Idly surfing a while back I came across a blog post detailing a stunt that seemed gloriously irreverent:
“…it would have all the trappings of a conference, just without the conference.”
I forgot all about it for a while but something jogged my memory and I decided to get to the bottom of it. The actual story features the noted art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, and while still a lovely tale, it’s less of a stunt and more of a considered approach to an intricate problem, namely the best way of bringing together thinkers from two wildly differing fields. The below is taken from this interview with Edge:
We thought we’d do a conference there, but then talking to Ernst, we actually realized that that was again wrong, because to some extent why would we do a conference with artists and scientists who had never met, and who would feel put on the spot. Instead, we decided that the most important thing would be to create a contact zone, which wouldn’t put people on the spot, where something could happen, but nothing had to happen.
I feel very often with my projects that we cannot force things. One cannot engineer human relations. One can set the conditions under which things then happen. For that reason, we decided, a few hours before the event was supposed to take place, to cancel the conference and to just do a “non-conference.” It had all the ingredients of a conference — badges, tee shirts, bags with all the speakers’ CVs, a hotel where all the people would stay, a bus to pick them up in the morning and bring them to the science center, people at the airport picking the guests up, all of the logistics — but the conference no longer was there. It was just a coffee break.
