The Research/Presentation-Divide and the Lecture as Performance
Der folgende Text ist die gekürzte Fassung eines Vortrags, den ich am 2. September auf der Tagung der European Association for the Study of Science and Technology in Trento (I) gehalten habe.
The Lecture as Performance
Today I will tell you about a research project, that is concerned with the question, how digitalization is changing the ways, knowledge is presented, mainly regarding the format of the lecture. Coming from a theatre studies point of view the project combines scientific and artistic approaches.
The project is the final part of a longterm research on lecture scenarios throughout the last 300 years. We generally focus on the relation between presenting knowledge and wider historical concepts of knowledge, to find out how the presentation and the production of knowledge are linked. Dealing with digitalization we now search for dominant parameters of present lecture scenarios.
We basically understand a lecture as performance – as a specific combination of ‘show’ and ‘tell’/(watching and listening) that can be described along categories of performance-analyze such as space, time, persona, media and public. We started by investigating how digital devices and programs like powerpoint are used in lectures:
Then we examined the documentation and distribution of lectures online.
If a lecture scenario is transposed in a new media environment like an online-lecture-platform the combination of show and tell is reframed and effectively refigurated. Many online lectures happen to be quite tedious, because they don’t take this reframing into account. Thus to analyze possible constellations of ‘show and tell’ in a digitized environment we include methods of artistic experimentation: We, for example, designed a digital ‘lecture lab’ consisting mainly of an online-connection and a green screen setup. This allows us to produce online lectures, in which the lecturer appears in the same picture as the online-content he or she is talking about. It looks like this: …..
Sibylle Peters: online/offline – über die Zukunft des Vortrags als Performance from Two Antennas on Vimeo.
With the setup in the lecture lab we defamiliarized the usual constellation of lectern and screen and tried to encourage self-experimentation in regard to the means of the digital presentation. Within artistic research this technique of defamiliarization and self-experimentation is a very common approach. Nevertheless it turned out to very discomforting for our only-science-colleagues, even though they were experts into the topic of knowledge presentation.
The Research/Presentation-Divide
This points to a main difference between artistic and scientific research: Within science, research and presentation are two different things – research first, presentation second. And this rule even applies if the presentation of knowledge is the very topic of research. In the performing arts, on the other hand, this is utterly different; to try and find a way to present a topic is a main part of the research into that topic. I would like to call this the research/presentation-divide in between arts and sciences. It is due to this divide that in artistic research you often only after the presentation find out, what actually has been demonstrated here, (which in the end might in part be true for scientific experimentation, too, but is not acknowledged in scientific protocols.)
So, what has been demonstrated in the online-lecture just seen: The online content you can see behind me on the screen is actually not selected by myself, but shows the screen of a collaborator who is surfing the web while listening to my lecture the first time. The result you see in this recording can be seen as an enlarged version of a situation, that is currently becoming common in lecture scenarios. In a wifi-environment students or listeners at a conference as a rule are connected to the web (my younger web-wizard-colleagues talk of the need to connect to the collective consciousness of the web). They follow a lecture by searching the web, checking facts, discussing points in chats or following diversions triggered, or not even triggered by the lecture. As a result there is a kind of competition, a sometimes closer, sometimes looser correspondence between the content, the lecturer tries to convey, and the web.
Facing this picture it dawned on us, that this very competition is not only taking place within specific lecture scenarios in wifi-environments, but also on a much larger scale: the level of cultural concepts and formats. Traditionally a lecture (among other functions) is meant to make knowledge accessible. For example: The lecturer – as ‘the one who is supposed to know’ – is initiating the audience to a certain field of knowledge by referring to things selected from archives, libraries and labs, interpreting them and putting them into context. Here the lecture scenario functions as an interface in between the audience and the more or less exclusive and hermetic spaces of knowledge production like archives or labs.
Today now, for most of its users the web seems to combine the function of archives and collections with the orientating interface-function of the lecturer; the web much more then the lecture is what makes knowledge accessible today. Thus the lecturer as ‘the one who knows’ has a new competitor: the open collective that constantly enriches and rearranges the content of the web and informs the operations of search engines within each online action. The changes of knowledge presentation induced by digitalization are not merely about the actual use we make of powerpoint or online-lecture-platforms. Instead the presentation of knowledge changes generally in accordance to the way digitalization changes our concepts of knowledge.
Regarding this it is significant, that the web is the first media-environment that is able to integrate the lecture as such in its database. Traditionally lectures were storable and reproducible as texts, not as lectures. The lecture principally stayed in a meta-position towards other media: All kinds of media have been part of lecture scenarios, whereas lecture scenarios themselves were hardly ever mediated or archived. As an interface the lecture scenario couldn’t be included into the database it was providing access to. With the current boom of online-lecture-platforms and presentations these times are over. Effectively the lecture scenario of the present is a scenario under pressure. Under a pressure that is questioning the research/presentation-divide itself. In fact it’s been two hundred years since the lecture has been criticized as severely as it is nowadays.
Two hundred years ago the function of the lecture changed, because improved printing techniques and markets made books generally available, so it didn’t seem to make sense to read them aloud in class anymore. The function of the lecture had to be redefined. In the course of this redefinition the lecture at around 1800 became conceivable as a performance. And this is exactly what happens again today: The lecture is questioned in its function and thus becomes conceivable as a performance. In other words: To see the lecture as a performance forms a matrix for its transformation. But where is this transformation heading to today?
