People love conferences. They can't get enough of all the offline events on offer. Like festivals, conferences are venues where you can meet future collaborators, debate ideas and artworks, party intensely, get inspired, provoked, learn, make new friends, and then occasionally carry on the dialogue in the sauna. These days, the event industry is an integral part of the shopping-driven locative spectacle. Conferences are also an opportunity for people who can't meet otherwise to spend a few days together away from their obligations, zooming in on ideas. Whereas, socially speaking, conferences may be exciting, most events use conventional, unreflected formats. In this essay we investigate why this is the case and what alternative models are available to disrupt the everyday consensus machine. Beyond good or evil, conferences are here to stay, so they'd better be good.

Critique of panelism

Formats and the vocabulary used lock us not only into structures but also impact on the way we develop content. In the age of Internet »rhetoric«, we can feel free to move on, away from reading a »paper« to more distributed and collaborative forms of discourse production, discussion and dispute. The ritualized academic structure of panels and the non-communicative form of the keynote speaker feed into the celebrity system, reinforcing hegemonic paradigms that get in the way of genuine dialogue and of diverse, emerging voices being heard. Some will read this criticism as an attack on the scientific community as a whole. We disagree. Academics are not a species in danger of extinction and it is time to get out of the defensive mode. Panelism is part of the dark side of »academism« and needs to be addressed, exactly because it is spilling over into other contexts such as the arts, culture, new media and even activism.

A good example of well-meant but misplaced panelism is the Intersociety for Electronic Arts (ISEA), a bi-annual conference, a somewhat tragic event in which artists have to participate in scientific formats in order to contribute. In part this is an effect of the forced »edufication« of the arts, particularly in the United States, but increasingly also in countries such as Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. Within the American »university of excellence« (1) language and research formats in the arts are modeled increasingly on the business logic of the sciences. People who decide about grants in turn are looking at the military-industrial complex that supports them to an ever-growing extent. The possibility of failure, even in the sciences, becomes almost impossible due to an all-powerful result imperative. Instead of addressing this topic directly, a culture of academic simulation is being introduced in which a wide range of people, from designers, programmers and activists to net artists, are persuaded to respond to a »call for papers« and to motivate each other to submit a »proposal for a panel,« and even have to buy into the dirty business of (blind) peer reviewing, enforcing lengthy citations, in order to get something »published« on a website.

Increasingly, the dull formats of the sciences are being imposed on the arts. Mind you, these are mostly unnecessary, »alien« formats that no one would come up with on their own. There is by no means a »natural« desire amongst artists to sit on panels and write »papers.« In fact, these formats are despised-- but nonetheless hard to resist. We do not suggest that artists cannot speak for themselves or should not be involved in practices embracing theory and production, or arts and sciences. But we do question the forced adaptation of scientific formats and argue that it is high time to start public awareness, openly talk about this and label the tendency by its proper names: paperism and panelism.

The source of »panelism« has to be located in conference organizers, and not speakers, let alone the audience. What panelism expresses is laziness and a lack of creative thinking as to which format in what (discursive) situation will work best. Panelism is often an indication that too many people have been involved in the decision-making process. The panel structure is the flipside of justified attempts to be more inclusive and have as many speakers as possible. But that doesn't always result in interesting events. The best conferences are produced by a small team of both researchers and producers that closely collaborate. Events curated by one individual, such as Ars Electronica, have the tendency to become narrow and repetitive and develop an informal circuit of guessing and gossiping around the intentions of this one person, much like Documenta and the biennial system with its small group of circulating curators.

The worst panels are those where speakers really have no clue why they are in the same session. Or take this situation: a competitive, slightly irritated atmosphere arises when the first speaker goes over her/his time limit, then the second as well, leaving no time for the last one. A variation of this would be the case in which the last speaker »eats up« all the remaining time for questions. Another general pattern is the fact that the last speaker gets most of the questions, as the audience has forgotten what the previous panelists had to say. These problems can only partially be solved by a good moderator. The key issue here is not the all too human qualities of certain subjects but the deep liberal, unfocused approach in which the topics might, at best, be described as a cloud of question marks. In response, the audience develops a liberal, »surfing« attitude towards the »collage« of information that is presented, a mechanism very precisely described by Marshall McLuhan. There is no compelling reason why panel members should have to discuss with each other. Usually they have been introduced minutes before they start and can barely remember each other's name. And while all this happens, the audience sits as a silent block in the dark.

Maybe we have missed something and only have been at events where there was nothing at stake. Perhaps there is a universal human right to present one's paper in public. We are being told that in this democratic idea science should be seen as a bazaar full of mediocre but necessary products in which it is up to diehards to find the precious gems. Noise-to-signal ratios vary greatly and one has to learn to filter in order to get through. Keynote speakers do not make up for the tragedy of panelism. They only mirror the problem and try to compensate for the middle-of-the-road methodology that creates artificial celebrity. Reputation does not exist, it has to be made, and the keynote system is an ideal vehicle for doing so.

The search for alternatives

Before we slide into radical negativism, let's focus on alternatives. The FreeCooperation conference that we recently organized (2) took place on a campus of the State University of New York in late April 2004. The topic of the event was the art of (online) collaboration. From cell phones, e-mail, and multiplayer online games to mailing lists, weblogs (3), and wikis (4), our everyday lives are increasingly enmeshed with technology. This at least is true for societies benefiting from the globalization of the information order. The necessity to examine what happens when we collaborate in the technological channels through which we communicate will soon become more apparent. How can we find independence and more freedom in a context of networked collaboration?

