Beginning with, I'd like to thank Frank, Rebecca and everyone at the Martin E. Siegel Center for their support and for giving us the space here to have the round table. From our program, I want to thank the Sydney E. Cohn Chair, Distinguished Professor Marvin Carlson, who's here with us. I'd also like to thank the Vera Malry-Rodgers Chair, Distinguished Professor David Savrin. The PhD program in theater and performance at the Graduate Center was also instrumental in making this event happen, especially our executive officer, Peter Eckersall, you're in the front row, and our assistant program officer, Lynette Gibson. We received a grant from the Doctoral Students Council to make this day possible. The Doctoral Theater Students Association, several students who were volunteers throughout the day. And thank you to our publishing panel, Susan Tenerielo is here somewhere and Norm Hershey from Oxford University Press and Mary Ellen Sanford from TDR. I'm going to let Erica introduce everyone individually on the panel, but also I'm sure that you would not have been here were not for these people being here as well. So thank you to all of our visiting scholars. And I also want to give a special thank you to Professor Erica Lynn, who was our faculty advisor for this event and we have one extra approaching dance t-shirt. That's just for Erica. I also want to take a moment to thank my fellow conference organizing committee members, Jennifer Thompson, Elul Acunja, Phoebe Ramsey, Margaret Edwards and Janet Werther. I didn't forget any words. Finally, any conference is only as good as its attendees and the work that you bring. And I think we all saw what a high level the work was today and how generous the conversations were. And for that, we're very grateful. Thank you all so much for being here. And now I will turn it over to Professor Erica Lynn and she is an associate professor in the PhD program in theater and performance here at the Graduate Center. She's also the author of Shakespeare and the materiality of performance, which won the 2013 David Bevantine Award for best new book in early drama studies. She is currently writing a book on seasonal festivities and early modern commercial theater. And she is also co-editing a collection on early modern games. Her essay on sexuality and Morris dancing in the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater received honorable mention for the society for the study of early modern women's 2016 award for best article on women and gender. So that's a mouthful. She currently serves on the board of trustees for the Shakespeare Association of America and as the book review editor for theater survey. Thank you Ryan and thank you for the t-shirt, which I did not know was gonna happen until I walked in this morning. Welcome to everyone and thank you for joining us. It's my great pleasure to moderate this round table session. Our conference today brings together participants from many disciplines to consider how transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches help us to think through the theoretical and methodological issues at stake in research on dance movement and performance. This round table will seek to weave together some of the threads from the working sessions that took place this morning and afternoon. And so before I introduce our distinguished speakers, I just wanna give you a quick overview of our round table format. So we'll begin with each of our panelists speaking briefly about their own approaches to research on dance and movement and any key questions and discoveries that arose during the working sessions today. And then we'll have discussion among all the round table participants and finally we'll open it up to questions from the audience. Since the session is a round table, let me introduce our distinguished guests all at once and this is gonna be in alphabetical order which is how they appear on your program. Unfortunately, Nadine George Graves is unable to join us today but I'm very happy to introduce our other speakers. Thomas F. de France is Chair of African and African American Studies at Duke University. He's the author of Dancing Revelations, Alvin Ailey's embodiment of African American culture which won the 2005 de la Torobueno Prize from the Society of Dance History Scholars. His edited collections include the prize winning volume, Dancing Many Drums, Excavations in African American Dance, Black Performance Theory co-edited with Anita Gonzalez and most recently, Choreography and Corporeality, Relay in Motion co-edited with Philippa Rothfield. A past president of the Society of Dance History Scholars, Professor de France is the Director of the Research Group, Slippage, Performance, Culture, Technology and the Working Group, Black Performance Theory and the Collegium for African Desperate Dance. His many creative projects as a choreographer, dramaturg, performer, writer, director, it keeps going. It include most recently, Fast Dance Past at the Detroit Institute for the Arts and Reverse Gesture Review, commissioned by the National Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker. V.K. Preston is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto Center for Drama, Theater and Performance. Her scholarly interests include dance studies, circum-Atlantic performance, gender, performance historiography and performance studies. She's writing a book on witches dances, a project supported by the John Carter Brown Library where she's currently in residence. Professor Preston has published widely on both historical and contemporary topics, including 17th century French ballet and indigenous histories, contemporary visual and performance art and archives, dictionaries and translations. Her co-authored essay, Tendering the Flesh, the ABCs of Dave Saint-Pierre's Contemporary Utopias won the 2013 Richard Plant Award from the Canadian Association for Theater Research. She's also the recipient of an early career fellowship for the Australian Research Council's History of Emotions Project. And Professor Preston has asked me also to mention that she and the Theater Historian Julia Fawcett at UC Berkeley are convening an Aster Working Session titled, Resurrecting the Extraordinary Bodies of Pre-1850 Performance. So they would love to hear from anyone here who might be interested in applying. Deadline is June 1st. Catherine Profetta is an associate professor in the Department of Drama, Theater and Dance at Queens College CUNY. Her longest term credits are as a dramaturg with choreographer and visual artist, Ralph LeMond, 1997 to present. And as a founding member, choreographer and occasional performer with Elevator Repair Service Theater Company, 1991 to present. She's also done dramaturgical work in dance theater and points in between with Julie Tamer, Karen Coonerot, Annie Dorson, David Thompson, Alexander Veller, Nora Tumar, Grisha Coleman, Theater for a New Audience. She holds a Doctor to Fine Arts in the Yale School of Drama and the Department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. Her first book, Dramaturgy in Motion, examines the labor of the dramaturg in contemporary dance and movement performance. Her writing has also appeared in performing arts journal, theater magazine, movement research performance journal, theater dance and performance training and TCG's The Production Notebooks. Paul A. Scolieri is associate professor of dance at Barnard College where he's also affiliate faculty in Africana studies, critical interdisciplinary studies and the Columbia University PhD program in theater. He is the author of Dancing the New World, Aztec Spaniards and the Choreography of Conquest, which won the 2014 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for dance research from the court as well as garnering a special citation for the Society of Dance History Scholars de la Tuerra Bono Prize and honorable mention in the Sally Baines Publication Prize from master. A former board member of several scholarly organizations, Professor Scolieri has also served as a panelist for the NEH, the NEA, these still exist and the New York State Council of the Arts. His new book is a forthcoming biography of the father of American dance, Ted Sean, a project supported by an ACLS Burkart Fellowship. Please join me in welcoming our round table participants. So we're gonna begin with each of the speakers saying a few words about their own approaches and methods on research and dance and their own take on transdisciplinarity and any kind of questions, interesting problems, discoveries arising from the working sessions. I'm gonna ask the speakers to please use a microphone. There are several of them. This is not a round table, it's two small round tables with several mics on them. So anyhow, V.K., do you wanna get us started? This is the, oh, it's the amplifying kind, okay. I feel like I'm somebody who had a dance background. I started when I was a little kid and did ballet and then got injured and went into contemporary dance and got injured and went more and more into improvisation. The idea that I would ever write about Baroque and 17th century ballet was pretty much like, and there was a moment, it was a forced situation, it was sort of a round of exams and I spoke French, I'm a Quebecer and a Quebecer of the heart, let's say, and so I started reading some of the early ballet texts and the first one that I read again with great resistance and reluctance ended with an alchemist showing the remains of Moors burned to death as a final scene. I had lived in Warsaw, I had lived in Germany and the sort of depth of the violence utterly shocked me. And so I came to a project with a degree of resistance to the archive that was both from my own training as a dancer and from a political position. And in a weird way that's become, like somebody described it as so old, it's new again, like it's become a way of coming back to certain kinds of collections. I sometimes work with bibliographies as written out 150 years ago. What's in this collection? Why is it in this collection? Why is it together? Sometimes as a result, finding really extraordinary relationships between things that I would have thought were the most sort of contemporary way that you could look at these and finding, in fact, it's written in the introduction to the 400 year old book on page two. So I think the tendency for historians to drop out questions of sexuality, questions of gender, questions of cross-cultural transmission and right in nationhood is continually defined by what happens when you get close to archives. For that matter though, I think they can be very proximal. It's been, I started looking at 17th century French dances. I thought I was being obnoxious and intentionally so by saying, well, in the case of Kebac and I would now say much of Northeastern North America, these are lands claimed in colonial contexts by France from this period. So I look at French language material written in the Northeast as well, which in the context of Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has meant reading the sort of texts of moments of transmission, of plague, of the emergence of capitalism. And so the colonization of very near has