Third Workshop #4

Despite blustery winds and gathering clouds, we took our picnic supplies out to the Bethanien’s lawn, Friday evening, May 25, to convene the third using global media workshop over barbecue, beer, proseco, and vodka. A small blanket was laid on the grass and workshop members Ralf de Moll, Christiané Dellbrügge, Christian Struck, Michel de Broin, Hadley, Maxwell, and I lolled about on it, sipping cold drinks and waiting for Mark Neufeld to arrive with the portable grill. Within ten minutes thunder and lightning erupted and the wind whipped the trees into a frenzy. The party hurried back into the studio as torrents of rain broke from the sky.

Christian and I stayed outside, already soaked, and enjoyed the fresh rains and violence of the storm. It was spectacular. Branches split from trees and the rain blew sideways. Hadley and Christian’s friend Sonjia (or it might have been Kiki) joined us for awhile until the storm calmed, and then we went inside. Upstairs we found a full house. The six who had spent the day together were now joined by seven more, some of whom had attended Thursday’s sessions, and some of whom were new. Three more guests, later in the evening, made our gathering very much a festive meeting place for new friends. As such, the coherence between afternoon and evening sessions that we had enjoyed on day one was displaced by a different social energy, and dinner unfolded like the first night of an island-marooned shipwreck, with all of us enjoying our common bond of surviving the storm.

Ralf de Moll performed a heroic rescue of the reluctant barbecue, nursing shy flames into full fury and puffing on nascent coals. While Maxwell videoed these ministrations, Michael Baers prepared a delicious potato salad, and the chatty ensemble filled the studio with conversation and bright excitement. Severed from the agenda of the day, I found my own train of thought adrift, and I was quick to hitch it to the pleasure of making the feast we were about to enjoy together.

This second evening was easily the most delicious and convivial dinner of the three our workshop enjoyed together. Ralf and Christiané had brought especially good sausages, including a truffle sausage that was more delicate and subtle than any I’d tasted before. The table was filled with excellent food — the potato salad, the asparagus (grilled and drenched in a superb butter), salad, and a remarkable fruit and fresh cream dessert Vanessa Ohlraun had prepared — and the room was alive with multiple, divergent conversations that I failed to track.

Of all the workshop sessions, this was the one that most thoroughly exceeded the agenda of the workshop leader or of the workshop’s established conversation. As such, it was a space of maximum autonomy and freedom, and perhaps generated exchanges that aren’t possible within the customary forms of the workshop. But what it might have gained in openness it lost in coherence or accountability. I am forced to leave it to the fifteen other people present that night to account for the conversations and exchanges we had (if they even find any value in that exercise).

Was our dinner a coherent space of discourse? Was it a heterotopia? Did it “expand the perceptual coordinates of the community” (to use Ranciere’s terms)? Was it a session of the using global media workshop at all? I leave it to those present to tell me. In a day or two I will post my account of the fifth session in Berlin, Saturday afternoon’s discussion of material media and digital media.