'Signal, Event, Affect' conference/colloquium, Aarhus University
A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to, and attend, a conference-colloquium in Aarhus, Denmark, entitled ‘Event, Signal, Affect‘. There was a deliberate attempt at trying to create a different sort of space in which to share our work, and there was as much time for discussion as there was to present. Coupled with a small number of participants, a session of conceptual speed-dating, plenty of meals together and spread out over three days, it made for a really pleasant gathering (see also Christoph’s comments on the conference-colloquium facilitating lures for friendship). The sessions – Site and City, Crowded Events and (H)ac(k)tivism, The Signaletic Event, Event Culture and Affective Interactions – provided some sort of loose structure and the keynotes were inspiring. Unfortunately, Nigel Thrift was unable to attend but this meant that Brian and Erin had more time to talk about their work and forthcoming project, Generating the Impossible. I’m really very grateful to Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen and to Jonas Fritsch, not only for their invitation but also for organising and pulling off such a great conference-colloquium. It was great to catch up with the group from the SenseLab, and also to meet the likes of Leila Dawney (a fellow geographer), Merete Carlson (who I have since met in Berlin, at IfREX) and Christian Borch (whose papers I have since been reading).
My paper, Experimental aesthetics: The Office of Experiments, was a chance for me to start thinking and experimenting the Office of Experiments. Not experimenting with, “which would induce the idea of a separation between the experimenter and what she is experimenting on or with … [but] a practice of active, open, demanding attention paid to the experience as we experience it” (Stengers, 2008: 109). Here, there is no clear distinction, as in French, between the terms ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’. Whether or not it was a success is unsure, but it did at least generate a discussion and a set of questions. These have enabled me to re-think writing the Office as a temporary and distributed space. The short paper is embedded below with the help of issuu.
Reference
Stengers, I. (2008) A Constructivist Reading of Process and Reality. Theory Culture & Society, 25(4): 91-109
This post is tagged aarhus, aesthetics, conference-colloquium, event, event-structure, experimentation, OoE, participation