Participation: A User’s Guide

What does it mean to take part in culture? Beyond the roles that culture assigns to us; beyond the roles of viewers and voters, listeners and demonstrators, visitors and protestors? Can we find new modes of engagement within the spaces of contemporary art, perhaps even by galvanising the attention that these spaces demand, for some other form of inhabitation?

Over the past few years of thinking and writing about ‘participation’, I have been struck by just how much our terminology of ‘art’, ‘exhibition’, ‘audience’ etc. fails to capture the emergent dynamics within the expanded field of art. This seminar explores the different models of participation which we forge through affective regimes, sites of knowledge production and circulation, conversation and unexpected exchange, as well as the possible new vocabulary we need in order to work critically with it.