gained by abandoning the "official" reception in favor of the less disciplinary environment of the local pub?
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Dave Chokroun
MFA Candidate
School for the Contemporary Arts
Simon Fraser University
Me and Larry Brown: Interrupting the Performance of Presenting “Research”– As– Performance With Research
How is the presentation of “knowledge” in institutional settings (eg., the academic or the conferential) influenced by heirarchical performative “scripts” that reflect the influence of the institutional setting (eg., the academic or the conferential)? The presenter presents an account of the process of developing a work that explores the parafictive confluence of performance and research through the study of the art and ideas of a fictional artist (Larry Brown) as well as the process of relating the fictional and/or parafictive to “verifiable” “research” in the humanities and social sciences.
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Vikram Uchida-Khanna
Honors
School for the Contemporary Arts
Simon Fraser University
Ship of Fools
For a project where I had to reinterpret what an academic lecture could be, I adapted a short story written by Theodore Kaczynski in prison into a play, which was then performed by members of the class. The play is an allegory of his vision of the future of society in which squabbling passengers on a ship (all left-wing stereotypes) fail to check the self-destructive tendencies of capitalism—symbolized by the crew, who keep “sailing north into more and more perilous waters, solely in order to give themselves opportunities to perform ever-more-brilliant feats of seamanship.” The play sets up a system in which the only way out of the failures (and continuing failures) of the Left is violence and engenders tensions between both cultural production and direct action and an identification with and disavowal of Kaczynski's position.
in terms of the conference on the conference, i think that the play/performance has a relationship to dissent and alternate methods of dissemination. as a jilted college professor, Kaczynski hated the left (in the play, the character of the professor is the most contemptuous) and most of his life after his withdrawal from society could be characterized as attempts to access alternate methods of dissemination for his ideas: whether they be mailbombs, a manifesto published in the new york times (upon the threat of more mailbombs), or in this case, a play.
the play is actually a downgraded version of the ideas he develops in his manifesto--which is a heavily annotated academically styled summation of his ideas entitled 'industrial society and its discontents'--so it has its own transitory history. it's trying to enact rather than describe, but it somehow fails.
this is all contextual information, however, i think that alot of it in the structure of the work and that the narrative of the unabomber is also well known.
if i did do it for the conference on the conference, i would cast beforehand, using some of actors who were in it before, rather than using members of the audience: the dissociative element is already in the text. it is intended to be a kind of interuption or interlude, so at the moment i like the idea of it being minimally introduced, ie, the actors say the title and author of the play and then go into it.
2:30 pm - Room 2270
Panel 6/Production or another institutional imperative to fabricate objects. [“Legimitation, initiation, certification.”]
Chair: Lori McGillvray
Respondents: Nicholas Perrin and Andreas Kahre
Justin Waddell
Alberta College of Art and Design
Calgary, Alberta
The Conference in Perspective: Do As I Say, Not As I Do: Warning Signs, Threats, and Hindsight
This paper explores the relationship between the photographic archive of an event and the experience of the visual event in hindsight. Images of academic conferences, meetings, classrooms, and symposia are commonly recorded by both official and informal means. These photographs are disseminated, archived, blogged, and shared outside the province of the institution. From looking at these images, individuals develop networks of meaning between singular visual events that in turn develop their scope of action and re-action in relation. I propose to examine this process as a series of readings and interpretations to photographic records of academic conferences, residencies, and classrooms. I am looking to answer the question of how one might critically exhibit institutional practice and what institutional practice may in fact look like. My previous research paper, “Do As I Say, Not As I Do” presented at Sheridan Institute in 2010, dealt with observed warning signs, premonitions, and threats in hindsight; how these images were interpreted, differentiated, and reconstituted into action. This new paper will intersect with previous research by critically positioning institutional representation as a potential warning sign and/or threat.
