November 13, 2012: Performance Notes (Courtney)

November 13, 2012: Performance Notes

Ellen & Amy: Discussion of the Syllabus/Abstracts

Amy: WE want to talk about election posts and historical museum visit. We can also talk about the K-G essay. Note the way in which Cody clearly outlined the terms of his post as ethnographic exploration. If you didn’t frame it as ethnographic, what would that look like? We should all recognize the groups we’re in.

Dorothy: Was alone, so it would be an autoethnography. But with social media, you should be aware of your self-curated communities. Singular choices add up to a set of ideas.

Ellen: That was Courtney’s project. Identifying yourself as far as voter demographics. There are so many categories that have been pre-crunched. That’s what we’re told is interesting.

Derek: For mine I was looking at college students. I didn’t do what Cody did, but it was the Bloomington graduate community. It is a left-leaning community generally speaking. I added a moderate Republican. There wasn’t actually one.

Ellen: This brings us back to an interesting point about the history center. The re-creation of the photograph actually added people who may never have been in contact. The relationship between the factual and the potential is skipped past. I was struck by the creative museology of our exhibits. They were not concerned with the differences between fiction and fact. This is an area of intrigue for me. It picks up on what counts as a curatable experience.

Dorothy: One thing that stuck out was the idea that there is such thing as a community. The idea of a graduate community needs to be proved before studying it. There is always the chance that someone does not agree. Community has to be proven.

Ellen: In Derek’s case, the spur to fiction is the sense of insufficiency of the group. I understand why that representation should be there. How can we do that? How can we curate that which was not our experience. Cody’s on the other hand actually took place. It can be re-constructible. Kelley’s idea was fabulous. You’re just about to script the scene. It is theater. There is a relationship between art and event. What are the epistemological criteria.

Derek: The presence of the moderate republican was the only thing that was fabricated. The people were talking about their parents and how they would react. That could be embodied in a person in the room. Our campus has a minority of Republicans. Since the election, I’ve heard about racist incidents in Bloomington. I don’t know how that would be integrated.

Dorothy: From what you just said, you have to represent how that is your experience of the community. I’ve heard racist stuff here all the time, from before the election. It is important to remember that you are representing your own experience of the campus.

Andrea: We were talking about the epistemological grounds and the photos at the museum. Mine and others revolving around Facebook. You could use those archives in a way similar to the photograph. You could create a scene in which those particular people interact. That’s a way you could look back from the future to our time.

Amy: Where do we want to draw the line between performance and a museum exhibit?

Whitney: This gets us back to Berlant, feeling historical. Symbolism needs to be present. That logic structures our ideas of recreation.

Jennifer: 9/11, we didn’t know it was historical when it was happening. But on election day we were sent out with this task to feel historical. I had trouble feeling historical. There is a desire to feel historical that just wasn’t happening.

Ellen: History doesn’t feel historical.

Justin: Anything you did to make the archive gets into pov. I backed away from it.

Jennifer: I didn’t post what I did all day, because it felt so boring. The feeling historical is difficult. Being caught up prevents categorizations.

Amy: I was struck also by Ming’s post about this. This is slightly different than feeling historical. A longing for drama that is problematic. There’s a desire to be where the drama is, but that desire suggests that you don’t have to be anywhere near the drama.

Ming: I was thinking about boredom. I’ve been struggling with the empty feeling and what that means to curation. How do you record people being not where the action is?

Ellen: I think this sense that we turn away from our own carefully culled information towards a history somewhere else. This is an interesting psychological dynamic. The history center was interesting because their photographs are quotidian. You get the mood of a moment. That’s difficult because people take pictures of special occasions. What does get marked are those events that are out of the norm. This project is difficult because it is a day that is specially marked. How do you get people to immerse without deviating from the facts. How do you stay true to what happened?

Ming: I’m interested in what we should be fascinated by. How do I know I should be fascinated by somewhere else. I was listening to Radiolab. Spinning things to make them exciting. In the present it was quotidian and so it was uninteresting.

Dorothy: It is interesting that we’re saying the event is somewhere else, as if feeling that is not a historical representation of the feeling. Even boredom is a valid experience.

Amy: But I think the exercise is to take the different perspectives. Acknowledge that the feeling of things happening somewhere else is a luxury. As scholars we should take these perspectives. We can take items and make lots of conclusions from this vantage point. How do you take scholarly perspectives in time/space/location to make what doesn’t look interesting rich and politically salient?

Sara: I had a funny experience with that. Boyfriend’s mom worked with Obama campaign. I would be asked to make phone calls. It was interesting that she wasn’t asked to make calls and that in Indiana things weren’t happening here. So that’s what I did. It seemed self-reflexive. I was involved in Ohio via phone.

Amy: The postscript about people calling your mom was interesting. I have never voted anywhere where someone would have called my mom. That is a very different experience.

Andrea: My perception was different. Instead of feeling like action was somewhere else, I felt like nothing was happening anywhere. Before and after the election nothing had changed. It’s like a birthday. You feel things should be different.