been radical for me. I'm starting with my approach and I guess you did a little background to your approach, which I think makes sense for me too because I was definitely trained as a dancer and I was a dancer who hung out with the theater people. And so in that, going back and forth and back and forth and then also going to a school where there was no formal dance program undergrad, but there was a formal theater program, I started both in the people I associated with and what I was studying, feeling very natural crossing that supposed boundary all the time. When I joined Elevator Repair Service Theater, the first show I was the lightboard up, but starting the second show I was the choreographer and then I was in the position of trying to get these theater bodies to dance all the time. When I went to grad school I thought, okay, I also had been collaborating with Julie Tamer and basically being her dramaturg before I knew what that word meant. And when I went back to school I thought, okay, now I'm gonna go be a theater person. I'm gonna get a proper theater degree, bye bye dance. And I was just very, very lucky. I mean, I guess maybe some of you wrote my book so you know this story anyway, but I was just very lucky because Ralph Lemmon showed up at Yale School Drama at the same time as I showed up and then I didn't have to say bye bye dance and I could continue sort of going back and forth across that supposed boundary, but I really feel like the only thing that makes it a boundary is both producing structures of how work gets made and academic departments where whether the theater and the dance program are together in one department or at opposite end of campus can make a humongous difference in what kind of performing arts get made in that school. It's just about proximity and how we understand each other. So my sort of approach and interest as a scholar is to write about rehearsal rooms and training and what goes on in those spaces and that was very easy to do with this first verse book on dramaturgy and now I'm kind of in this pause wondering what the next project will be, but I do think it will be something about how bodies and minds are rehearsed and trained for performance, like not as interested in the final piece, but rather the history and the theory behind how we get there and what assumptions we have about what we're doing and how we decide what good and bad is and all that stuff. So yeah, I'm currently thinking about some kind of history and theater performer training. I'm also very interested still in the chapters of my books that were about audience and relationship to an audience and this whole idea of the artist's work configured as a gift instead of a transaction, but can we really, is that a nice pretty myth and story we tell ourselves cause everything about how art gets made is transactional these days or always was maybe, I don't know. And I'm interested in the part of the book I wrote about intercultural collaboration because it just seems to get more urgent, more interesting, more thorny, so I felt like maybe I was only scratching the surface there. But whatever I go after this sort of pause to breathe, it will probably be about the rehearsal room and the training room more than the finished piece. So I really like this format that we're doing now as our round table. So I was a very nervous child in Indianapolis, Indiana, nervous with lots of energy and so kind of living in this vibration. And the youngest of four kids and the other kids were all very sports minded. And so I knew that I wanted something else cause I had to distinguish myself. So dance and gymnastics and tumbling and doing shows on the corner for passing cars was really important with my little friends and the stuff that we would do. And then, you know, so always didn't dance but also in music and maybe it kind of speaks to transdisciplinary and you know, in my family in Indianapolis, Indiana, we all took music lessons. So this is kind of before. So everyone played an instrument of some sort not like one of those families but just, you know, it's what you do as your aspirational middle class. So playing the piano and playing the cello and playing the string bass and kind of kept all that going. And then those interests between dance and music, those kinds of formal music. Music was much more formalized and dance was something that our family did. And then as I kind of realized that I was gonna stay engaged in the arts in that way, the writing stuff and the research came from this kind of inclination to better understand what's it doing in the world. So that's kind of always been the question that I'm chasing and still chasing it. Not so much what's it for which kind of forecloses possibility I think but what's it doing there? So what's it becoming? What's it enabling? What's it allowing? And that kind of curiosity is kind of the thing that drives the approach to research. And you know, so thinking back on being a little boy and doing shows outside of our house in Indianapolis, Indiana on the corner.  You know, like, so how does this, how does dance and performance do something and what is it trying to make possible in the world? That's for that curiosity. And then for me, working in Black Studies, I mean, I've always been like, okay, well we need so much more research on Black people.  So we just need so much more. So keep opening that space, keep opening the space, keep opening the space. So a lot of the research projects that I get involved in are spaces that, I tend to think of them as opening for a's. Like here's an idea, someone else please take that on and move it forward or move it sideways or do something against it. But that's where a lot of the projects come from, these spaces that feel like they could be opened up in different ways. I've been really curious in terms of centering kind of Black aesthetics, if you will, but then being really concerned about African-American exceptionalism, it's very complicated, you know, so as we get to travel the world or not or have conversations with people around the world, you know, there's still a very deep seated and productive cynicism and suspicion of the American exceptionalism as well as there should be. At the same time, Black American experience has produced something utterly impossible and unsolvable and just ridiculous, you know, ridiculous that has such a huge impact over the world, whether it's about claiming exceptionalism that marks it as being special in a way that's, you know, it's not about a kind of quality but a quantity of experience maybe. And so I've been thinking about that a lot and that's kind of inside the projects that I'm moving towards. I'm also lucky enough to work as an artist and something I always take from working with Katherine on her work with Ralph Lemon talking about him as an unreliable narrator and I've been really working with this as an artist, you know, we get to be unreliable narrators all the time and I can say things that I don't mean and I don't have to validate them. I don't because I'm opening a space that seems like it needs to exist now but as a researcher and working in the archives and politics of citation, I have other kinds of questions and responsibilities and tethers to other people in the room where, you know, what is responsibility to an archive or to the structures of feeling that other people have already encountered and made present. So that kind of bouncing between those two kinds of modes of address to others seems really important to me. So, I guess the theme is I started off as a dancer too. I actually wanted to be a dance professor because I thought I would get free studio space. That was my skewed sense of how academia work. But, you know, I went to an interdisciplinary graduate program, the performance studies program at NYU and really at a time where I felt like all of our conversations were dominated by questions of methodology. So, we talked endlessly about methodology but we weren't trained in any methodology even, right? So, I actually left for a bit and went to an anthropology department and started to train linguistics and figured I needed to do, it was fantastic because I also don't think I would've developed the project I ultimately developed in a disciplinary home but I felt like I needed more tools than just the kind of discussion of interdisciplinarity would allow me. So, as soon as I was done with my first project which was really started off kind of with a methodological question, how do we write about dance as we can see or some foolish sort of question like that? After I finished graduate school, I said, well, I'm gonna go study lava analysis. I'm gonna study movement and I wanna figure out a way to get back to my training and with the belief that really looking at dancing and looking at choreography and movement was going to be a vital and important way of engaging with dance and dance studies and dance history and I think it is and it's part of what I teach and it's part of what I preach to the undergraduates about learning to look not necessarily lava analysis but about movement analysis and what you see and patterns of experience and qualitative movement. All of that is important but it has almost nothing to do with my research. So, I don't really feel transdisciplinary as much as I feel sort of disciplinarily promiscuous or something, I sort of just, you know, but I think that's what came across today even in our panel today that different projects, different texts, different parts of projects require different tools, right? And I think there's a way that we are always aspiring to because we like to integrate and we like to combine and a lot of the work we deal with is calling for so many different ways of examining it and we want to make sure we capture the complexity of it. But I think, and I hope we hear from you as well, that sometimes there's something beautiful about the disciplinarium, about a kind of slow looking through one lens consistently. I just find in my own habit of reading, I prefer works that sort of, not as the ending of a way of looking at it but as a complete and thorough deep way of looking at an idea or of a phenomenon. So, it's just interesting to me that while I preach interdisciplinary and like to teach it, I have students think across different disciplinary boundaries. I also find that my own sort of increasingly as I get older and deeper into the archive is to, you know, where I situate myself as really a historian. So, that was one thing, just thinking about what is the value in always trying to privilege transdisciplinarity but we don't have to be all things at once for one. And then, but I was also thinking today and I've been thinking and probably should have been always been in the past few months, just thinking about the sort of material conditions of dance and scholarly research and thinking about how expensive projects are to travel. We were just in the last session I went to so much of, I think the underlying, what wasn't said was what is required to stay in an archive for the long duration that's necessary to get to the bottom of something, to have the funding to do that work, right? And so, all of those