I'm just back from Manchester, having attended 'Beyond Text? Image:Voice::Sound:Object Synaesthetic and Sensory Practices in Anthropology' conference, part of the 10th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film.
I was intrigued and amazed to note how reliant all the speakers were on text. Bar a couple of examples, I was stunned to hear entire academic papers read verbatim. As a result, I found them impossible to follow (and not simply because of the jargon-packed language). Many of the papers overran their time slot, and the ones that did manage it only accomplished the time keeping due to their ability to rattle off in excess of 250 words per minute, rendering their speech virtually unintelligible.
This text dominance seemed particularly ironic considering the conference's focus on visual anthropology and its apparent affection towards the visual arts.
The most refreshing presentation I saw was Tomie Hahn and Curtis Bahn's Sensational knowledge, Sensational Ethnography. They presented a live performance of 'Streams' which seemed to me to epitomise 'Beyond Text'.
In more conventional but less text-based presenations David MacDougall presented visual clips expressing non-visual sensory attributes and Steven Feld spoke about Honk Horn Music in Accra, Ghana.
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2 comments:
That whole reading of the paper thing irritates me. Why go to a conference when I could just read the paper?
For me a conference is an opportunity to discuss ideas and go off topic a bit.
I was at a conference in July where everyone was reading stuff, and I'd done my usual 'lots of diagrams' and me just making it up approach.
I got so worried it wouldn't go down well I literally rewrote my presentation complete with verbatim presenters notes.
And then, cometh the hour I scrapped it and went back to plan A. And it went better as a result.
In New York in April the conference notes encourage interactive presentations, so I've scrapped my text-based slides for more diagrams again, and I'm hoping to turn it in to a workshop. The paper can cover the stuff like methodologies etc. Yu don't fly across the Atlantic to have someone read to you...
Well, it reminds me of the differences of storytelling clubs and writing groups. I think the physical paper becomes a barrier between the audience and the speaker.
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