Ams Group C response to today's presentations

In this entry we are going to talk about Warwick's and Tampere's provocation exercises and Hanna's presentation today. 

Warwick's exercise was clearly about the miscommunication that has been prevalent throughout the week between the students and the staff of the three universities. We really couldn't find a coherent narrative in what was presented. Extensive use was made of technology in the form of images and text but there was a gap that couldn't be mediated between what was articulated and what was perceived or perhaps the mediation itself became a barrier in communication. The fragmentation of the 'message' achieved the purpose of being provocative. There was this dire need of finding a 'meaning' in the presentation, to build a narrative whether or not it existed. This led to multiple stories being created in everybody's mind which might not exactly correspond to what the Warwick group had in mind. The multiplicity of images, stories, narratives, ideas is what we have been experiencing during the entire week.\

Tampere's exercise on the other hand, was a theatrical/performative comment on Desmund Tutu's  TRC in South Africa. Basing our comment strictly on the footage shown, which focused on the rehearsal process, we can say that we found it to be a very interesting path to explore collective memory. The access to this shared memory, was attempted through the 'musical' recollections of the participants. Maybe it's not the songs itself, but the memories (both intellectual & emotional) that flow through the actor's bodies, what makes it terribly interesting. An example (maybe) of what Walter Benjamin considered a 'true experience': the coming together of collective and individual past within the locus of memory in a process of redemption of the past. 

At another level, we found a conflict between the form and the content. The form was beautiful, but the memories that were engaged were traumatic. Is that a conscious meta-comment on the TRC? 

Hanna's lecture. We thought it was useful to go through the different modalities of research that are being adopted in our programme. However, we felt it probably fell a bit short. It might have been productive to stop and dwell upon the idea of the 'radar'. The idea of the 'radar' (which by the way Guillermo Gomez Pena uses too) is very descriptive of an embodied approach to the object of inquiry. However, it would have been interesting to go deeper into the idea and explore the possibilities of playing with it. Are there any rules around it? Does this 'animal' have a certain character? What are it's strengths? What it's weakness? 

Ian, Swati, Diego