structures, which are really shaped the kind of possibilities for transdisciplinary that I think we're here to talk about. Does that make? Absolutely, and I think that's a wonderful touch point to talk about some of these questions, so thank you. And thank you all for some wonderful discussion during the working sessions. I'd like to take your point, Paul, about the institutional questions of access to ask about the ethics of various research methodologies. And one of the things that Tommy, you were saying about the fact that artists offer unreliable narratives because you're licensed to, right? And then the idea that is art non-transactional that Catherine brought up, right? And the fact that it's not economic means that you're outside of the realm of needing certain kinds of commodifiable notions of evidence methodology. And so I was wondering then if we can talk about what it means to have an ethical methodology. And I'm not saying it's not ethical for you to get a grant, Paul, to go to an archive and do some work, right? But just thinking about what these questions are about the ethics of a particular method, but also the ethics of transdisciplinarity given that disciplines are based in terms of these institutional structures. Something that came up in the morning session as well that I was part of. I don't know if this is right, but I was feeling, I'm thinking a lot about how expansive and how much work there needs to be done in Black Studies and Dan Studies. It's overwhelming, but also thinking that the way that the economy of academia is with book publishing, with getting jobs, it's sort of, you're driven by the need to be very original, right? And to be exceptional in that way and to be marketable in that particular way, which I think almost runs against what the field most needs, which is collaborative research, transnational research, right? The way scientists organize knowledge production, that so much of the burden of knowing these histories and these experiences are tied up in that one scholar who has a job that could fund that work, right? And so how do we actually build the, and I think this is what we're doing today too, right? But how do we build those networks to allow that kind of multiplicity? So the burden of transdisciplinarity and the depth of knowledge doesn't fall on one person and how do we create an environment that allows for that work when we have a kind of structure that's asking for individuality, differentiation, and exceptionalism? Well, when you mention ethics of research methodologies, where I go immediately, is working with people who are still alive and how I suppose there's an ethics of how I represent someone who's deceased that exists as well, but the consequences feel much more acute if I'm representing someone who's still here and who doesn't like the way they're represented. And it's funny how Tommy mentions Ralph Lemon's unreliability because I think of this, I thought of this directly when I'm sort of telling tales from the rehearsal room because Ralph Lemon tells tales from the rehearsal room within the context of his work too and he sits down and he talks to the audience on a mic and he says, oh yeah, after I did this exercise, Dow Jones wouldn't talk to me for four years and I know it was just six months, you know, but it sounds better and that's, you know, he's right within his art. And so I'm very conscious when I'm telling these stories of the rehearsal room in my books of like, well, what is my responsibility? I don't have the same freedom Ralph does, but on the other hand, we all heard in the publishing session today that narrative is how we re, I kind of, there are ways to resist that a little bit, but mostly I just buy it. Like I love a good story, a story draws me in so I believe in the power of story it's just a question of when our story is manipulative and unethical in the way we tell them. So I just, I have come up with a way to try and be rigorous in the way I take notes and I come up with a way to check with people later on if what I think happened is what they think happened to, but then I also have to, and it's in my book, just put a big disclaimer that there are gonna be multiple stories of what happened and this is what it looked like from my lens. And with that, I hope my ethical bases are covered if awareness of the dilemma is enough to cover my ethical bases that I'm okay, but it's always a little more than just that. I think the ethics question is the key question and I think by becoming something of an accidental historian who approached it as a performer, like you're gonna let me look at these things, okay, you know, and then actually started to accumulate some experiences, I entered more almost philologically, like following particular words, following particular scenarios and constructions that repeat over time. What that has led me to and that of course is also your own intuition and taste and has actually engaged me in levels of ethics. I certainly never entered into a dance archive expecting to be looking for. The persecutions, when I started reading, and it was also a bit imposed for whatever reason that works for me I guess, but when I started reading The Witch Stuff, I was like, I don't need that, I already do queer stuff and I do this and I'm like, why do I also wanna add all this second wave feminist stuff? And then I started reading about histories of sexual violence and histories of people imprisoned without trial for three years and having multiple children by their wardens and you're like, oh, this is not gonna be an easy archive and it's entirely engaged with histories of colonization and race and inequality and disability. And so that was one site in which we're somewhere where the sort of popular slighting that's so habitual of a class of historical victims had actually concealed for me too how serious some of these constructions that are ingrained into Disney movies and every other thing, right? That they're still ongoing machines of you have to defeat The Witch by the end of the children's book. And then in another context, but not in disconnected archives, similarly around some of the language archives, I started because I found some dance terminology in a French and Wanda, which is here on language texts in 2011 started slowly working away at this text and finding it very interesting. I didn't have the historical context of what I was looking at. What I was looking at was a very deep set of translations, hundreds of pages of translations for an indigenous language that was, at least from what I was realizing at the time, no longer spoken. And then now realizing it's in the middle of a rivification process that people are teaching and learning languages in a way that all of the questions about past and present are a culturally not commensurate, but these archives are the archives of languages of the very lands that we're on that evade some of the questions of NAGPRO, which is the return of remains. So we're ending up in profoundly ethical questions.  So yeah, it's heavy. I'm thinking about this question of who gets to tell whose story in appropriation. So we're not done with appropriation, I'm fair how to talk about it yet. But that's the heart of this kind of another heart. There are lots of hearts to this question of ethical, the ethics of research methodologies, but it's like how do you, so there's a question of method and there's a question of object and there's a question of address. And those are the things that I like to try to think about and entangle them and let them coerce and let them fall into each other, but they can be entangled and made distinctive and then we don't experience them maybe in our lives that way separately, but it can be useful to set an ethical compass to think about address object and approach, what was the third one, sorry, address object and method, thank you. Sorry, but to kind of think about like how, who's story is getting told and who's the story telling for. I think the last four or five years I've been trying to center black people and that's entirely imagined, it's an imaginative spectrum of space because what does that even mean? But trying to center black people in the concept of the theoretical projects. So to do that though, and this came up in our group, like we're thinking about Michael Jackson, but if we center Michael Jackson in tradition of black performance in the US, not always in relationship to pop culture and largely white audiences, but in relationship to itself, so public performance in relationship to church practice where you get a larger group of mostly black people and keep moving that back to the spaces of the family where maybe it's all black people. So centering that as a way to start thinking about what Michael Jackson's up to could maybe produce a different approach to a part of a project. So maybe that's just an ethical kind of consideration is about how are we addressing the objects, how are we conceiving of the objects and what is it we need the objects to do in the world? Because that's ultimately the most important ethical question is what do we want our research to do? How is it helping reveal process as you're saying or reveal narratives of dance that are long gone but can help us understand what's happening now? Yeah, I keep, for me, ethics right now, I'm writing this biography of Ted Sean and so much of it is, and I'm not trained to write a biography, but there's a lot of theories of biography and life writing that are dealing with all of these ethical issues, some of which I don't necessarily consider ethical. It's just about sort of bourgeois values. It's not about a political ethics. But I'm grateful that the Ted Sean archive is vast and all over the place and I mean that literally in different archives from Kinsey's archives with sexual histories that Kinsey scientists took of dancers in the basement of a dance bookshop on 57th Street, right? Yeah, and so these dancers form part of the Kinsey report including Sean's, so they're, and then also reading redacted letters between gay dancers during World War II, so reading through the redactions. So I'm already, and the Kinsey archives are closed, you could read through them, but you can't read the exact reports. There's a very calculated, they're closed off to read the act and they're in a kind of code that you can't read unless you're one of the scientists. But there, you could read general information about them. So I'm reading an archive that's already been redacted, right? And kind of politically around sexuality and then the letters between, there's 50 years of letters between Ted Sean and Ruth St. Denis, which are, here are these two extremely public people kind of giving a face for what dance might mean or naming American dance, but their letters to one another are these painful personal stories of these two queer people trying to define what it meant to be married dancers in America, right? And so to think, for me the project is actually what's going on, this internal struggle and reading and in contact with all of these theorists of sexuality, Havelock Ellis, the father of Eugenics was a counselor to them both, right? So it just, to me the