I recently returned from New Orleans and the 2011 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. Despite the fact that two of our workshop participants were unfortunately unable to join us, we hosted a pretty awesome workshop on mapping. Brendan and I agreed that the experience was among the most positive and inspiring we’d had at a conference in a long while. Thanks to Brendan, Nicole, and Daniel for their fantastic contributions — and to Germaine and Jesse, who were there in spirit!
US Shipping Board, 1925, NYPL Digital Gallery: Image ID: 92539
The workshop worked in large part because the participants’ presentations and the ensuing conversation were so engaging. But, for me at least, our success was in part attributable to the fact that our workshop was not a panel. By Saturday afternoon I simply couldn’t handle another panel. As Jason Mittel wrote on the SCMS blog, it’s hard to process four consecutive theory-laden, 20-minute papers, then move on to another conference room and do it all again…and again…and again. I discovered last year, at the LA conference, that I could remember much more from the workshops I attended than from the panels, primarily because I was way more engaged in the workshops.
And from the perspective of a presenter, workshops (in which each person does a brief 7-minute presentation, ideally non-scripted, leaving lots of time for discussion) are much more interactive, more informal — and for those reasons, more memorable. I recall past conferences, when I’d wait nervously for my turn to present, fearing that everyone in the audience would bolt right before my paper, and consequently I heard absolutely nothing any of my fellow presenters was saying. I was too freaked out over my own impending performance to listen. And then even after I did my thing, I was too concerned with how stupid I sounded, or how fast I talked, to process any of the Q&A. I’ve calmed down considerably since then, which certainly helps, but a slight anxiety persists…and I still remember very little of what anyone else says on a panel.
Formals panels serve their purposes, of course — but I think that from here on out, as much as I can help it, I’m going to fit my own conference presentations into workshops.
That's me in the red tights. It was FREEEEEZING. Via Storefront
Yet just a few days before SCMS I participated in a (slightly intimidating) panel discussion at Domus magazine’s Critical Futures #3 at Storefront for Art and Architecture. As happened in New Orleans, half our panelists — Justin Davidson, Kazys Varnelis, Lebbeus Woods — were sadly unable to attend, which left four women, plus a last-minute addition from the Domus editorial team. As one might expect at a discussion hosted by Storefront for Art and Architecture, the word “architecture” was uttered roughly 27 billion times over the course of the evening. After a while, it felt like a MadLibs daydream in which every blank was filled with “architecture”: “The architecture of architecture is that architects are architecting architectural architecture! Architect?” Most of the claims being made about architecture criticism, about architecture blogs, about architecture magazines, are true of criticism, blogs, and magazines in general – of contemporary culture in general. Thanks entirely to the smart people on the panel the evening’s conversation covered a pretty wide scope. But there were occasional peeks at the tendency, within the broader global, online/offline architectural criticism debate, toward architectural solipsism — which often flips into architectural imperialism (i.e., all the world’s concerns are architectural concerns) — a tendency that makes me a little uncomfortable.
I experienced something similar this past weekend at SCMS, which, despite the addition of the “M” — for “media” — to its name a decade ago, is still very cinema-heavy. Even with other media folks in the room, most debates still seem to be framed in cinematic terms. I realize that the Film Folks got to the party first; they established the discourse. But not all mediation can be reduced to “filmic” terminology, and many claims made of film would benefit from a cross-media comparative perspective and wider historical contextualization (à la media archaeology).
Both film production and architecture — and the branches of academia that study them — are in a bit of a transitional phase, so I suppose this self-reflection is only to be expected. It’s interesting to see where that self-reflection leads, though: to a defensive or offensive position, or something else.
The Workshopping Solipsism: Or, I’m Really Bad at Titles by Shannon Mattern, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
