Participated Tuesday in "Training for the Not-Yet: Protocols in the Making," an online event sponsored by our Vera List Center for Art and Politics in which about one hundred and fifty people around the world were led playfully to form a different kind of zoom community. Our cameras and microphones switched by turns on and off, we hummed along with chants, jammed with noise makers, sketched and posted pictures, all in an effort to make clear the unspoken "protocols" of online meetings and reimagine them. We were led by musicians and artists, one a specialist on invisible disability.The screenshot above is from a moment when we were asked to do a kind of surrealist-inspired automatic drawing. We were to scroll through the stamp-like pages of participants and pay attention to the backgrounds of our fellow participants, then choose one to try to sketch with a marker pen on a piece of paper not in our line of sight. The screenshot is from when we held our drawings up, ostensibly to see if we recognized ourselves in someone else's sketch, but really to hack the panopticon of the zoom grid, interrupt its unquestioned sharing of our living/working spaces with our interlocutors. Restoring human seeing and being seen.... it was a really lovely moment.
In a complementary directive fewer people followed we were asked to post in the chat photos of what we saw when we were facing our computers - what our online interlocutors could not see about the spaces we were in, what we were seeing while we looked at them. (I posted the picture at right, taken a day before but precisely what I see beyond the laptop when it sits on our dining table and the balcony door is half open.)All in all it let us gently push the limits of zooming. It made me realize that, while I've wanted to push these limits myself, I haven't dared! Specifically what I wanted to do was to make clear that each person in a grid sees a different constellation of participants. What if I had people write the name of someone they thought was in one of the neighboring boxes on a piece of paper and hold it up, with an arrow pointing to the person? (The confusion would be compounded by the fact that zoom shows each of us to ourselves - but only to ourselves - in mirror image.) I suppose I haven't had the nerve do that because the doubtless largely wrong signage, at first confounding and hilarious, would break a spell we couldn't recast - and not just for that meeting but for all future meetings. We'd realize that to zoom we are just random blocks, never actually stacked in any fixed way. The illusion of being somehow connected spatially in a fixed grid would be punctured. Seems I'd rather not experience what I intuitively know about this...
But the workshop has given me hope that I'll be able to think of something before my next online classes begin, something akin to the ground rules (=protocols) with which we form any learning community but attuned to the particularities of zoom gathering. Better to be intentional about them!