story is about that gap between this very public formation of dance and how it relates to these very personal sexual histories that both were trying very hard to manage. And of course, Ted Sean leaves this great letter to all my future biographers. Here are my suggestions of how to write this book, right? And he writes his own memoir and then in 69, write a Stonewall is about to happen, decides he needs to tell the story again. This is actually after Ruth's death and he says he needs to tell the story again. Basically, he wants to say how his life has sort of informed the social change that has happened around gay identity and he has a heart attack in the middle of it. Once he starts talking about Martha Graham, which in a way was sort of, but this is all to say that there was a desire, there was tremendous, the way I sort of reconcile it one way is that there was a tremendous desire for him to tell a story about and revalue his life and his work and sort of what he was very clear about the sort of racist, anti-Semitic, even deeply homophobic parts of his own life and writings and trying to amend for it. But I guess it's to say, I have to read that. I mean, even though it's the most deeply personal thing, it's actually what was driving his vision of a merit for dance and training a sort of legacy that we still sort of have with us. Yeah, I find this fascinating because what each of you are talking about in different ways is a combination of how we understand absence, what's missing, right? And then how we understand relation, right? And that relation can be between two people that you're actually talking about in your work or it can be about your own position relative to the people that you're speaking for and this speaks to Tommy's point about who's doing the telling, right? And what your relationship to that is and it speaks to Katharine's point about what your status is when you don't agree with somebody else's story, right? There are two realities happening simultaneously and what happens in the archives, right? When the extent evidence that's remaining is all from one side because the other side has been decimated but then the absence is then reimagined in a different way when you have a language that is now reliving in a different way. And so I was wondering if we could think about that question then, right? Of absence and relation to our objects of study, right? In asking that question then, well, what do we want the research to do? This is Tommy's question, right? It depends on what we want it to do and we each have different goals. It's good, you know, it's fantastic that we have different goals and different ambitions and different, you know, sort of readerships and addresses to students or other faculty or colleagues around the world. And that's just, you know, it's pretty glorious. It's not valuing one over another. It's recognizing difference and, you know, this language of diversity has come back into the academy big time in the last three years and, you know, I think it's about biogenetic diversity is we're all kind of understanding climate change more deeply and understanding the need for diversity and the kind of salary level, if you will, and organic level, but then, you know, that turns back into the academic discourse of we need diversity approaches and experience and backgrounds. But this question came up in our group two about absence and we didn't actually address a femorality but kind of got in there and we got into some thorny but juicy part about choreography and improvisation. But there is a way that these questions are kind of, you know, is the dance there or what are the remains of the performance? We're not, and I say that in a snarky way, we're not done with those questions but we're trying to kind of resist them, you know, in this kind of way that dance is absent, it's an absent present, you know, we know we're there but I think even your question brings us back into that encounter in a certain kind of way. And it is a challenge for dance. I mean, I think of it in terms of dance really is trying to live outside of language and then our task is to keep fixing it back into language like relentlessly. We're gonna make it work on this, you know, on this little keyboard. It's gonna fit somehow. And, you know, what we know from kind of everything that we do that we, you know, need outsides of language that dance can help us with that. Not always, not only but can help us towards that. So, you know, maybe absence is more like the jigsaw puzzle and it's not that something's missing but it's just that parts of it are in other places than we think they might be. I'm gonna jump in there. That's such a, I loved your dramatization of our trying to fix it into the computer. Here was my ridiculous attempt to resolve that problem this semester. I taught a course for undergraduates at the New York Public Library of Performing Arts trying to bridge digital humanities with archival research to see if I could, you know, we could begin to have that conversation. It also gets students excited about doing archival work but also to foray into digital humanities and my sort of, don't laugh at me, but my attempt was to also say, how do we confront dance and the archival films on their own terms, right? How do we actually, can we make visual arguments that places dance and choreography at the center of a kind of experience of learning or interpretation? So it was sort of, to be really brief, we developed this software that allows you to, and the New York Public Library actually started this but we sort of developed it where you could juxtapose video or students learn basic film editing so they could kind of manipulate the film that we had permission to manipulate which was actually a great sort of choreographic analysis because they were literally transforming choreography or trying to adapt it according to, you know, against and alongside what the actual source of the material was, right? Which was 16 millimeter film put onto VHS then digitized and now on YouTube, right? So then they were transforming it once again but the sort of, to wrap, you know, and then annotation and there were all these tools that they learned trying to create an experience where we can make, create visual arguments that allowed dance to sort of reveal something central of historical significance without necessarily, you know, outside of or complimented somehow with language. Anyway, the lesson was, right, that even how these archives were also a type of absence, right? You could look at a Pavlova film of a ballet, right? And we have the archive, this one, you know, 45 second clip of her dancing, right? But it's not the dance in history, it is just, you know, some clip of her performing it not on the stage where she did perform it, not with the lighting or with the live music or even, you know, so it sort of became amazing in this exercise was how lighting the actual archive was, right? How in for some dance that, you know, especially around film, that how limiting it actually is to some of the arguments that we wanna make or the historical questions that we have. I think one of the things that it can do also, and I love that you're engaging the archive by playing with it, is also that I find it allows us to defamiliarize any of the concepts. It defamiliarizes time, it defamiliarizes the idea of a stage, it defamiliarizes. So any one of these things, it's not just that you can historicize it, it's that you begin to have plural ways in which these things always already were, but I read recently that people using different languages have different senses of duration of time amongst other things, right? So there are these ways in which by continuing to be quite close to some of these materials, you're actually making them stranger and stranger. I mean, we know that from all of these other forms, but to say, why have dance and aesthetics? Why not have it in medicine? Not from a contemporary 21st century medicine, but because it is in medicine, according to all sorts of cultural practices. So by allowing that, I think it has created spaces for me and for, I mean, it's not intended as a selfish project, but of care and of attention that I think are generous ways of allowing ourselves to educate and be with each other with questions. I think the ones that came up that I thought were very tender in our groups today were transmission in that case, that was Janet's project of disease as well as cross-generational work. And McGreed also talking beautifully about care. There are items that are in the archives because they've been sealed but stolen, but there are also those that have been cared for into that moment in time. And so to be able to see the care and to be able to apprehend questions of transmission has actually been, I'm not saying that I'm arguing for a recuperative process, but a way in which like a real appreciation of a plurality of cultural practices that don't fit any particular category but can tend to other possibilities has allowed dance to not be stuck in these on the stage, on the particular timeframe, chronology, et cetera. I think I have just a very brief answer to this idea of engaging absence and my immediate answer when I thought of your question was just that I'm not so sure that I wanna deal with absence as much as what I'm really dealing with is trying to make visible what we don't see but is there so it isn't really absent or to speak what's unsaid. And so it's about saying actually this isn't an absence. You just thought it was. And to Tommy's question of why do we try to put it into that thing, two words. I think two things, we try to convey it to people who don't have it in their bodies, who don't dance it and as a way of maybe transmission whether that actually leads to them moving or leads to just their greater understanding of what the heck we're doing. But also to convey to other movers, other performers across time. So speak to the performers, the dancers of the future or we the performers of the present read something. Say Ted Sean said about what he was doing in the past and that kind of transmission. Yeah, it's interesting that you all picked up on the absence part because I was thinking of it not as absence presence as a binary, but of absence and relation, right? And so I was thinking about then the second part of it you talked a lot about this kind of across temporal relation, right? And I'm wondering like is this specific to dance studies in some way? Is this, what happens in terms of a transdisciplinary interdisciplinary approach? And does it change our relation to my thinking of Catherine's comment earlier about how it's different if you're talking about live versus dead subjects, right? But also I'm thinking about the earlier working sessions where we're talking about not just interrelationship but intra-relationship relationships within ourselves but then also complicating the notion of where the edge of the self is which came up just earlier in our round table talking about collaboratives versus individuals. It's amazingly huge. I don't know that it's just for dance but dances of our, we tend to think of it as being of our bodies or of our spirits