A monthly meet-up to discuss the use of conversation in contemporary art as part of the ongoing Negotiating Conversational Frequencies project.

First Meeting – Speech genres in artworks

We will discuss Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of speech genres and share and discuss examples of different the genres that have been used in specific artworks we have made or seen.

Bakhtin contended that “[t]he wealth and diversity of speech genres are boundless because the various possibilities of human activity are inexhaustible, and because each sphere of activity contains an entir repertoire of speech genres that differentiate and grow as the particular sphere develops and becomes more complex. Special emphasis should be placed on the extreme heterogeneity of speech genres (oral and written).”

You can download a summary of Bakhtin’s theory here:
http://universitywithoutconditions.ac.nz/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Segment-1-Bhaktin.pdf

Or the full essay The problem of Speech Genres here:
https://livelongday.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/bakhtinspeechgenres.pdf

About Negotiating Conversational Frequencies

In September 2016 the Performance Ethics Working Group ran a four week discussion series as part of the Share/Cheat/Unit exhibition at Te Tuhi. This discussion series focussed on the rise of conversation as a medium in art and what the nature and formal properties of this practice are.

http://universitywithoutconditions.ac.nz/research/conversations/

Tuesday 23 May @ Audio Foundation, from 6.00pm
koha