Who talks? Who listens?

by Ruth Barker, 15 Jun 2011

Hello,

I was in Dundee yesterday (I loved Nina Rhode’s show at DCA, by the way) for a meeting with Ken Neil, Tracy Mackenna, and Edwin Janssen as we discuss the next stage in the Mapping the Future project. Remember that? The event we held last year? Well anyway, when we initially planned the project knew that symposia and conferences can just be a talking shop: a bunch of folk sitting in a room talking about things, and that that conversation a) never reaches a wider public and b) never changes anything.

I really believe in the importance of conversation. I think that talking is important and when conversation and discussion doesn’t happen, I think we really feel the lack of it. But in order to learn and to inform ourselves – we can’t just talk. We have to listen as well, and we have to include as many people as we can in the conversation.

So a lot of the meeting that Edwin, Tracy, Ken and I had yesterday was about that question of who talks? and who listens? It’s an important thing to question. Ken Neil has produced a really brilliant document as a result of his being appointed as a Correspondent for Mapping. His response is thoughtful, insightful, and illuminating, pulling together lots of the ideas and questions that came up through the Speakers’ presentations, but also through the group discussion. But what should we do with this document when it’s finished? Obviously we want people to read it, but how can we distribute it? And – importantly – how can we make sure that a broad audience can access it? How can we invite people who may not agree with the report’s suggestions / conclusions / provocations / speculations to read it? It’s no good if the only people who browse it already agree with much of what is said.

It’s a question that has cropped up tangentially recently in a couple of conversations I’ve had about publishing in Scotland. Where are the Scotland-based publishers who are producing our glorious art-books? Well, they’re thin on the ground (not least because the people who love to buy glorious art books don’t often have much disposable income). But that means that we’re really lacking something. Publishing is a way to make thoughts permanent. We archive the moment of our fallible, changeable, flawed and incomplete words, so that others can read them, and challenge them, or build upon them. Blogging is ok, but it’s transient. I can go back and change what I said last year, for example. online, authors can edit. But when a book is on your shelf, then the words inside it stay there, whether the author changes their mind or not. And I think that books circulate in a way that online texts don’t, always. But, on the other hand online is free and books certainly aren’t.

I feel like there are a lot of questions at the moment about this – which is more durable? which is more democratic? which is more effective? I also think that those questions are probably occurring because of our particular moment in history, when ‘online’ is still a fairly recent phenomenon that many of us didn’t grow up with. I wonder what the questions will be in a hundred years? I wonder what happened when the printing press was invented? I imagine that there were similar ponderings.

Anyway, the upshot is that Ken has written something that I think could be very useful, and that at some point in the coming months it will be available to read! Whatever else happens to it, it’ll be sure to be here on PAR+RS, so you’ll all get a chance to browse – and no doubt – challenge its content.

Oh and the picture? Similar ones have found their way into the Editorial before, and I don’t apologise. It shows my an extract of my ever-growing bookshelf, something that I won’t be parting with any time soon, no matter what the internet offers!

More later,
R.

PS – on the blog front, has everyone seen Andrew Dixon’s? I wish I had a profile picture like that! I love it – it’s like he’s in space, looking down at us all…