or of our kind of volition or, so there's an oveness to dance maybe that's important here that dances of something that is not in its name. Like it's not just of dance. Dance does all these other things. It doesn't just dance. So there's always this kind of relation. I was just thinking as you were talking though about being an improviser and the kind of imagery that comes through, we learn dance body to body but then we also learn it in relationship to sound and smell and to video and other kinds of archives as well, written archives and this kind of like constant streaming of information that goes all over the body and through all kinds of imagery as you're performing. And I think as researchers we do that too. So this kind of relationship to, I mean Paul's been talking about it so much like your relationship to Ted Sean and St. Denis keeps changing day to day as you reflect more and more on these archives. So I don't think that's just for dance but I think we're maybe more attuned to it because we are in the space of the sensorium as we're trying to do our research in certain kind of ways. This came up in the morning session too. I think also maybe if we think about dance as an art or dance as religious practice or social practice it's already tied up to some ideas of historicity, right? So to take on dance is already to deal with someone engaging with a kind of tradition and history. It's already somehow engaged with, the choreographic is already not always but already tied in with the historiographic. And what I hear you saying is that it already implies within it a pastness and it's the relationship to the pastness that's part of what the choreography is, right? That's what you're saying, I think. Now it's an interesting thing, especially given, and I mean V.K. and Katherine, you should feel free to jump in here at any time. In the working sessions, in the morning the one that I was a part of talked a lot about corporeality in terms of healing and healing being a process that has no temporal endpoint and that the point is it's a process, right? And so to think about that question then of a kind of completely different notion of temporality then arose in the afternoon session that I audited in thinking about exactly how it is that we can even recuperate something in an archive that to already treat it as separate from us that we can go into an archive and have any access to some embodied practice from a historical past is to separate out that embodied practice from our current own embodied practice as the person who's doing the research. And there's a relationship to that back to the morning session which was thinking about the way in which the body becomes ill, when the body becomes ill you understand it as object, right? Or when you understand it as object it is ill because it's not integral in a certain way. And so I just wanna kind of trouble that boundary a little bit and think about that in relation to temporality. I was Chloe Ray Edmondson's work also raised the question, yes, of drunken times and intoxicated times. So I think that there were these, I was in both of the same session so there were these extraordinarily beautiful kinds of conversations about healing. And I also found that, I mean certainly intoxication and drunkenness can be parts of healing also, right? But they can also be parts of loss and any number of things. So I think there are ways in which, even if we can think about the self-loss and exploitation and all of these things as being ingrained within the sensorium and the ways in which we apprehend moving through the world and temporality and memory and so on, that I think some of the forms that we're interested in bringing into conversation allow us a complexity of both metaphor and trace and memory that allow us into pressing the limits of the categories so that it isn't only is it healing or is it intoxication or is it appropriation or is it participation and immersion but that this continual movement through can be looked back upon as any of these one, these moments and scatter and refrain somewhere else. And I think that's where the capacity to be collaborative gets very exciting as you follow one thread and then you say, oh okay that has fallen into this existing pattern and how do we take the thinking somewhere else?  Yeah, but just right there, I mean that, so it kind of tilts to what's next or maybe it's not what's next, but we have gotta disrupt this single authored manuscript project.  But you know, it's really hard, these structures, these institutional structures keep wanting us to claim solo space is what you were saying. But you know, I don't know if we have the power but we gotta do it, we just have to. We have to push against that and you know, what you're talking about collaboratively it's just, you know, that's just what has to happen, sorry. You don't have words. You don't need to apologize for that. I think we definitely agree with you on that and I think that's an interesting problem then, right? Is this something that we can contribute to perhaps by talking about process in our research so that what we're privileging in the work itself is something other than the product, right? Which is understood as a commodifiable entity that's gonna be attached to a single individual, right? And that might be one possible direction. Are there other possible directions or methods that you can think of to make live Tommy's manifesto and reality? No, I was just gonna ask Tommy how he wanted to do it. But I mean, it does seem like it's easier first to bust up the individual part than the commodification part. That seems to me even harder, at least to where I'm thinking right now. I mean, we have lots of examples now in all kinds of activist circles of, you know, activist projects that don't claim authorship and don't claim identity and don't claim necessarily sort of beginning levels or ends but claim space as projects. So we know it's possible, but these are the kind of special artists type people doing this, artist, intellectual, activist. There's like kind of this mass consumption of social media and we had this really good conversation about mass camp that came up in our group that was just fantastic for me to think of it that way or for all of us. But trying to make the space where yeah, the commodity part, it's just tough. I mean, you know, people are growing into lives thinking that branding themselves is the way to kind of achieve something that's sustainable and gets beyond bare life. And you know, there's a way that the world we're in is saying that that's true. So then how do we as intellectuals, as academics, as dance instructors, as artists, how do we help resist that and make open spaces? You know, the first thing I would do is hand the mic out to someone and say enough of us. Where are we? You know, that's breaking up the individual is to drop the mic, to share the mic, to stop soul offering anything, to make collective spaces. And you know, if you stay in the game long enough, it does become possible. But then the ethical question has to keep being reignited. Where are my ethics? You know, it's not about me. So what does it mean it's about? How can we collaborate and what will that look like and make space in our lives and our daily choice making? Yeah, I was thinking about this and you were talking about how this is a world that values branding of our own stories and our own identities, that we started the session telling our personal stories, right? And so I'm curious, how has your story changed over time in relation to your research? Wait, repeat that question exactly. I was just saying that in this society it's time of saying that values branding of individual identity or individual narratives, right?  But in this round table, or as I said, two small round tables, the conversation began by each of you telling your stories, right? And I'm wondering how your story has changed over time. We've been telling these stories a long time, but they're not the same, each iteration. And so I'm wondering how your research has affected that narrative of yourself that you tell as the narrative to get to the research. I, since I started that pattern for better or for worse, I'll take that one up. I'm just like, there are little eyes looking up at this guy, or tables. I think that I see the criticism of beginning with the personal narrative as the point of entry in, but I think that also what I was doing with that to an extent was what you're raising now, which was that I went in each time with a, it's a habit, oppositional stance in relationship to a topic. And each time by being in that oppositional stance found myself changing and other possibilities, including ones that I would certainly now be like, oh no, that's not where I wanna go with my work. But the practices of scholarship that included creative labor and collaboration allowed for I think levels of mutability with that that I wouldn't say whether or not they def, I mean, certainly there are questions of privilege. I wouldn't say that they defy the question of commodification, but they've allowed a reflection on embodiment relationship, location, politics of history and art that have, I think substantially changed at each iteration and that that for me is what I'm trying to share when I'm teaching and otherwise, is that it's not a continual South authorship kind of scenario, but that these are tools that allow pushing those frameworks imposed on us in these marketed kinds of ways into playful and oppositional stances that can be transformative, even if that transformation is its own paradigm, but also small, it can be big. I'm trying to formulate a thought here. I mean, mostly where I went to is like, yeah, why did we all start with a story? But it's so powerful, right? And I think that goes to what we were saying about in publishing to and giving the book a sense of a story and the question of whether stories are lies, because you shape them to have a certain affect and to have a certain kind of journey. And I've also always been dealing with narrative in dance and whether dance can escape narrative or whether it can't quite because of how we perceive something, we perceive and understand the world in terms of story or do we? I think we do. So I don't know, the story always shifts. It has to because I think because of our distrust of stories.  And I think I'm repeating lies about myself even if they were once true. So yeah, it's not a fully shaped thought but those are thoughts that came up. Yeah, I don't know if the stories changed so much as I'm at a weird time in my life where I'm beginning to think of my work very differently that I think, and I still feel politically, personally motivated on how I choose how I choose to spend my time on what topics I wanna write about. But I also have a sense that that'll come through no matter what I'm writing about. And I've sort of been thinking about what the next few years are or projects I take on. I'm sort of not thinking only about, I'm thinking, well, I need to know this because I don't know anyone else who knows this and I feel sort of obligation to the field or to my students. It's a very different thing. And I think this was also a colleague of mine who recently retired and she gave me boxes of research. And it was basically projects that I think she was going to finish and realizing, oh, I'm already collecting that box of things that I think I'm going to get to write and to think about and follow up on. And she gave me the box and said, you have to finish the box. And now I have students and grad students who are going and I'm like, you have to write this, right?  