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Compulsive Browse Colloquium

February 18-20, 2011

From left to right:  Salle de lecture de'artiste au travail, Angela Grauerholz, 2003-2004; and Leisure Projects, video still from Folie à deux, 2009; and Italics; Underlining Emphasis or Marking Words as Words, Michelle Lacombe, 2010

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE VISIT THE COLLOQUIUM WEBSITE
http://www.compulsivebrowse.net/

Dr. Rebecca Duclos: curator

 

This intimate two-day colloquium is the first in what we hope will be subsequent gatherings of artists and cultural professionals who have an interest in exploring the particular research cultures that evolve around contemporary artistic practice. This initial session welcomes participation from an intentionally broad range of disciplinary perspectives including practicing artists, museum and gallery professionals, library scientists, archivists, and art school educators.

With the burgeoning contemporary international discourse concerning artists’ research, particularly as it relates to the academicisation of aesthetic practice within an increasing number of “practice-led” PhD programs for artists, there is a paucity of sustained, in-depth documentation, research, exhibition, discussion, or debate around these issues that would allow various perspectives to be heard within the Canadian context, especially. More specifically, there is a need to hear from artists themselves who at times engage in project-related study within the institutional arena, but who often engage in forms of “research” which are resolutely located outside the academy.

The Compulsive Browse colloquium hopes to provide an open forum in which to discuss what library scientists more neutrally describe as the “information-seeking behaviours” of artists. By focusing on Canadian practitioners’ own definitions and interrogations of their individualised, esoteric, para-academic, quotidian methods that have been developed in dialogue with both their formal training and their informal responses, we hope to broaden and question the definitions of “research” that we so often take for granted. By bringing together cultural professionals who, themselves, embrace and enact specific modes of research relevant to their own cultural fields, the colloquium becomes a place to reflect on the intersections and divergences of an array of investigatory and interpretive postures.

**Special pre-Colloquium event**

As a way to model the very non-linear, associative, iterative, cross-disciplinary research approaches being explored within a theoretical context in the colloquium, participants will be invited to engage in an all-day experimental event. For the Compulsive Browse colloquium, the McConnell Library at Concordia will partner with the Jarislowsky Institute and the Faculty of Fine Art Gallery to stage an urban bibliodérive that utilizes library and archival collections located in numerous sites across the city of Montréal. The Bibliodérive is an alternative, library and archive-based investigatory strategy designed specifically to unhinge participants from reaching expected research outcomes. The activity emphasizes spontaneous curiosity and encourages random connection-making across a single library/archive or amongst collections at multiple sites. As a radical research tactic, the bibliodérive has its roots in the ludic strategies of the Situationist International in which the pursuit of “psychogeographic currents” and the following of “ambiences” as a form of alternative urban exploration or research was embraced. In this exercise, the library itself becomes a city of books that is navigated through random, associative, intuitive means at the same time bibliographic resources across a city are seen as an interconnected knowledge network.

The staging of the bibliodérive exercise for colloquium participants would provide the impetus to forge alliances across multiple sites in the city of Montreal. Several libraries across the city are being approached to host colloquium participants during this all-day event.