IPP Workshop Series / STIBET: The Virtual Lecture-Performance

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As we are intimately aware, the novel Coronavirus pandemic has forced educational institutions across the globe to suddenly move their teaching almost exclusively online, in many cases without a pedagogical ‘gameplan’ as to how to ensure continued cognitive and affective stimulation and active dialogic participation of students. Academic conferences have also been greatly affected by this shift to virtual space, making an already dry format barely palatable. Consistent with furthering investigations into digitization in the study of culture, this workshop will explore the innovative methodologies and formats offered by the lecture-performance, as a potential model for students.

The aims in adopting this visual-centered approach is to improve knowledge production, reception, and retention; to help avoid ‘zoom fatigue,’ the mental exhaustion tied to extended hours in web meetings; and to create more captivating paper presentations both for the classroom and conference settings.

Lecture-performance is by nature a hybrid practice, routinely experimenting with and challenging normative configurations and relations between presenter and public, as well as disciplinary boundaries. The lecture-performances incorporates dramaturgy, discursive narration, voiceover, and montage, includes physical materials, objects, archival evidences, and documents, and may be categorized as self-reflexive, situational, participatory, and interactive. Critical both of traditional rubrics of knowledge production and dissemination and constrained institutional structures, its origin can be traced historically to the video essay and cine-essay, as well as conceptual and performative arts of the 1960s and 1970s, and contemporary dance discourse of the 1990s. From the perspective of theater studies, the lecture-performance descends from J.L. Austin’s concept of the speech act, as presented in his 1975 lecture and subsequent publication How to do Things with Words. Within art history circles, early practitioners of lecture-performance include: John Cage’s Event (1952) and Lecture on Nothing (1961), Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Robert Smithson’s slide lecture called Hotel Palenque (1969-72), among many others.

Prior to our session, participants are asked to watch a 28-minute contemporary, virtual lecture-performance independently in preparation for our collective discussion. Please watch Raqs Media Collective's 'Where Do You Wander Alone,' which was supported by Akademie Schloss Solitude. We will discuss this together during the workshop. Link:https://vimeo.com/486337366. ("Please register on Vimeo to view the video.")

The session will begin with a 30-minute expanded introduction to the lecture-performance genre which will include clicks from an array of examples, followed by an open dialogue in response to the assigned lecture-performance. Our main objective will be to explore how we can use lecture-performance methods to enhance our own research.

Note: The sessions of the IPP Workshop Series are open for BA, MA and PhD students and the participants do not require any previous knowledge to take part.

// Candace Goodrich (GCSC) is an artist/curator, director of ArtSci Nexus, and a PhD student at GCSC - IPP at Justus Liebig Universität Gießen, Germany. Her teaching background is in art education in contemporary art spaces. Notable lectures include: “Anthropocentrism: The Failure of Modernity – How do we decolonize the sciences through ecovention?” at the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle, Germany, invited by the Global Youth Academy and National German Academy of Sciences – Leopoldina (April 2019); “The Aestheticization of the Anthropocene – A discussion about terminology, periodization and imagery” at Rupert, Vilnius, Lithuania (March 2019); and “Can robots end class struggle? A second chance for Autonomia” – Hamburger Bahnhof, as part of the “Festival of Future Nows” (September 2017).

The IPP Workshop Series "Reading Culture: Established and Emerging Approaches" provides the space for IPP members to give a workshop that deals with current concepts and methods of literary and cultural theory related to their research interests. It aims at creating an interactive discussion for doctoral researchers as well as undergraduate students. The topics may range from general introductions to different "schools" of literary and cultural theory to concepts, methods and subjects of literary and cultural theory.