What's relevant? I also feel like, you know, I'm based in New York. I have the dance division down the block from me and all of these archives, I feel a responsibility, even though my, I have to say my first project was, how can I not go to the dance division of the New York Public Library? Right, because it was in a terrible state. But now I feel like the sort of obligation to that amazing institution and what it has there, not that it's going to define all of my work, but I do feel a different sense of responsibility and sort of about what I feel, you know, I think are the glaring gaps in our shared history of dance and performance studies. This raised for me quickly the thought too, we were talking about who is telling histories and who can and I also would say that almost everything I choose is a bilingual history. And I think that sometimes we absolutely miss telling the story that's shared or looking at the trace that is of more than one already. And of course, in some ways you could say the trace itself is always more than one, et cetera. But that if we believe that things are in utterly separate categories, there is no story really to tell. But that as we actually take the time with what's in between and there isn't a between to be in between of, but if we understand that there are complex shared stories that are habitually told in oppositional forms, that that is continually repeating the structure of a category that is itself doing. And I think as much as I appreciate performance and performance studies, the kinds of voices that come from the Butler thing of performance and performativity are actually in many ways the structure itself. That if we understand that that repetition is authority, then we can also push against that structure in doing that work. And just one quick extra thought, I was thinking about the nature of narratives and individualism since you were, and it's very, very frequent that we attach a story to an individual. There's a protagonist, but it's not essential. That's not an essential connection. We can tell stories about groups. We can tell stories about relationships that are complex and large webs. We don't have to tell the story of Oedipus over and over again, right? I think that, unless Tommy wanted to say anything. Yeah, I guess it took me a minute to think it through. Those stories change.  Never, never, never, never. So there's a way that how I entered the academy and when and who I thought I was and who I thought I wanted to be, that's all changed through time, you know, in relationship to my own creative practice, my writing practice. So maybe it's inside everything that we're saying to each other about these things are not fixed and how we stay curious. Stay thirsty, my friend. But how we stay kind of curious about possibilities is what makes more possibility.   You know, we need queer kids a color in this room. So, you know, that was very, that was in your point too. It's like, so it was very intentional, even though it's not like I pre-planned saying something. But it's like, it's an intentionality about our choice-making and how we're narrating stories, you're narrating ourselves or being oppositional. But then being suspicious, always suspicious, always a little bit bitter, you know, black art is bitter, you know, but keeping those things going alongside each other seems just really, really urgent to stay engaged in this way of skepticism that I think you're helping us remind us. Well, I think that, I mean, this is an interesting opportunity then to bring in our audience. And we have some time for questions from the audience for all of our panelists. Thank you, Jennifer and Elul, for helping their microphones so that you can properly be heard. Thank you guys so much. This is incredible. And I guess I just wanna, in terms of how we told these introductory stories today, there's something for me as someone who was a little kid who was a dancer and came to the academy and all of these things to hear lauded scholars in a room tell the stories of their professional academic trajectories as lauded researchers starting with when I was a kid dancing, right? And that that's not the thing to set aside that de-legitimizes us, but that that can be a tool of legitimation. It was really powerful actually. So to be in this building and have those stories, I really appreciate, thank you. Yeah, in the session D that VK was, you were leading, you were talking about or a term came up, the eroticism of the archive, which I came in part way through, but I came to understand it as this sort of like sensual, intuitive encounter and personal encounter with the archive in a way to, yeah, in a way to, and the ethics, the ethics of approaching the archive from a very personal point of view. And this story sharing echoes that for me, that there's actually like an eroticism to the story sharing, to take it there, you know? But there's an ethic to it also, I guess, that's interesting in terms of our collectivity as everyone in this room, you know? By bringing yourself and your story to the table, there's like a certain collective dance as we then move towards idea sharing, to begin from the personal is a really beautiful place to begin. I'm nervous for some reason. There's a question over here on the right. Oh, I have a question, I'm sorry. You can go first and then we'll bring the microphone over here and you can go next. I wanted to ask you about, so there was a recurring kind of, I think, theme about stories, both your own, but also your work as a story and bringing to light of processes or of things that belong or were in the archive and how do you resurface them and so on. And I was wondering, so this is a question that's not about methodology as such, but rather perhaps about the dance of the work or the performance of the work itself and of the product of the work and how, if at all, does your, our emphasis and attention to non-representational modes of being inform the product of our work. Does someone want to take that up? That's a good question. I like this question of the non-representational and very complex expanded questions of the memetic and the non-memetic in its relationship to colonization and so on, I think, are at the center. One of the places where that's come up, I think the essay's coming out in a little while, but for me was looking at lines drawn in gold and silver and so when you look at them and like I'm just seeing it now and maybe it's a trick of my particular eyes, but things that glint, things that reflect do something to the visually field that's quite different than representation, I think, like that it has this moment of relation that's cast that I will see a glint off. I'm seeing it from people's plastic right now, but name tags that will be quite different from the next person who's looking from a different angle. And so looking at these also then also said, well, where is this gold and silver coming from? This gold and silver is coming from the extractivism of the colonial project. And so it has been a way to write closely to the sensorium in a certain way, but also to look at that as scriptive and in relationship to scripts that have a history, like the history of paper is of deforestation too, look at that. So allowing both to be in a dance, as you said, like what's the dance of the project? What's the dance of the labor that we're attending to? Like Vinardizi has this book about the construction of the stage that is also the ecological destruction of forests being part of the same moment. Whether it's, and there are reasons to critique the Anthropocene as a model. But some of these questions, when we bring the question of ecology or the question of perception or non-representation, we can also come back to, well, what is the material and economic structure that's shot through with the way we perceive? And so I think that's where I've been thinking about it. Thank you so much. I'm inspired by so many things that flow between you. One thing that keeps ringing in my head is collaboration. So I wanna ask a question about collaboration. So among scholars, but also with other kinds of interlocutors, dancers that we write about. And I'm particularly interested in collaborations across ontological fields, not only the ontological taxonomic fields of our disciplines. That was redundant, but I think it's because I don't know how to say it. Taxonomies and all that. But also ontological in terms of the pluriversal condition that we live in as human beings that under modernity coloniality is forced into the universal ontology. So how do we talk across ontologies and collaborate as equals across those ontologies? It's something that I'm experimenting with in my own work. And a question came up during the session. I think your name is Ante? Ante asked me a question that bothers me, that I ask myself all the time that I'm trying to fit all these worlds on this little machine made out of extracted materials. Just why do I refer to these legitimizing scholars from the canon? And why don't I just have the conversation with the interlocutors? And I work within the field of, well, it's not a field, it's just a practice of contemporary indigenous dance in Mesoamerica. So I have two versions of articles I'm working on. One, which is for you guys. And one, which is for my friends. And I don't know how to make those connect. And then finally, I'll make this real quick. And then the archive and the eroticism of the archive and objects, because the, well, my friends who I work with, have relationalities with objects that are very intimate. And how do we listen to the objects of dance, right? So I was a research fellow at NMAI, National Museum of American Indian. And I encourage anybody who's interested in archives to go because there's a ceremony room they're referred to as grandfathers and grandmothers. And it's just a fascinating place. So just think about that. So thank you. Do you feel those projects have to come together? And I ask because it's, I think it's a great impulse we have, but I feel like so much of our conversations have been trying to, it's a great impulse, to bridge and connect, but also understanding that not all of these arguments and addresses, right, what Tommy was saying. I'm just curious to know if you could say something about, because I think it's a fascinating question. I think about my work and what does this mean to, you know, or I get pushed back from, you know, dancers or people, folklore dancers who are invested in histories of Mexican dance. But I'm curious, do you feel that these two need to come together? These registers of thought or, I mean, are they different ideas that create, you know, that do different things in different spaces? Your book actually, which I'm reading now, is making me think about that even more because especially in Mesoamerica, we have, we had libraries of texts about movement practices and they're gone. And so, and now we have contemporary Mayans and Nawa peoples and others who are, it's not recuperating, but they're continuing.  