Whitney: Connect to K-G. Quote about heritage. There’s a sense that we missed out on the real event. “Created thorough exhibition.” Is the project we were asked to do a piece of making election day something that it is not. It becomes part of the ideology that says something is going to happen.

Dorothy: Even though I didn’t vote for political reasons, it was a big deal to have a black president get a second term.

Whitney: It’s not that it wasn’t a big deal. There’s a sense of it that the phrase election day garners that doesn’t actually occur on the day.

Ellen: There’s a difference between historically consequential and our own sensory experience. We felt the election was happening elsewhere because it was (electoral college). There are also other somatic expectations. This was ghosted by election day 2008. The hope for a second version had already been deflated by pundits. This made it impossible to experience the event. This is unbelievably complex.

Jennifer: My grandmother did this when she was 14. In 1932 she wrote a poem about the election day. (Quotes from poem.) I couldn’t find the details that made it resonant for me.

Derek: Your grandma’s poem gets at what Whitney was saying. Trying to document an average day. It doesn’t feel like anything special. In other places it is not a work day. That is a big part of it. If we changed that.

Justin: Corporate America tells us it is an important day by cancelling shows.

Jenna: Facebook was trying to use the election by creating a superficial community.

Justin: The breakdown was men vs. women.

Whitney: My polling place was reminiscent of why the day becomes so important. The kids had done so much preparation. These kids are being set up to feel something important about the day.

Sara: My students did election themed plays.

Jennifer: Tuesday voting is because of travel times (by horse).

Kelly: I was registered in Brownsville IN. It was a big event for my parents. It felt like an event for them. It was a special day, but I had to go make it a special day. I didn’t know how to display that.

Amy: That touches on something that everyone’s post commented on. The way the day highlighted connections or lack thereof. It is a moment in which those relationships are all suddenly really visible. Right now incredibly contentious.

Ellen: Kelly, your story could be an oral history. The visit to Indy is distortive. It is a strange place. Many of you imagined that you should make use of these amenities. Courtney’s version or Kelly’s narrative suggests less fancy less epistemologically complex versions of these were worthwhile. Maybe these things weren’t so easily integrated into the forms we’ve seen.

Ming: Amy, what did you mean by privilege?

Amy: In the spectrum of human experience, one is in more safety and privilege. There is a degree of security and privilege that is not historically or geographically constant. There is way that we have privilege. We’re able to sit on Facebook. Relatively speaking that’s of historical note.

Jennifer: This is reminding me about Geertz. He makes a grand moment about cock fighting. Different people find different ways of telling history differently appealing. It depends on how you feel historical.

Ellen: Is it clear why the history center made the choices it did? We heard from the director. It seems that there are claims that are being made for the value of performance and interaction. Especially for children. When and where do we use performance? We need to be attentive to this. There are many historians that would claim they do truth not theater. This is curious in relation to K-G’s complaints. I was surprised that many blogs embraced theatrical heightening. Surreal (Whitney’s post). What is the value of fiction in the midst of history?

Jennifer: Something that made this election odd was thinking of what could go in a museum was that so few things were tactile. You had to move to screens and actors.

Whitney: For me it was a selfish desire to make people think about what I thought about in my experience. Decisions are made in the interest of the designer.

Sara: I was upset I couldn’t come up with creative interactive ideas like the rest of you. The only people that I could talk to with these exhibits would be people that already agree with me. I felt it was necessary to eschew all of that. I felt I had to do an archival representation. I was thinking of court documents.

Kelly: I thought of that in the history exhibit with the prohibition. It was obviously a biased representation. I thought there was a dramatic irony in those exhibits.

Ming: I found this assignment to point to the myth of historiography. The cool thing about humanities to me lately has been a reclamation of what was not on the record. History is not an act of curation is a myth I buy into.

Ellen: I was struck by Kelly’s phrase “how do you jar up this election.” What do we do in a digital event? This is something that many of us addressed. There is going to be an age gap in audiences that like the history center. We need to be alert to those shifting perceptions. Dorothy, what you were creating was performance.

Dorothy: Those were the actual things, but not taken on that day. I wanted to be very literal in what I saw on that day. I tried to get exactly what they said.

Amy: One of the things I was struck by was the juxtaposition between the artifact and the bias. The story was the republican math that wasn’t adding up. This was a performance of a narrative that they were all expecting with the background of Nate Silver’s math. There was this real performance of anticipation and excitement that was not based in the math. It collided so embarrassingly. The performance of prohibition narrative colliding with the truth of the photograph.

Dorothy: That’s interesting in terms of the individual perspective. A lot of people in my circles. We know the math, but we don’t trust the math.

Ellen: I don’t think that’s exclusive to your experience. We went through the Gore election. Those algorithms that we believed failed. It is one of those moments were the nature of the election became manifest. Everything that is projected on the math that seems stable can change. All of that is always recognizable to me as a charade. At any moment those can change.

Sara: The delay of the concession speech was horrifying.

Ellen: It does bring out the issue of the digital or the virtual. How do we claim it as our experience? Can we know the history we’re living in?