Aesthetic artifacts and events, whether in art or pop culture, are inconceivable without an audience. However, how the audience is to be defined conceptually for the present, how it behaves in terms of perception and reception when dealing with works of art and art performances, and above all: how it communicatively forms the arts and itself during or after reception - embedded in spatially, temporally, materially and physically situated everyday practices - and what relevance "the audience" has for art and in society against this background, must still be regarded as largely unclear.

The term " audience", which was originally located in the border area of political and literary discourse, is now often only used to describe local gatherings of viewers and consumers. Art theoretical discourse has also contributed to this development: Here, the audience was often conceptually devalued to a passive, collective 'patiens' and contrasted with the individual, creative artistic genius as an 'agent'. In contrast, more recent approaches in art theory attempt to dissolve traditional asymmetries: between those who speak and those who listen; those who actively give something and those who passively receive something; those who instruct in aesthetic form and those who are instructed.

Against this background, the interdisciplinary conference brings together representatives of various related disciplines (literary studies; linguistics; media studies; theater and music studies, art studies, and possibly also art sociology and political cultural research) to investigate the question of whether and how exactly conceptualizations of the audience in the form of everyday communicative practices in dealing with art are empirically concretized historically and currently. The empirical focus is on the everyday practices of the audience anchored in social interaction in the context of 'art communication' in the theater, museum, poetry house, concert hall, urban space, etc., in the cinema, at festivals and not least in connection with the Internet. Art communication is not only understood as communication with art and through art, but also communication about art. It also raises the question of the fundamental media and interactional conditions that enable and fundamentally structure communication in the space of art.

The interdisciplinary exchange opens up the possibility to compare the communicative everyday practice of the audience in artistic contexts reconstructed by empirical studies of language use 1. across different institutions (theater, museum, cinema, etc.) and 2. to discuss and relate it to theoretical offers of the literary, cultural and social science discourse on the relationship between art and society.

Organizer

• Working group of the DFG project "Theater im Gespräch. Linguistic Art Appropriation Practices in the Theatre Break", University of Siegen / University of Bonn (Prof. Dr. Stephan Habscheid; Dr. Erika Linz; Eva Schlinkmann, M.A.; Christine Hrncal, M.A.; Dr. Jan Gerwinski)
• Project "Begehbare Literatur. A cultural studies study on literary tourism" in the DFG Research Training Group "Locating Media", University of Siegen: (Raphaela Knipp, M.A.; Prof. Dr. Niels Werber)
• Project "Handbuch Sprache in der Kunstkommunikation", University of Heidelberg, Department of German Studies (Priv.-Doz. Dr. Marcus Müller)

in cooperation with

• DFG Research Training Group "Locating Media" (University of Siegen)
• "Journal for Literary Studies and Linguistics" (LiLi).

Audience's Everyday Practices: Theater, Literature, Art, Pop Culture

at the University of Siegen, February 29th to March 1st, 2016
Venue: Apollo-Theater Siegen

Aesthetic artifacts and events, whether in art or pop culture, are inconceivable without audience. However, a number of aspects still have to be accounted for: How is the audience to be conceptually determined in the present, how does it perceive and receive art and, above all, how does it communicatively employ arts and position itself during or after the perception - embedded in spatially, temporarily, tangibly and mentally situated everyday practices - as well as which role does "the audience" play for art and in society against this background?

The term "audience", originally found on the threshold of political and literary discourse, today often only refers to local gatherings of spectators and consumers. Among others, art theory contributed to this development. Here the audience was conceptually devalued as a passive collective 'patient' and contrasted with the individual creating art genius as an 'agent'. By contrast, younger approaches of art theory try to dissolve traditional asymmetries: between those who speak and those who listen; those who actively give and those who passively take; those who lecture in an aesthetic way and those who are lectured.