This idea, you know, it's not, yeah. Yeah, there's literacy in indigenous societies. And it's continuing. So on the one hand, maybe these worlds don't need to talk to each other. And that's okay, maybe. But on the other hand, and actually from, and I'm talking about Grupo Sotsil, my principal interlocutors and friends and collaborators right now in Guatemala, they want to talk to the world. They want to read you. They want to read your work. I tell them, oh, I'm reading this and this is the idea. What do you think of this? Well, from what you tell me, sounds pretty interesting, but I don't know if I understand. We'd like to read it one day, but it's all in English. Most of it is in English. So there's not a one answer, but there's facets. There's possibilities. And I'm interested in those possibilities. And I'm interested in knowing how you see those possibilities and how you're working through them, if at all. I mean, I know among us, right? But also beyond this thing that we're in, it's called the Academy. Do you want to speak to that issue? The proliferation perhaps and expansiveness that we can communicate with and connect with others. I only have a few quick thoughts. It's a massive and important question. And I just wonder what about it? I agree with Paul. It doesn't have to be the same project, but what about an expanded concept of translation rather than just translating the book for your friends and collaborators? What about a way of writing which translates ideas from, because it's really just about, it's about different audiences and different languages and languages not just in the most literal sense. But if you feel your role as a bridge, then that function can be in your writing. And no, maybe you don't write one thing, but maybe you do write two things that kind of approach each other. Other questions? Can I ask one? Yeah, I think we have time for one more. So I think it's only appropriate, Jennifer. This is a bit of a practical question. I was so, Tommy, inspired by what you were saying or just felt it so resonant, that sense of needing to just push out of this individualized authorship thing, right? And that these things that are required by the Academy, by us. And then in particular, feeling our own position, which is extremely precarious at the beginning of our careers. Are there avenues? Are there places? Are there directions where you see sort of like tangible avenues to kind of push beyond that or ways to collaborate? Because it's something that I think about and dream about, but it's hard to find an avenue for it or a space for it that feels like you can hold on to something. You're not wrong. And of course, when it doubles into details, it sounds great to get passionate, but then what does that mean? You know, so Paul's involved with digital humanities kind of initiatives. And these initiatives are circling back. So there's a way that, you know, the UK keeps reminding us that we're always engaged in these histories that are so deep and wide and that keep telling us the same things over and over again, but we fail to recognize them again and again. So this model of science as the model for arts research predicts a possibility for collaboration. We resisted for the years I've been in the Academy and the humanities we've resisted. We're not scientists. We don't do these co-author. That's not what we're about. But that's actually a model. So you co-author, you have five authors. The place in the ranking that you are tells you how high it goes on your list. Well, this is new for the humanities because we've grown up in a system that was individual investigator, individual PI or PI and then others, but one person telling the story. But there are models in other fields of the Academy. So we're just gonna go into the Academy so that model could be useful for us to start doing more co-authored. There are collective publications coming out. I know that the postdoc I've been fortunate enough to be affiliated with for the last three years is publishing pieces as collectives, creating artwork and creating publications as collectives. So that's another model that's, the question is then does, do big poobag full professors recognize that? And I'm just like, well yeah, some do. So then you gotta find your allies and find your advocates and the people who will stand up for you and pound on the table and say, this collective model is, this is what we need or this is what's possible. But I think that the science model is as bankrupt as it might seem does give us evidence of another way it's thinking about the kind of work we're doing in a way that's already valued inside the academic corridors, if you will. So digital humanities can help build us towards those models as unfortunate as they might be, but there's something else. It probably should have ended with Tommy's amazing thing. But one of the things, yeah, I mean, I think one part is to be able to choose one's collaborators. I think that's, I mean, it's not always, but it's an important part of it. But one of the things that I wanted to say was I went to a history conference and I sort of went, you know, somebody invited me, I was very excited, but I didn't necessarily expect to see a whole ton of collaborative models coming out of that particular site. And there were a number of them and they were amazing. And one of them, and they very much respond to the political moment, but I think finding voices for public facing scholarship and making that a consistent every year part of what you say you're producing, what you guys just did with this awesome event is precisely this kind of thing. So I think sometimes that it, especially the way that gets gendered, the way that gets tracked within the academy is super problematic, but always finding the formulation and having the conversations that allow that to become something and also finding, are there ways for that to also become part of print? I think is an important part of that conversation. And so there's a way in which, like there was one example in our class this year, we had a number of really interesting people come in and talk to the students and because we had a student who had an accessibility issue, we were handwriting a number of these in order to be able to pass them on. And we lost track sometimes, it wasn't totally continuous, but we realized that we had a pretty remarkable archive of written texts with artists in conversation that had been produced across this and that there was a possibility for collective publication there. So we'll see if we manage to do all of this over the summer and so on, but I think there are ways in which deciding that it's public facing, also making the milestones so that you don't end up on the wrong end of the stick of an already very asymmetrical structure, but finding formulations to work with is where we can go with it. I'm exciting. And you guys have done something really awesome with this in particular. Yeah, and this is I think a good place to end unless there's any final comments from the rest of our round table participants. The idea that sharing always exceeds that commodifying what happened today is not something that you do because you get a certain amount of money for it or a certain amount of credit for it per se, right? It exceeds the boundaries of that, even if you may get a little money for it, okay? And anyhow, I just wanted to thank all of you for being the collaborators and make it possible to have that kind of sharing that exceeds those bounds of institutions and exceeds those bounds of discipline. So a big round of applause for our round table participants. So we're coming up is gonna be the Bureau for the Future of Choreography. Our organizers have asked me to announce that we all need to step outside briefly because they're gonna rearrange the physical space here. And so you can take a break, please be...


Do you know that the climate change gets more and more alarming? Do you know that heat waves, the melting ice, droughts, floods and tropical cyclones have really stopped being normal weather phenomena? Well if you understand the situation and you're worried like we are about the environmental disaster then you should also be probably worried about the European Union's decision to promote nuclear energy and gas as sustainable. Of course this is promoted as a great solution to the apparent energy problem that came out after the Ukrainian war. But is it really green? Well in case you don't know, nuclear energy is certainly expensive and quite unreliable. Humanity should never forget how disastrous Fukushima or Chernobyl accidents have been for our climate. So this doesn't really seem to be a great solution, which is more the fact that nuclear energy installations are so expensive led to the conclusion that they will be in the hands of a few, in the hands of an oligarchy. So this doesn't really make nuclear energy part of the commons, does it? And of course, gases find it. But what could be done then? Well maybe it's high time we're focused on renewable and eco-friendly energy sources. After all, wind and solar energy sources are less expensive and maybe easier to install. So the European Union should stop any further actions against the environment or at least don't paint it green.


