I’m on my lunchbreak from a ‘conference’ at the Video Studio at the Duderstadt Center. It’s called Arts & Minds, and is supposed to be thoughts and conversations about art and its intersection with science and humanities.

From their promotional literature:

Please join us in the Duderstadt Video Center this November 1– 2 for a playful, experimental “learning studio” in which leading international artists, scientists, scholars, activists, and students will explore the interactions of art and mind. There is no audience for Arts & Minds: everyone participates.

Everyone participates? Excuse me? I just sat on my butt for 2 1/2 hours - literally, cross-legged on the bare floor - being talked at (and danced at) (and video-ed at). There was 20 minutes at the end where the ‘not-audience’ could speak up - it was about 5 people giving little soapbox style responses to material presented. Sorry folks, but limited Q&A after a 180 minute lecture - even if that lecture is comprised of some talking, some video and some dance - is not ‘everyone participates.’

It wasn’t that it was completely without merit. There were the requisite ‘you really need an editor’ art films here and there, and though I usually can’t stand interpretive dance, I did like what was presented - not exactly my style, but there was beauty and thought put into it.

The main speaker, Ellen Dissanayake, was talking about evolution and art - specifically, to ask the question of whether art is an adaptive trait we as humans have used to advantage in the evolutionary process. She had a pretty cool hypothesis - that maternal-infant interactions are the basis of art. Let me try to boil it down: first, walking upright required smaller pelvises, smaller pelvises require smaller baby heads - but brains were growing, not shrinking. So, humans evolved to birth their young at a relatively undeveloped age when baby heads are relatively small. Therefore, a long term commitment from a parent was required for survival of said baby and cute, interactive babies engender the best and longest-term parental bonding.

Now think about how parents interact with tiny babies - their speech is repetitive (formalized) and exaggerated (much more inflection than in adult speech) and often employs elements of surprise (think This Little Piggy’s ending). Dissanayake’s hypothesis is that those qualities - formalization, exaggeration, surprise - are exactly the qualities which differentiate art from the everyday, making art into ’special’ or ‘extra-ordinary’ versions of normalcy. If you use a nice broad definition for art (including dance, music, etc.), it actually works pretty well.

I think the underlying idea here might be summed up that in the same way infants use the extra-ordinary (mamatalk) to understand the ordinary (adult language), humans use art (the extra-ordinary) to understand their own existence (the ordinary). It’s an intriguing idea, and perhaps seems a little more plausible to me than ‘art is made by males to attract females.’ I’m sure there’s some truth in that, too, but I like this ‘extra-ordinary to understand the ordinary’ idea better.

But the academic air of this morning’s presentation was kinda stifling. Not only was there no participation between presenters and audience (they are fooling themselves if they think there wasn’t an audience), but there was no facilitation of interaction between the attendees themselves. For example, there were coffee and snacks put out before the presentation began, but they did this music/dance thing right there in the hallway which shut everyone up. No good mornings, no nice-to-meet-yous - just ‘you will be a viewer, not a participant.’ Sad, really - there’s a bunch of cool looking people and it would have been nice to talk to some of them. But there was no attempt from the organizers to foster any conversations. And don’t get me started about lunch - we plebs dispersed to fend for ourselves while the presenters were taken off to some separate room where they were fed and could talk to each other, but not the ‘not-audience.’ Great.

I think the organizers would benefit from attending an open space type conference to see the possibilities of an event like that. I’ve gotta say, ArbCamp blew this shindig right out of the water in terms of getting jazzed up about a subject. Maybe the afternoon session will be better. I’m not bailing on the event yet, but if I end up sitting on my butt listening/watching for another 3 hours, I’m sure not coming back tomorrow.