Posts Tagged ‘workshop’

Research on space & art.

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

photograph of a stairwell platform leading down into the tunnelThree weeks ago, Alexander Schellow and I conducted a workshop called spatial research at the advanced performance training part of the apass school in Antwerp, Belgium. I was a bit anxious about the workshop, even though Alexander and I tried to prepare as well as we could for an open-ended and individualized workshop setting such as the one we offered for the people in Antwerp. I guess the anxiety stemmed from the fact that I did not have any experience in teaching artists and therefore was not sure if our interaction would be productive or not.

To my relief, the cooperation was great – two of my main qualifications (knowledge about social theories of space & spatiality on the one hand, experience with different ethnographic field-work settings on the other hand) were very useful for them and the participants really tapped me for all of the advice that I could give them. Of course, what they do with that advice is different when compared to people from a university setting. But there was more than enough overlap to make the experience highly stimulating for me too. As I posted on Facebook: Artist may not be the better sociologists, but they can be sociologesques with brilliant ideas!
To give you a bit more information to work with: One project posed the greatest difficulties but – exactly because of that – it also was the most productive for all involved. One of the students is interested in violence and bodily injury – so we decided that for the short time that we have for the workshop (about two days in the field) he might want spend some time in the entrance area of a hospital, to get a feeling for how physical pain, injuries and sickness embed themselves and are produced in a specific place. When he spent time in the area, he took photographs, which obviously got him into trouble quite quickly. But after a stressful encounter with the hospital staff, some attempts at repairing trust by Alexander and me, several talks about this, and the ritualized deletion of the pictures, the student/artist developed a really excellent presentation that very forcefully evoked a feeling of the place, of the presence and abscence of the place in his presentation, of the loss of the photographs, and of the ambivalence of privacy, voyeurism, pain and empathy. It was more than thrilling – and it was only one of the many really excellent projects that the participants came up with in only a week. In a way, one could say that this was a first encounter with non-representational theory made practice.

If you want to take a brief look at the some of the things that people came up with, you can check the description of the workshop on the web, where some of the projects are presented (the links to the individual projects are in the box on the left side of the page).

Workshop on video analysis.

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

On May 11-12th I will participate in the workshop Video Interaction Analysis – and how to do it (PDF) which is organized by Ulrike Tikvah Kissmann. As she writes: The aim of the workshop is to bring together video analysts with different methodological backgrounds and to discuss how their approaches differ. For that purpose, the presenters have been asked to make the stages of their analysis as transparent as possible. I will try to dive into the transparency or openness and offer those video sequences for discussion in which people display their stance (scepticism, interest, evasion…) towards me and my camera. The title for my presentation is Video research in the open – researcher, camera, and others. I am really looking forward to the workshop and I am confident that the atmosphere and setup of the workshop will be allow for fruitful, non-defensive discussion of methods in practice.

Strategieworkshop.

Sunday, February 18th, 2007

montage showing a blackboard, a foggy mountain valley and nordic skiingDer Strategieworkshop der Darmstädter Stadtforschung im Kleinwalsertal war inhaltlich und dynamisch ein voller Erfolg – Stadtforscher der Republik: haltet die Augen und Ohren auf und bereitet Euch innerlich auf das vor, was da so kommen wird…!

Getting reorganized.

Monday, August 2nd, 2004

Yesterday evening I arrived back in Berlin after a 12 hour trip from Darmstadt via Leipzig to Berlin – there have been quite a few traffic jams on the autobahn. Makes one remember quite vividly, why traveling by train is a Good Thing. There was a lot of comment spam – most of it generated yesterday though, so I hope it hasn’t been indexed by search engines yet. Now I have to rent an apartment for when we visit my brother’s wedding, organize other stuff concerning the wedding, write a few mails regarding college seminar organization, try to find somebody to rent the free room in our apartment to from now to September, get my article published, try to get my diploma published, and, of course, work on my dissertation, i.e. read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, and analyze my recordings.

The college’s workshop was excellent, we managed to get quite some stuff accomplished for the people who presented their material, though we had a hard time agreeing on the procedures for the conference we will host in 2005. The chalet was wonderful and the view we had from there magnificent. I am also pleased to report that my knees managed to cope with the downhill part of the one hiking tour that we made on our free day.