To this conference we invited the Bremen-based media critic Christoph Spehr, who coined the term »free cooperation« in his essay »Gleicher als andere« (More Equal Than Others). Most of Spehr's writings are not translated into English and this event was an opportunity to introduce his ideas into Anglophone media discourses. Spehr's writings use references to 1960s sci-fi movies to think about contemporary cooperation, insisting on the options of refusal, independence, negotiation, and re-negotiation with alien corporate or state monsters. Focusing on these ideas of equality and freedom, the conference asked how they can be made useful for alternative networks of learning and the university.

We designed the FreeCooperation conference scenario after the dramaturgical structure of a Brechtian play. The somewhat staged environments of the event were rather theatrical. In order to make way for new structures, there was a crucial need to crush all hope amongst possible followers of panelism. The mantra »no lectures, no panels« took a long time to sink in. Yet, at the same time, the event had to be as open and participatory as possible. There is a wide range of alternative formats from which one can choose nowadays. To state that keynotes plus panels is the only possible way of doing a conference is pure nonsense. All it takes is the willingness to experiment, undaunted by the prospect of failure.

At FreeCooperation participants impersonated sci-fi filmmakers, scientists, and »flexible personalities« in a talk-show-style session and were accompanied by musical intermezzos on Tony Conrad’s »phonarmonica.«(5) Remote guests commented on the debate via Internet Relay Chat. In the staging process we included an intimate talkathon (four hours, one room, two speakers, eight people in the audience at a time), a few dialogues, performances, a conference radio, a video conference in tandem with remote desktop, a game about games, streamed net radio discussions, brainstorming sessions, film screenings, a small exhibition, several workshops, a turntabilist collaboration, and one monologue. There were no keynote speakers and, obviously, no panels, which worked well particularly because the topic was collaboration. We explicitly asked participants not to deliver long lectures, aiming at a more dialogical format. This approach caused concerns for participants who usually walk on red carpets, but was perfect for those who were willing to contribute to an event, the success of a debate as a whole, and for those who could briefly present a summation of their thoughts and were then open enough to engage in debate responding to others.

Arriving at events with hundreds or thousands of speakers, it is a challenging task to connect with those attendees with whom one has wanted to talk for a long time. Nametags are half-concealed by bags or coats, making for a strange detective game. A simple piece of software could help here. A Twiki (6) or proximity area network could be a space in which people can read each others’ texts before they attend the event, then be able to jump right into the discussion after a short summation of their argument. People would also have an easier time finding each other as photos in the wiki, and one could see where others are at a particular time during the conference, and allow for brief exchanges to arrange meetings. This requires attendees to prepare the conference and take part in pre-conference exchanges, while still leaving things to debate for the event itself. Some conferences use commercial social software platforms such as ORKUT (7) to meet in. Using wireless networks, one could also adapt software such as ActiveCampus (8) or "Wifi Bedouin" (9) for personal data assistants (PDAs) or wireless-enabled laptops. Best of all, we could write a free/ open source application that serves the described conference needs.

When organizing the FreeCooperation conference we were overwhelmed by the large number of proposals that we received in response to our call. We read the submissions, making decisions based on their relevance to what we set out to organize. Like Phil Agre, media critic at The University of California Los Angeles, who notes this in a text about the organization of conferences (10), we were uncomfortable selecting on the basis of already established reputations in the field or of nepotism, because this simply re-inscribes the circulation of a virtual class; the same voices are heard over and over. We based our decisions on proposals which led us to program undergraduate students next to established media artists and critics. We also choose participants whom we got to know on the preparatory mailing list. The main question was whether the proposed presentation would fit into the thematic framework of the conference. We emphasized that we were looking for reflection on collaboration rather than mere descriptions of projects.

Another pivotal question in the organization of a conference or other event is that of outcomes. What do you want the participants to take away from the event beyond the participation experience itself? Positive networking and the exchange of ideas always take place, but what can you do to go beyond that? For the FreeCooperation conference we edited a theory newspaper, simply designed, that was launched on the first night of the event. We printed a large number of copies, some of which participants took home with them while the rest was distributed locally and throughout new media institutions. We also created a DVD that, besides short video impressions of the conference sessions, also included interviews with conference participants, and a video by Christoph Spehr and Jörg Windszus. The conference website, created with the helpful free software package Open Conference Systems (OCS) (11), simplified some of the registration issues, but was also limiting, as too many of its non-customizable features were based on the needs of traditional academic conferences. The conference Wiki became a rich repository for ideas and a growing archive about (online) collaboration. Out of the conference emerged the Institute for Distributed Creativity (12) and the Institute for Network Cultures (13). We are currently editing a book on the art of (online) collaboration that will be published by oe/b_books by the end of spring 2005.

We can't wait for the moment when complex, stable, and powerful open-source tools for presentation become available. How many times have we tried to replace proprietary software such as »Powerpoint« or »Keynote« but had to give up because such packages as OpenOffice (14) did not have the necessary features or were not reliable enough? Many conference organizers start to invite a range of participants based on only a few topics. They make sure that these are good speakers with engaging presentations, and that they are geographically diverse (local vs. inter/national) to avoid an isolated alien landing of a conference crew star ship. In this balancing act between ideas, equal representation of gender, minorities and available finances, the focus on a few specific topics easily gets lost and events become unfocused.

The challenge is to avoid the tokenism of the multicultural spectacle while still achieving the much-needed balance. Globalization has yet to arrive in many cultural/new media arts events. One of the ways to speed up diversity is to question dominant organization formats and introduce basic forms of interactivity and dialogue.

 

 

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