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Jen Delos Reyes
Department of Art
Portland State University
Open Engagement: The Conference and the Social Turn in Contemporary Art
Open Engagement is an international conference on socially engaged art currently in its third year of operation. The conference initially began as a work of social artwork created by Jen Delos Reyes in 2007. Open Engagement now brings together hundreds of artists each year that work explicitly with the social as a medium by integrating their art and research directly into the structure that makes up the conference: feeding attendees, the registration table, the conference tote bag, transportation and more.
Open Engagement is now a free annual conference directed by Jen Delos Reyes and planned in conjunction with Harrell Fletcher and the Art and Social Practice students at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. Each year the conference themes are directly related to the current research and inquiry of the students in the Art and Social Practice MFA program at PSU. Students and faculty work together to select the featured presenters for the conference who then also become faculty in the program during that year. This presentation will explore the following ideas in connection to the Open Engagement conference: the conference as relational artwork, conference director as curator, conference as exhibition, and conference as educational programmatic framework.
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Alex Ferguson
PhD candidate
UBC Theatre Department
Redefining the conference lecture
The Right Honourable Alex Lazaridis Ferguson, P.G., 14A, will perform his ministry, redefining the conference lecture for the 21st, 23rd and 28th centuries. Not the lecture as it is, but as it will be. Not the lecture as it will be, but as it was. Not as it was, but as it is. He will employ futuristic, year 2000 PowerPoint technology, and tell a very moving story about his wife who will appear LIVE ON STAGE.
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Henry Daniel
Associate Professor
School for the Contemporary Arts
Simon Fraser University
The Report
see panel 2 (Friday, March 4th, 2:30 pm)
3:30 pm - Room 2205
Panel 7/[In absentia]
Chair: Allyson Clay
Respondent: Donato Mancini
Adam R. Shapiro
Department of Medical History and Bioethics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Speaker Absence as Boundary Formation
The collaborative experience that results in the academic conference is frequently subject to the phenomenon of the absent speaker. In this paper, I would like to examine absent speakership as a performance of negative space that contests conference goers' conceptions of speaker hegemony. The different varieties of speaker absenteeship (listed in program; listed in program errata/addenda; and wholly unaccounted) each demarcate a space/time in which a paper was "meant" to have occurred. The extent to which such spatial and temporal boundaries are retained indicate the prevailing structure of hegemony encountered in the specific discipline/s in which such an absence can occur. The responses from program committees, session chairs, and co-panelists to the absent speaker's claim to "presence" inscribe a highly local set of attitudes towards reclaiming "allocated" space and time. The withdrawal of a speaker from a panel or conference subjects the remaining conference participants and audience into an inherently postcolonial discourse in which any attempt to either acknowledge or to disavow the speaker as "missing" places every other paper into a tacit comparison with the paper that might have been. Ultimately, it cannot be shown that the "absent" speaker is not "at" the conference.
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Dhymitruy Bouryiotis
Independent Scholar
Pecos, Texas, USA
The Conference as Imaginative Historicity
A Paper presented by a character of a "pseudo 18th century style"* novel based on a real though never completed (nor contemporaneously published) 18th century novel, and extending the fictive reality of the former into the idea of the character from it presenting a Paper on the Project undertaken in that novel to a contemporaneous Conference on the Conference.
* The New Oxford American Dictionary (second addition,2005); entry on “Jong, Erica” in reference to her novel Fanny (1980).
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Stacey Ho
Independent Scholar
Vancouver, BC
A Question for David Elliot
In September 2010, David Elliot was a keynote speaker for "Let's Twist Again", a two-day symposium presented through Centre A. According his biography for the 17th Sydney Biennale, this illustrious curator is responsible for "formulat[ing] a series of pioneering exhibitions in one of the first programs to integrate non-western culture with contemporary art". His lecture, "Wounds, Happiness, Distance" was followed by a conventional Q&A session. Though most of the questions were typical of those posed in an academic setting, one conference participant brought a very personal narrative to the dialogue. Other conference attendees found her monologue to be so embarrassing, or irrelevant, they left the conference area as she spoke. However, though her story did not exactly pertain to David Elliot's talk, I found in her words a very honest and funny portrayal of the struggles and questions brought up by artistic practice. I would like to re-present her question to David Elliot at The Conference on The Conference as a talk, or as a piece of printed matter to be given out to participants.
