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hello al,<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>I would like to second Susanne's call for some self-reflection on the side of the authors of the juxtaposium proposal. I respect and admire the work of most of you (juxtaposium authors, I just don't know Baruch Gottlieb), but I think this proposal completely misses its mark. Let me try to explain why.</div><div><br></div><div>When the juxtaposium proposal came in my mailbox I was a little surprised by the contrast between the content and the style. Then what caught my eye were the names at the bottom. Three well known critics and three artists that all seem to come from very different directions and backgrounds drop a harsh criticism and radical (?) new presentation format onto our laps, completely out of the blue. If it would have been posted today (april 1st) I might have thought it was a hoax. Where does this come from? How was it created? How did the writers come together? Have 'social media' so undermined our communication skills that it is easily forgotten we are posting into each others private email boxes/homes and that addressing the mailing list members as a mass instead of possibly smart individuals is not the way to go? Don't get me wrong, I like a manifesto from time to time, but this seems to miss the mark by not having any clear context but the writers' personal experiences, which are barely explained. More info needed urgently please! </div><div><br></div><div>Like many working in the field of art and (what was formerly known as) new media I am aware of the problems with symposium formats. Everybody complains about them from time to time, like one complains about the weather. It is good to criticize them. There have however been plenty of experimental formats going around in the past 15 years if not more. What bothers me a little about the juxtaposium proposal is that this is completely ignored. It does not help to negate one's own history. The problem with polemics like this is that it turns what is a very diverse field into a black and white situation, even retroactively. Institutional and corporate phenomena are placed on the one side, and the victims of it on the other. This way you actually become part of the problem. The reality of the past 15 years is different and I personally feel very happy to have witnessed some of it. I know that many on Spectre must feel the same way. </div><div><br></div><div>What we also do not need I think is a return to the polemics that destroyed for example net.art. The claim that "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; ">Our field is all about hacking, deconstructing and reformatting existing formats" is just nonsense, sorry to say. Misinterpretation is actually a rather standard approach of new media art that needs heavy criticism, if I may be polemic a bit myself. If anything our field is about a diversity of practices and exploration of new materials, hard, soft and wet. I welcome a call for a renewed criticism, but only from an awareness of and respect for past failures and successes, and from an acknowledgment of existing constructive and/or interesting practices. </span></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>With respect,</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Josephine</div><div><br><div><div>On 1 Apr 2011, at 13:33, susanne jaschko wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"> <style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }</style><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Dear friends,<br> </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">you have made an interesting proposition that I would like to comment on. Let's leave the provocation aside with which you apparently tried to get our attention and stir up some debate and let's try to be a bit more objective in favour of a serious discussion. I totally understand that you are tired of traditional symposium formats. We all have been there. We all have attended and participated in conferences and panels that went nowhere, at which the speakers did nothing but present themselves in the ordinary, boring way and were often not able/ not willing to respond to each others' ideas, concepts, works or to discuss a subject sufficiently. People who just read out their paper, speakers of whom you get the impression they have not considered the subject of the symposium, theoreticians repeating themselves, artists not going beyond the information that they provide on their website. Moderators who fail to generate something like an interesting debate, because the presentations are so disparate. </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">There are a number of reasons why this is so. Lousy speakers' fees don't explain everything. Laziness might be one of the factors. Laziness of the organisers to find speakers who actually – in theory – have something to say to each other, laziness to take the effort to communicate with all participants in the panel about their individual contribution in advance and making them understand what the context is in which they speak. But also laziness of the speakers to think of something different than the usual presentation. In all those years that I am organising these kind of events, I was rarely surprised by someone making the effort to come up with something fresh, something extraordinary, although there the space for it was there.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I don't want to play the ball back to you (or eventually myself – I have played all positions in this game: curator, moderator, speaker) asking you to be more inventive and responsive to each other, even after delivering your speech. Maybe we need a change, a challenge, to refresh. Maybe we should just stop trying to offer topic-driven conferences to a larger public and just do little, informal conversations like for example Andreas did at Tesla or create workshop like situations in which real exchange is easier. Which all really work well, we know. Since real and debate is so difficult to achieve in larger groups, why not give up on that in general, or do it in the way we do it here, have a remote, but focussed discussion?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">But let's look at what you proposed here. Artists talking about each others' work, not their own. I have seen that, but not too often at symposiums, granted. However when artists teach at art school, this happens all the time. This does not excite me per se. You should elaborate on this, make it clearer what you are expecting to happen, or define even super clear rules to make it special. Only speak about the artists who are present? Is there still a kind of general subject to which the presentations will refer or do you envision it more like a pecha-kucha, straight forward presentation/reflection of one or many artworks without a conference like theme?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">How this will foster critique? I am not sure it can. Real critique means also negative critique - in public this is very unlikely to happen. And why should an artist be more suited to critique another artist's work than anybody else? Finally the theoreticians - self-absorbed in their own theory and discourse (like you say) they should now disclose their subjectivity and/or speak predominantly about the art. What I am missing rather in our field are more theoreticians who come up with strong theories...theoreticians who are not <span lang="en-GB">caught</span> up in the scholarly world but have some connection to reality. There is much more to say about your idea, this is just a quick response, and we should continue talking about it. I agree, we need more and new formats, because we all want to talk to each other honestly, but we still hardly know how to in public.</p> <pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
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</pre><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">______________________________________________</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Info, archive and help:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="http://post.in-mind.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre">http://post.in-mind.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre</a></div> </blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>