VideoConference
Celebrating “60 degrees of difference” (in degrees centigrade and latitude, more or less), a videoconference was held between the Cibercidade / Ciberpesquisa Research Group at the Faculty of Communication (FACOM), Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and the Space and Culture Reading Group at University of Alberta. The structure of the event was rounds of introductions, my paper on The Virtuality of Urban Culture and a powerpoint with an interactive section where the groups showed local urban images of their respective cities.
We concluded that the videoconference is a ‘differential space’ in Henri Lefebvre’s terms. A Q&A including comments on the conference itself and exchanges between the two groups of participants concluded the videoconference - my recipe for videoconferenced presentations which respects the social relations between speakers and remote and local audiences which are different than in either a simple lecture or seminar situation. Why isn’t there any research on this?
The still is from the U of A end of the videoconference - thanks Lee! Details, participants’ great images of the two cities here. Add your comments to this post!
December 10th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
Hello Rob, I’ll just post a couple thought-rambling about the video conferencing event, along with some thinking on ‘Internationalism’…
This brief conference went well in my view. It attempted to respect the difference between both ‘locations’ and in turn created interesting bits of communication and interaction that we no doubt would not have had otherwise. Since most (if not all) of the media was electronic in form, it was relatively easy to prepare for, if I do say so myself. Olga and others might disagree, I’m not sure.
We had an opportunity to imagine another place, a warmer place, with only a brief hiatus from everyday life at the university in December. In this sense alone, it was like traveling to Salvador if only momentarily and if only virtually.
The most significant problem with the interaction was exactly that which made it possible in the first place: the virtual communication network. From our end, it was somewhat infuriating that the video feed would stop working every 10 or 15 minutes or so (if we were that lucky). This made it very difficult to understand sustained statements and comments from our end. Instead, what we got were bits of visual stills, disconnected audio/visual, alongside some of the communication the Salvadorians were engaging in. It was relatively uneasy for us to interact with Rob and his students at all. We could hear the conversations in Salvador quite well at times, but we also had a decreased ability to respond back with any ongoing fluidity.
For next time I’m not sure how we can improve this. Now that we have had the experience of the first conference it might be easier to prepare and manage expectations for the next one. It might be best to structure the meeting “topically,” perhaps around specific images, arguments, monuments, pieces of architecture, or articles. You know something more tangible about our respective cities that might prove to aid interaction ‘between’ groups. That way, we would generate a common basis for interaction, if indeed the technology pulls through.
It was very interesting to notice that even though the virtual, in one sense at least, limits the barriers of geographical distance, it was apparently obvious to us that the duration between Edmonton and Salvador is indeed vast ‘in reality,’ at least geographically. And, no, I don’t think this a bold statement at all. All I am saying is that the virtual attempts to mend rigid separations, disparate places, ideologies, and spaces. Yet, it is irreducibly faced with its own failure to do so. The video conference itself speaks to this.
To understand the virtual as a universal is important in this sense. More often than not, the virtual tells us far less about ‘pure uninterrupted communication,’ or about the real of the other in its ‘essence’, and perhaps much more about the failures of the universal to actually constitute a universal! The universal-virtual is always at pains to hide its own lack as a totalizing signifier, since it is never completely synonymous with the singularity of each site. If it was, this would make the virtual non-universal and particular in nature. So, as I said above, the virtual is known more by what it fails to explain, and also by what it obscures in its attempt to become universal.
This should connect with Rob’s understanding of the virtual city in the paper he delivered. We understand the city and the relationships between things in highly abstract, but personalized and subjective ways (in this sense, no two maps of the same city ever coincide – there is always a ‘gap’ between perspectives). If anything, the image of the city, as Lefebvre was quoted as saying in Rob’s talk, is like the video conference as it unfolded. The metaphor of the city as a ‘blind field’ was being performed before our very eyes! Except in our case, it had much to do with international communication and interaction.
I might venture (on a limb, no doubt) to say that this helps us to understand the failure of the nation-state to wither away. That is, there is always a gaping remainder between self and other, similarity and difference, proximity and distance. These ‘separations’ makes the nation as a state resist any complete sense of withering. There may never be a condition of one world state, and for a variety of reasons. The nation represents the enduring survival of the ‘us’ and the ‘them’, if only because of geographical/proximal distance. There is never a complete “One”, but only universal attempts to make the multiple singular. These hegemonic attempts always ‘see things incompletely.’
“Between fields, which are regions of force and conflict, there are blind fields. These are not merely dark and uncertain, poorly explored, but blind in the sense that there is a blindspot on the retina… The centre of vision doesn’t see and doesn’t know it is blind… The urban…remains unseen. We still don’t see it. Is it simply that our eye has been shaped (mis-shaped) by the earlier landscape so it can no longer see a new space? … It’s not just a question of lack of education but of occlusion. We see things incompletely. (Lefebvre 2003:29).