Based on this framework the interdisciplinary conference brings together representatives of various adjacent disciplines (literary studies, linguistics, media studies, theatre studies, musicology, fine arts, as well as sociology of art and culture research) to inquire whether and how the audience is and has been conceptualized and empirically concretized in everyday communicative practices when dealing with art throughout history and at present. The empirical focus is on practices embedded in social interaction in the context of 'art communication' in theatres, museums, poetry houses, concert halls, city spaces, in cinemas, at festivals as well as practices referring to the internet. 'Art communication' is understood not only as communication with and through art, but also as communication about art. Furthermore, the conference inquires the basic media and interactive conditions that enable and fundamentally structure communication in the scope of art.

On the basis of empirical studies on language use the interdisciplinary exchange makes it possible firstly to compare the audience's communicative everyday practices across various institutions (theatre, museum, cinema) as well as secondly to relate them to theoretical propositions within the discourse of literary studies, culture research and social science concerning the relation of art and society.

Organizers

• Research group of the DFG project "Theater im Gespräch. Linguistic Art Appropriation Practices in the Theatre Break", University of Siegen / University of Bonn (Prof. Dr. Stephan Habscheid; Dr. Erika Linz; Eva Schlinkmann, M.A.; Christine Hrncal, M.A.; Dr. Jan Gerwinski)
• Project "Begehbare Literatur. Eine kulturwissenschaftliche Studie zum Literaturtourismus" in the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg "Locating Media", University of Siegen: (Raphaela Knipp, M.A.; Prof. Dr. Niels Werber)
• Project "Handbuch Sprache in der Kunstkommunikation", University of Heidelberg, German Department (Priv.-Doz. Dr. Marcus Müller)

In collaboration with

• DFG Research Training Group "Locating Media" (University of Siegen)
• "Journal for Literary Studies and Linguistics" (LiLi)

Monday, February 29, 2016

Tuesday, March 01, 2016

André Barz

Non-professional theater criticism on the internet
Non-professional theater criticism on the internet seems to be developing into a significant phenomenon. In 2012, "nachtkritik.de", probably the most renowned forum in this respect, recorded 2,110,000 page visits (cf. Gut und viel gegoogelt 2012) with around 7,000 comments (cf. Der Debatte sachlichst dienen 2012). Of course, both did not only apply to reviews of theater productions. But even with regard to the latter, extensive comments can be found in terms of quantity alone, as shown by the 111 comments on the review of Wolfgang Engel's "Othello" production with the subtitle "Venedigs Neger" ("Venice's Negroes") at the neues theater Halle in 2012. (cf. Schmidt 2012) The lecture will examine the extent to which this, it seems, now 'everyday practice' of non-professional theater criticism by the audience on the Internet is, on the one hand, an expression of the 'co-producing spectator' often described in theory (e.g. Vaßen 2013 again) and, on the other hand, a conceptualization of the spectator on the part of the theater producers, whether explicitly disclosed (e.g. Werli, cf. Reimers 2013), implicitly staged (cf. Pollesch 2014) or practiced in both-and (e.g. Rimini Protokoll, cf. Marscheider 2009 or Ostermeier, cf. Schröder 2007), confirmed or questioned. The intentions of the critiques and their gestures as well as the inherent 'self-definitions' of the writers must be worked out.

Literature:
Marscheider, Jana Henrike (2009): On the conceptualization of the spectator in the theater of Rimini Protokoll. Bachelor thesis at the University of Siegen. Unpublished.
Pollesch, René (2014): Kill Your Darlings. Plays. Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag.
Reimers, Ann-Kathrin (2013): Der neugierige Zuschauer - Penelope Wehrlis Theater der kalkulierten Unübersichtlichkeit. In: Barz, André/ Paule, Gabriela (ed.): The spectator. Analyses of a construction in a theater pedagogical context. Berlin: Lit Verlag. S. 165-182.
Schröder, Miriam (2007): Theater and media. Structural references illustrated using the example of Thomas Ostermeier's theater. Diploma thesis at the University of Siegen. Unpublished.
Vaßen, Florian (2013): The co-producing spectator - Collective creativity and theater practice. In: Barz, André/ Paule, Gabriela (ed.): The spectator. Analyses of a construction in the theater pedagogical context. Berlin: Lit Verlag. S. 125-147.

