I have decided that I am the Dawn Weiner of conference-goers. Maybe I’m Ugly Betty (who is decidedly nicer than Dawn, but still out of sync). I am the CAA attendee that all the serious panelists hate: I walk in an out of panels, I type on my laptop when in the audience, I walk hurriedly down the halls, my nose in the conference program, nearly running into everyone my path. I am proud to say, however, that my cell phone has not gone off once during the entire conference. More than I can say for a surprising amount of other attendees. What is up with that? Have we not learned to turn phones off during public presentations?? Still?
I am a bit behind on updating my responses to panels I’ve seen, so, in an anachronistic fashion, analogous to the way I’ve experienced the entire conference, I’ll offer a few mental sound bites on things I’ve seen and heard.
The Friday conference on collaborative leadership (Inventive Concepts: Models of Participatory Leadership in the Arts) was disappointing. And that was the one panel that I should have been most invested in. Angela Ellsworth presented on the LA Art Girls, of which I am a founding member…but because I taught on Friday, I missed her talk (though I heard it was great of course). I stayed for a few of the others, however.
The panel was regrettably plagued with technical difficulties and mumbley presenters. But I was impressed with Chris Csikszentmihályi’s presentation. He spoke about projects that were made (involving collaboration or collectivity) in the Media Lab at MIT.
He outlined some interesting differences between the ideological perspectives on collaboration in the arts versus collaboration in the sciences. In science, he reminded us, a paper can and is expected to have multiple authors (he then showed us one that had 2500!) and that is in fact a commendable thing. But in art, when one works on something with multiple authors, they run the risk of being unoriginal, or sacrificing their individual artistic voice. I found this to be an interesting observation, and one that sadly indicated our continued and unfortunate reliance upon modernist and capitalist models that privilege authorship and creativity as commodity. The projects he mentioned by artists (artist/scientists?) Kelly Dobson and Alyssa Wright were great! Look them up!
I have enjoyed the talks that address the confluence of art and science. There seem to be a lot of papers on the ideas and positions that code has in the realm of creative art. The panel today (Saturday) chaired by Victoria Vesna, Database Aesthetics: Artists Sorting through Bits and Flesh, was great. I sat through more of this session than any other session at the conference. Though I missed the first speaker, I heard Carol Gigliotti, Eduardo Kac, George Legrady, and Lev Manovich. They were very stimulating- but for the moment, I have to go help pack up the X-Tra table at the book fair. To be continued….
