Durational Conference #1

This report is an invitation to the first Durational Conference that took place on the 21st of June 2015 at Flutgraben.

The origin of the term “conference” comes from the French conférence or medieval Latin conferentia, from Latin conferre ‘bring together’.

TED, PechaKucha and various other “edutainment” formats have transformed what used to be called a “conference” into a self-celebratory benevolent exercise devoid of self-criticism. Speakers are expected to pack all the complexity of their topic into an easily digestible, short and entertaining delivery to promote their ideas or their new start-up. The “elevator pitch” rhetorics fortified by succinct Twitter 140-character format is creeping in and beyond.

Therefore, there’s a need for a space that facilitates an intelligent, purposefully slow, detailed and comprehensive debate.

The kind of debate that is driven by a genuine drive to ask questions and to be asked questions, to learn, and to challenge oneself and the others.

A kind of debate that opens the space up for a discussion, so that everyone else can carry the topic further, beyond, and within.

We invite you to bring in the topic that has a real urgency for you at this very moment,

to present it to everyone who is present

in whatever way suits it the best,

and to open the space up for a discussion, so that we can all carry your topic further, beyond, and within.

you are very much invited
to experiment with the format of your presentation in itself –
so it is not at all expected to make a conventional reading of a paper or a lecture.

For example, it could be:

– an object in space that is positioned there for some time
– a lecture that happens during a walk through space (or outside)
– a talk that sends everyone to sleep
– a sound / an image / whatever else can communicate and be communicated

Please, send us descriptions of your proposals until the 14th of June 2015.

By 16th of June we will send everyone back a map that shows some common pathways as well as the differences, so you can use this collective snapshot as a reference for preparing the final version of your presentation.

The conference will take place in Berlin on the 21st of June 2015 at 1 pm till we are finished in Am Flutgraben 3.

If you cannot make it, we will have a live Google hangout link, so you can connect remotely.

The presentations and follow-up discussions will be documented and put online for further reference.

UPDATE: The results of the conference were made available in Nodus Labs case study on conference profiling using network analysis.