4:00 pm - Room 3420 (primary) and 4390
Panel 8/Respondent to panel on respond-ence. [“Is it possible to respond? The very idea of...”]
Chair: John Anderson
Respondent: Aaron Vidaver
Reg Johanson
Professor
Capilano University
The Lone Gunman: Interventions and the Pathologies of Institutions
This paper discusses the performance of the intervention as an affect-laden response to the structural inertia of academic and literary institutions. Through a review of various acts of intervention in Vancouver’s literary and academic community carried out by the author and others since 2001, I will argue that intervention is the manifestation at an individual level of cultural-institutional pathologies for which no one can be blamed except for those most distant from the moment of intervention.
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Am Johal
Independent Scholar
Vancouver, BC
'In the mean time and in between time, that's it, another edition of Stampede Wrestling'
Can early 80's professional wrestling rhetorics infuse the rituals and practices of the contemporary academic conference with the kind of hybrid populism and language games that can bring entertainment and wider audiences to the ossified condition of the 'academic conference?' Can the mediation of academic ideas in obscure journals benefit from overt forms of trash-talking, public acts of revenge and and occasional chest beating? What is the role of new media? Could pay-per-view options bring about the necessary market conditions to bring about the reforms that are necessary? What is to be done?
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Roger Farr
Professor
Capilano University
"There is no such thing as dialogue – it is a swindle"
This unscripted talk begins with archival footage of a Belgian Situationist assaulting Jacques Lacan during a lecture at the University of Louvain in 1971. Developing and extending this instance of "the hysteric's discourse" as a new form of knowledge, I will argue that the University is productively understood as a state-sanctioned mafia, and that the conference form is a racket involving "the sale of a solution to a problem that the institution itself creates or perpetuates, with the specific intent to engender continual patronage." Having disposed of our bodies, the conference reduces us to "voices" in "dialogue" because only these are required to maintain the spectacle of democratic participation.
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Chris Welsby
Professor
School for the Contemporary Arts
Simon Fraser University
All hands are are now presumed lost At Sea. The conference put out a call for papers but strong currents, poor visibility and the absence of visible landmarks prevailed and the rescue attempt was soon abandoned. But just before midnight, as all hope was cast aside, a bottle was sighted, (and true to form,) written in a shaky hand was the following message...
"At Sea" Reverie as Intervention: a paper without any words.
Imagine if you can an 80 foot long wall of water vapour, a high resolution fog bank. A million pastel shades of light carried on a breeze of over excited pixels. A 20ft high wall of under utilised digital information. "At Sea" contains few, if any, landmarks or fixed points of reference. It is an
unmarked hazard to navigation; a Bermuda triangle without the scary music; a cocked hat on a chart without any land: a triangle of velocities with no
fixed point of departure.
This 4 screen video installation was shot here in Vancouver and although it has been seen on several distant continents it has not been exhibited here in it's home port. The work is completely none verbal but none -the -less attempts to describe the indescribable vastness of the ocean in a language
that any one can comprehend. Using very simple video images shot from the land to stand in for the vastness of the open ocean it turns the viewer's gaze away from the make believe world of distant horizons towards the larger expanses of the imagination, reverie and contemplation.
The spoken word is my second language and I therefore plan to use it sparingly, if at all, in my presentation. I see the primary focus of this "paper" as an attempt to create a none verbal space for reverie and contemplation in a primarily verbal environment. "A conference with no words
at the centre of a Conference on the Conference"
7 pm - Room 4525
"Keynote" Address
Jerry Zaslove
Prof. Emeritus, English and Humanities
Simons Chair Graduate Liberal Studies
Simon Fraser University
Untimely Meditations and Personal Thoughts Out of Season - The destruction of place and time by the university and the Camouflage of “cynical reason”
8 pm - Doors close.