Sophie Ashdown

So I attended (remotely) the latest Monday lecture, and if I’m honest I did not really understand or connect with what was presented for the most part.

There was not a useful or comprehensive introduction to the topic or the presenters, so it launched into the first speaker’s presentation without setting the context.

I had to look back at the description of the lecture from the email to find out what it was suppose to be about:

“Shibboleth announces the launch of One-Thing-After-Another, a visual reader of post-war British history by Central Saint Martins’ Professor of Research Mick Finch. Drawing from an archive of 3000 images, the volume reshuffles the visual material contained in The Book of Knowledge, an eight-volume encyclopaedia from Fifties Britain, into a self-reflecting cinematographic sequence suggesting that editing images of reality means editing reality itself.

This Monday Guest Lecture is by Mick Finch and Adrian Rifkin on One-Thing-After-Another, and by Allegra Baggio Corradi who is a publisher at Shibboleth on social publishing questioning the responsibilities of the artist in relation to audiences and the environment with the aim of fostering interventions in the practice of everyday life.”

Mick took us through how he used the 3000+ images from the Book of Knowledge, an encyclopedia from his childhood, and used the images to create new pieces of work, primarily in black and white.  He then progressed into making moving images using the Ken Burns technique for videography where still images can be manipulated, up and down, side to side, zooming in and out, etc.

By the time he was finished I still wasn’t much wiser as to the purpose, theory, or objective that he was going for, and his monotonous reading of his notes (that were displayed on screen) was not inspiring.

Then we had Adrian who showed three images side by side, that did not appear to be related to each other. He spoke repeatedly about “Side-by-sideness” which is a new term to me.  Apparently if you put things side-by-side enough then you learn to Tango?!? He said that “Side-by-sidenss is a reflection of one’s own anguishes, beliefs, social structures, etc.  Side-by-sideness provides a schema within which we live our lives.  The act of making is an act of side-by-sideness.”  I struggle to understand what he is talking about here and why it is important to talk about.  As one of my coursemates said, it was “pompous nonsense” and another commented that it was just a lot of “wordy words”!!  I was glad to know I wasn’t the only one that was not feeling moved or inspired by the presentations.

The third speaker, Allegra, was more interesting and made more sense.  She works as part of an organisation called Shibboleth which is a nonprofit organisation “devoted to visual literacy education and social publishing based in Milan, Italy.”

In contrast to her co-presenters, Allegra had an introduction, some context, some useful and informative slides that related to what she was saying, and her presentation made sense. 

Thankfully after all presenters were done there was discussion with the in-person audience, which helped somewhat to make partial sense of the presentations and link the different speakers together, which certainly was not made clear previously.  The host did his best to drum up some enthusiasm for the presentations but it was a hard sell.

I’m walking away not much wiser than I was before.  One thing I do know is that that was an hour an half I won’t get back in my life.