Internet sources:
Serving the debate most objectively. Die meistkommentierten Seiten auf nachtkritik.de 2012. (2012)
http://www.nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7579:die-meistkommentierten-seiten-auf-nachtkritikde-2012&catid=673:jahresrueckblick-2012&Itemid=60; last accessed on 16.02.2016
Gut und viel gegoogelt. The most-read texts on nachtkritik.de 2012. (2012) http://www.nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7581:die-meistgelesenen-texte-auf-nachtkritikde-2012&catid=673:jahresrueckblick-2012&Itemid=60; last accessed on 16.02.2016
Schmidt, Matthias: Red-Bellying versus Black-Facing. (2012) http://www.nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6943:othello-venedigs-neger-in-halle-schaut-wolfgang-engel-hinter-den-korrekten-empoerungsreflex&catid=178; last accessed on 16.02.2016

Ulla Fix

Education or encouragement? -The linguistic-media construction of an audience in the dispute over theater concepts
In recent years, there has been a fierce debate about the work of the Schauspielhaus Leipzig (renamed "Centraltheater" by Hartmann). The style of the then new artistic director Sebastian Hartmann divided the public and showed that there are different types of expectations and therefore different audiences. Hartmann formulated what I saw as a pedagogical claim (which I am sure he would strictly reject). He believed that the audience had to learn to cope with new concepts of theater and staging as well as with an approach that no longer regarded plays as canon, and that they should not stick to what he implied were bourgeois educational standards. An influx of young people proved him right. A considerable proportion of the old audience stayed away.
After Hartmann was replaced by Enrico Lübbe, a different idea of the audience was formulated. No education, but an engagement with the respective text using all the possibilities of the theater in the belief that all audience groups could be reached through encouragement. The success of the first year - the theater was full of old and young visitors - seems to prove him right.
Of course, I am not interested in deciding which of the two is right. Rather, I want to use discourse analysis to determine from the statements of the artistic directors, with the aid of public opinion (online and/or in newspapers), how a certain idea of the audience is constructed linguistically.
1) One side (former artistic director: Sebastian Hartmann) assumes that the audience has not yet understood what the theater can and wants. To remedy this, he wants to educate a new audience (develop new viewing habits) or attract a new audience whose needs he believes he knows (attract young viewers).
Here it would be interesting to work out how a respective audience image has developed in the discourse between the theater and the public. The focus should be on how the artistic director and his colleagues, especially the theater's in-house philosopher (Guillaume Paoli) see the audience.
2) The other side (new artistic director: Enrico Lübbe) wants to win back the Leipzig audience (more traditionally attuned spectators) without giving up the new, young audience. So he takes them as they are, wants to fulfill their expectations and encourage them to respond to innovations.
It will be just as interesting to see how the public in the media reacts to this, but above all how the new artistic director and his chief dramaturge see the audience and how the audience is addressed.

Matt Hills

From Media Fandom to Art Fandom? Appreciating an Exnominated Discourse
This paper will explore how different kinds of fandom can be theorized by learning from fan studies' emphasis on media fandom. The concept of "implicit fandom" will be used, drawing on notions of "implicit religion" which evade standard definitions of the term (Bailey 1998). I will argue that "implicit fandom" occurs where 'fandom' can be analytically used in relation to high-cultural forms, yet is not usually discursively drawn on by participants (Bourdieu 1986). In terms of contemporary art, the discourse of fandom has begun to circulate, but as a kind of provocation: for example, Grayson Perry refers to the Tate Modern as a "cult entertainment megastore" (2014: 88), comparing art "fans" to fan-shoppers at Forbidden Planet.
If fandom has remained highly implicit (and devalued) in cultures of modern art, we should nonetheless be careful of deploying high culture in ways that seek to legitimate the study of fandom. Politicizing approaches to fandom have often formed an authenticating bid for the subject's 'inherent' value - whether this involves characterizing fans as resistant "poachers" or subversive "activists". Attempting to legitimate fandom has been part of fan/audience studies' history, but it invariably makes use of disciplinary discourses of cultural 'significance' that other and exclude as much as they dignify. Indeed, attacks on fan studies by Marxist writers draw on a similar discursive matrix (Fuchs 2014). Thus, while contemporary art has an unstable relationship to discourses of fandom (which are often exnominated), fan studies remains uneasily legitimated
About the presenter:

Matt Hills is Professor of Film & TV Studies at Aberystwyth University. He is the author of Fan Cultures (2002) as well as five other monographs, the most recent of which is Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event (2015). Matt has published more than a hundred journal articles/book chapters on fandom and cult media. He is currently completing Sherlock: Detecting Quality TV for I.B. Tauris (2016), and is a co-series editor on the Transmedia book series for Amsterdam University Press.