I want to start by telling a story. I was in New York exactly 10 years ago for a similar gathering of techno-optimists. And it was called the Open Hardware Summit. And this group is still around. They still have meetings. But 2012 really stands out as an important moment for this community. There were lots of entrepreneurs, Aya Badir, who started Little Bits, was sharing her designs and raised a bunch of money for her company. She was actually at this conference yesterday. Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired, was there and had started his 3D robotics drone company and was very excited about the possibilities of open hardware, taking the ideas of open source, that the open source software community was developing, and applying that to hardware in the real world. The highlight of the weekend was Brie Pettis, who got on stage and announced that their new MakerBot replicator was no longer going to be open source. They were going closed. And this kind of sent the community into kind of like a shock wave and started this kind of civil war. It wasn't so serious, but it was a real harbinger of things to come. We were there. My friend Eric and I had started a company, a project, sharing open source underwater robot designs. And we ran into a lot of the same problems that Brie did. It's trying to mix the ethos of open source with the realities of supply chains and venture capital and needing to capitalize a factory. It was a really tough balance. And for a lot of us, it didn't work out. We had some success, but it's kind of a long story. At that moment, what we were thinking was all we had to do was be transparent, share our designs, and add version control. That turned out to not be enough. And we know it wasn't right because we have the counterfactual. We have Raspberry Pi, which was this microcomputer that said, we just need to be small, we need to be cheap, and we need to have lots of GPIO. This needs to be a small modular tool. They really listened to their community and really focused on what they had to do, ignoring the kind of the larger dogma that we were creating in the open hardware community. And they had a lot of success, they still do. And I bring all of that up, because I think we're in a similar moment here, where a lot of the really exciting and interesting ideas that are happening in the web 3 space are trying to crawl out of the metaverse and into the real world. Like crypto cities, decentralized societies, Deci, I saw that yesterday, Solana announced that they're going to make a mobile phone. I think we're kind of at that same place we were 10 years ago. And I think there's a lot that we learned that would be applicable now. The reason we gathered 10 years ago is really the same reason that this group is gathering here. It's this kind of belief that the technology commons is at least as important as technology companies, that the things we build and design and share with the world are just as important as the products and services we provide. The history of standards are really strong. We're talking about it's not just open source software, it's not just the internet. We're talking about containers. We're talking about time. There's a really strong history of techno cooperation being an important driver of progress. And I have this kind of working thesis that standards movements are actually the foundational driver of techno scientific progress. But it's a story that not too many people know, the long story of standards making. Most people, when I bring up standards, this is what they think of this XKCD comic. Has anyone seen this comic? Yeah. Yeah, almost everybody.  I want to change your mind about that, hopefully. So this book, I have to recommend it. It's called Engineering Rules. It was written by Joanne Yates and Craig Murphy. And it's the global history of standard setting for the past 150 years. Highly recommended. They talk about standards as an entirely different realm, different than commerce, different logic than politics. I really like this framing. Standards is such a wide variety of things. We have been talking with people about it this week and we're talking about the pasteurization levels in milk and then we're talking about unicode and emojis. It's a huge swath of things that exist. But I think they can be divided into these taxonomies. So Yates and Murphy write about steam boilers. These river boats were blowing up in the 1800s far too often. So they got together to create these safety standards for steam boilers. You think about interoperability. You think about screw threads. Before the 1900s, they were all screws and nails and everything was different. The movement to standardize screw threads was wildly productive for just about everyone who was using them. There's also such things as performance standards. So they talk about the steel manufacturers getting together and creating some performance benchmarks that they all wanted to meet. And this is how they ended up winning the contracts over iron to lay all of the railroads. So this kind of performance standard can help facilitate commerce. And then of course there's contractual standards, which Yates and Murphy don't mention, but I think are really important ideas. They have been important in web three, but they're also important like the common app or the safe note has really transformed early stage investment. Standards are things, they're rules, but they're also processes. And Yates and Murphy go through the three waves of standards. And each of those movements had different ways that standards actually came into the world. The first was kind of de facto, like the new screw thread, they just went out there and convinced everybody and they made it happen. The second wave was really voluntary consensus based, which saw the rise of these big international standards groups. And the most recent with the rise of computers and networking has been this kind of disruptive mode of standards making. So like the QWERTY keyboard is a de facto standard. They just made this for the first typewriters and it has pretty much stuck. I know there's other people who have different hopes and dreams about this, but we don't need to go into that. The container was something that went through the international organization of standards. ISO, there was a lot of discussions about what size container would work, but intermodal transportation had proven to be more effective. Eventually this big international group settled on the 20 foot TEU container and the 40 foot TEU container. ARPAnet really changed things. This was the first, I would say disruptive standard. ISO was working on a standard, ITU was working on a computer networking standard, but the group at ARPA just got something working. I mean, this is where we get the phrase rough consensus and running code. They just proved that it worked and then invited everyone else to be a part of it. And I think thinking about this, how you should go about making a new standard is you really should sit down and think about who the stakeholders are. What's holding all of them back? And then what's the goal? Do you need safety? Do you need performance? Do you need interoperability? Think about what is the right type of standard to help move that community forward and then really think about what's the appropriate standards making process. Maybe it is de facto, maybe you can just do it, but maybe you really need to take a disruptive approach and have a strong go to market isn't the right term because we don't even have terms for go to market for standards making. We're still in the very beginning of understanding this. And then the last thing is prototype prototype prototype. So what's becoming more and more true is the things that work end up working. And so I don't think this is a wait and spend a lot of time in committee thing. I think this is a build thing. Couple examples, so the CubeSat was developed by two professors, one at Stanford and Cal Poly and they wanted to create a way for their students to be able to launch experiments into space. And so they grabbed a beanie baby box and said, okay, this is the right size, 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. And they created the P pod launcher so they could piggyback off NASA launches and other launches. And they created this design and this has been important for their students to launch their experiments into space but it's also turned out to be a wonderful prototyping platform for companies, companies like Planet, companies like Spire. This small compact way for them to actually hitch a ride to space proved to be really important and it continues to be really important standard. But it was started by two people without much resources. So it shows you that idea of a disruptive thing starting on the periphery and changing an entire industry. We're trying to do this now for oceans. So having worked on it for 10 years, this is, there's a strange bottleneck which is the connectors between sensors and platforms. So we're trying to build the USB for the ocean and we're trying to do it with interoperability and performance in mind. We're doing this with experiments. So thinking about a contractual open standard, experiments been around for 10 years. They've honed this open grant proposal design through crowdfunding. But I've been taking that model and trying to figure out how that contractual standard could be a better bridge for science funders and scientists. And the thing that really seems to be working and we were just talking about this in the session is this idea of science angels of just giving scientists budgets and letting them quickly bet on each other. And we've got quite a few of these, more than 10 science angels going on our site right now. You can check them out experiment.com slash grants. And to give you a better sense of how that works, it's a foundation writes a grant to the experiment foundation and we hold a budget for a scientist to quickly, you know, in a matter of weeks, bet on projects that they know, that they like, that they think are promising. So this to me is really decentralized science, moving the decision making further out to the scientists at the periphery so they can make bets on each other. I think that's really important. I'm really impressed with the molecule platform that's come up a number of times here. I think they're doing standards making right and that they're really sitting with this idea of how do we connect investors, in this case the DAOs like VitaDAO and PsiDAO, how do we create a new contractual standard that connects those investors with scientists in a way that's productive for all of them. They're spending a lot of time trying to get this right and I think that's absolutely the right way to build a new standard. So I'm talking about this history and putting this all in context because I think this is important. We didn't do this 10 years ago at the Open Hardware Summit. We didn't think about how the work that we were doing fit into this long story of techno cooperation and it's a rich history and I'm actually quite convinced that tokenization and crypto economics actually do represent a kind of fourth wave of standards innovation but to really be successful, to really move out of the metaverse and into the world, I think we have to be a part of a bigger story and so I encourage you all to think of yourselves as standards entrepreneurs or standardizers which I also think is a cute kind of name and I think we need to celebrate them. People like Bob Twig's at Stanford who created the CubeSat, we need to celebrate those kinds of standards makers even when they're in different corners of the world and I think we need to build an ecosystem of support. For the ones that I've been involved in, it's very rare to get support to prototype and build and design new standards. I think this conference, this discussion that we're all having about building these tools is a wonderful first step but just think about all the resources that are available to you if you're starting a company, all the accelerators, the books, the blogs, the investors, there's so much infrastructure for starting companies. I think we need a similar push to create infrastructure for standards entrepreneurs and new standards including celebrating standards adopters because I think the early adopters of standards are equally important as the people who start them. If you take nothing away from this talk, I hope that the next time that you see this comic, this XKCD comic about standards that you don't roll your eyes, that you don't think, oh God, another standard, that you think, all right, we've got another person who's in the standards game, we've got another standards entrepreneur who's digging in and doing the great work of techno cooperation, so thank you very much.