Misha's Blog

Misha Rabinovich giving the SoYummy lecture performance and showing Roy Arden's The World as Will and Representation SoYummy summary. Photo by Yogesh Girdhar.

On Wednesday, August 3rd, I gave a lecture performance at the robotics building on the McGill campus in Montreal. There was a good audience — both in terms of numbers, energy, and inquisitiveness. I presented research and ideas stemming from my experimentation with computer vision software being developed at McGill. A good amount of the audience was already familiar with the research behind the software, so I had the pleasure of presenting ideas from new perspectives of art theory and philosophy.

According to Charlie Hoban (Educational Technology theorist), the lecture as performance is achievable by only 2% of lecturers and is worth digitizing for the future. Even though the bandwidth limitations for disseminating such lectures he describes will soon seem laughable, I agree that the question of bandwidth is central to this subject. Lecture as performance is an effective information dissemination vehicle because it is so high bandwidth: it combines the visual, aural, gestural, and sometimes tactile and even olfactory senses.

Last year’s curatorial inquiry on the subject at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade asks “is contemporary art a product of fascination with aesthetic objects or a space of knowledge production?” The most successful art created these days falls into the latter category. It is art that engages the audience in confronting real changes happing in the current world. Contextual Art, as described by Jan Swidzinsky is a particularly attractive approach when presenting to a scientifically minded audience because Contextual Art accepts both art and science as disciplines capable of responding the rapid changes of our technologically accelerated world. From this angle, Lecture as Performance is a post-modern practice because of its emphasis on the communication of information through the melding of pedagogic as well as theatrical approaches (and sits in opposition to Modern Art as art for art’s sake).

Joseph Beuys, who is one of the originators of the Lecture as Performance form (stemming from his ‘Social Sculptures’) wrote that “The most important discussion is epistemological in character”. This is especially true now in our economy of abundance where there is more media being produced than anyone can possibly consume. When the information about our world comes to us in such a fragmented state, from so many different ‘news’ outlets, and filtered by so many layers of special interests, its hard to know what is true and what is bent. Epistemology helps us answer how we know what we know, and Lecture as Performance is an artistic approach to investigating these questions.

Walt Whitman, late in life, lamented that he didn’t tour and read his poetry to the masses to increase his audience. Plenty of examples of artists and scientists disseminating ideas through Lecture as Performance hang in our collective memory. From Tesla’s highly influential demonstrations of radio to Nabokov’s lecture tours through the United States to Laurie Santos’s insightful TED talk on the “monkey economy” and human irrationality we learn of key ideas right from the horse’s mouth. Despite the continuously increasing complexity of the world around us, the old adage of ‘if you can explain it to a 4 year old, you really understand it’ is more true than ever. Lecture as Performance is that ultra-high bandwidth communication channel on which the most relevant truths of today can set sail, powered by nothing more than a person’s breath.

Through the combination of my creative practice and access to the latest cv research (in the form of Yogesh Girdhar’s software) I am able to devise artistic experiments and achieve insight. Through creative application of this research to solve the problems of our economy of abundance we can open new engagements between Art and Science. The impact of Temporal Semantic Compression on Culture will be determined with time and experimenation, and I’m excited to bring the latest insights to interested audiences. The poetic engagements with Art History and Philosophy are more illuminating to the scientific crowd, while explaining the science behind the software is more enlightening to the art audience. The presentation remains accessible for even the most general audience, who is often interested in these subjects and the impact of new technology on their life.

The lecture performance at McGill went really well and I would like to thank Yogesh Girdhar and Gregory Dudek once again for inviting me there. One excellent criticism of the talk was that I didn’t take the opportunity to delve into Lecture as Performance itself: I stayed in character during the question/answer session and didn’t step up to the meta-level. From the Lecture as Performances that I’ve seen personally, it doesn’t seem common for the performer to break out of character during the lecture or even the question/answer portion (if there even is one). One reason this is unclear to me is because the lecture performance itself is not an act: it is honest expression of subjective and objective truths. Thanks to everyone for coming out and being part of the event and I look forward to the next one.