Presenting the Presentation
We can say for sure today, that economical parameter play an important part in this transformation. Most people do not understand the performativity of lecturing and presenting knowledge in a ‘theatre studies’-kind of way, but rather economically in the sense of terms like ‘bad performance’ or ‘high performance’.
The slogans of online-lecture-platforms speak their own language: Here, you are encouraged to “Broadcast yourself” and “Make your research known” – meaning: make yourself as a researcher known by integrating your recorded lectures into your online profile. As a result in the lecture scenario of the present, it is no longer mainly the lecturer – as ‘the one who knows’ – who is presenting the lecture; more often the lecture is meant to present the lecturer. We call this dominant figuration of current lecture scenarios ‘Presenting the Presentation’.
It can be traced even into details of this lecture here: In a powerpoint-presentation like this one I myself am no longer the presenter. Instead, what technically is called ‘the presenter’ is this little thing here, that by a click is connecting the live-presentation to the digital presentation.
And those two presentations are presenting each other vice versa.
Not only am I presenting live the digital presentation, the digital presentation is also presenting me as I am presenting.
A figuration of knowledge nourished by this structure is that of personal exemplarity. You can observe its power in the most successful online-lecture-platform of the web, the platform of the TED-conference:
Who is presenting here (presenting in a presence, that can go on for several years) does not only have an “idea worth spreading”, but is inclined to talk about his life and work as exemplary, as an example for what he/she is talking about, and as an example meant to motivate the audience to follow it.
In what we conceive today as the performativity of the lecture new lecture scenarios are in the making, which are going to define how we will have to present, and thereby also understand, knowledge tomorrow. We found evidence that these new lecture scenarios are likely to be bound to economic dispositifs like motivation and application (as in apply for a job). These dispositifs form an economy of attention, that is based on scarcity and is taking over parts of the knowledge system.
New collaborations between artistic and scientific research
Keeping this rather dark prognosis in mind I would like to talk now about chances related to this current transformation of lecture scenarios – chances for a new encounter and cooperation in between scientific and artistic research:
As we all know within the world of science there are strong doubts about ‘so called’ artistic research. As the scientist and as the artist I am, I can understand these doubts. And I think that they are mainly related to what I called the research/presentation-divide.
There are good reasons for this divide and for the doubts connected to it: In differenciation the research itself from its presentation science was able to gain autonomy and protect processes of knowledge production, at least in part, against a whole series of claims from outside of the knowledge system. To divide research and presentation once enabled modern science to take of. From this viewpoint the artistic approach, to experiment with the conventions of presentation, looks rather naïve. It simply doesn’t seem to take into account the important function of these conventions as part of the protective divide.
Moreover approaches within ‘artistic research’ have referred to the research/presentation-divide itself in a problematic manner: From an artistic perspective the claim ‘to do research’ has often been brought in opposition to the pressure of production, the pressure to present a work as the result of an artistic project. By borrowing terms like ‘experiment’ or ‘lab’ from science, artistic practices tried to evade the pressures of artistic production, basically by denying to show results in favour of making people share artistic experimentation itself. These attempts have been influential and important. Nevertheless they generally tend to underestimate, that the inner relation between presentation and research is crucial to artistic research. This is at risk, whenever artistic approaches refer to research activities in opposition to the presentation of results. And if this crucial relation isn’t acknowledged artistic research necessarily falls short compared to scientific research. In other words: There is no artistic research without presenting results, though the focus is here on the performance of presenting more then on the results, as any presentation is a main part of the research itself and so the result presented can never be the final result, yet.
Taking this into account the current transformation of lecture scenarios and the performativity of the lecture can be seen as a chance to get rid of a few misunderstandings in between artistic and scientific research and to find new forms of cooperation:
First, from the viewpoint of science, the problem is, that we currently just do not face the alternative of clinging to conventions or experimenting with them. Instead it is becoming evident that these conventions are transformed anyway – with or without us intervening. And currently they seem to be transformed in ways which are possibly threatening the autonomy of knowledge production – the very autonomy, that was meant to be protected by the research/presentation-divide in the first place. And second, from the viewpoint of artistic research, to concentrate on the lecture as performance means to concentrate on the very own strength of artistic research, the re-entries of presentation into research. Regarding this strength artistic views on the practice of knowledge presentation can provide an alternative: By understanding the lecture as a scenario, in which the presentation of knowledge turns into a part of knowledge production, artistic approaches point towards future lecture scenarios not governed mainly by economic conditions like motivation, application or sellout.
Quite a few performing artists are interested in questions of knowledge production these days. These performing artists are not only useful as trainers or the conference-evening-program. They are experts in the experimental transformation of presentations and in producing chances for research through the means of presentation.
So, in the current last stage of our research project, we try to bring scientists and artists together to intervene into the current transformation of the lecture. A main starting point for these experiments is the current transformation of the traditional persona of the lecturer as ‘the one who knows’. Instead of redefining the lecturer as someone who motivates, who is presented and presents himself, who applies for something, etc. we see this as a chance to develop collective forms of lecturing. These forms make use of the web without giving up on the lecture in favor of the web. If the lecturer is competed by the open collectives of the digitized world, why not search for ways of lecturing that would be suitable for this collective to enter the stage of a lecture theatre?
(We currently work on the project “Life Lecture” together with the performance artist Joshua Sofaer. More about this collaboration, soon…)