Werner Holly

Speaking audiences?
How to approach the concept of audience from a linguistic perspective? First, I try to identify elements of a semantic frame 'audience'. Then, with regard to the characteristic of "(partial) dialogicity", a brief review of our television reception research is undertaken, which had follow-up communication as its subject. In the central part, the question of how television attempts to compensate for the lack of interactivity with the viewer in certain formats, such as political talk shows, through a studio audience is examined. To this end, I use some examples of Maybrit Illner programmes from 2007, 2011 and 2016, where the audience does not really "speak", but is staged acoustically and visually as a bridge to the viewer, with all the risks of distortion and polarization, so that its function as a reception model brings to light typical further characteristics of the frame audience, which are discussed in conclusion: Reflexivity and discursive reductions of complexity.

Raphaela Knipp

"So not the usual approach, book closed and gone" - literature as a place-based practice
From a literary studies perspective, the audience in the sense of everyday readers is a largely ignored variable. Questions of the reception and appropriation of literature are usually treated with recourse to specific theories and models. In contrast, the lecture proposes a praxeological approach, the aim of which is to link literary-aesthetic aspects with the question of specific reader practices. In concrete terms, this is illustrated using the example of literary tourism, which is a special form of location-based reception of literary texts: Readers visit literary settings in real space. On the basis of interview and observation data obtained in the context of participation in literary tourism offers, the question of which practices of appropriation of literature take place and how these can be linked back to the literary processes of the texts will be investigated.

Hubert Knoblauch

Audience interaction and audience emotion
This article will deal with the question of audience emotion. More precisely, it deals with forms of communicative action of presence audiences in various settings, i.e. the physical, meaningful activities of the audience as an aggregation of actors. This is an explorative contribution that views "audience" as a performance of the actor involved. Based on a brief overview of the current state of research, selected empirical examples will be used to pursue the thesis that and how the audience emotion can be seen as a co-production of the participants. In a further step, a special phenomenon of audience interaction will be discussed, namely audience response. It can be understood as an interactively generated form of effervescence, in which subjective, sensual perception and communicative action are coordinated in such a way that the "audience" appears as the agent.
The article is based on explorative videographic studies focusing on the institutional field of sport and religion. In order to address the phenomenon of the "audience" more generally, other contexts are also included.

Marcus Müller / Jörn Stegmeier

Tweeting as an #everydaypractice of the art audience
Our lecture will focus on practices of positioning relative to the visual arts (Hausendorf 2012) on Twitter. Tweeting is an everyday practice insofar as it can in principle be practiced anytime and anywhere by those who do it. Twitter is therefore a good measure for assessing the local dissociation of the art audience of our time. People tweet directly from the museum, through readers of exhibition reviews or also associatively from everyday life. However, Twitterers are only half of the (receiving) art public; at the same time, they are actively involved in the medial transcription (Jäger 2002) of art and take on social positions (e.g. as EXPERTS, ADVERTISERS, MEDIATORS, CRITICS, FANS). Our analyses are based on a corpus of German and English tweets about artists in the period from December 1, 2015 to January 31, 2016, to whom major exhibitions are currently being dedicated: #Botticelli (Berlin), #Schiele (Zurich), #Gursky (Baden Baden), #Calder (London), #Kandinsky (New York), #Balthus (Rome).

Literature cited:

Hausendorf, Heiko (2012): Social positioning in the art world. Linguistic aspects of a sociology of art communication. In: Müller, Marcus/Kluwe, Sandra (eds.): Identitätsentwürfe in der Kunstkommunikation. Berlin, Boston, 93-123.
Jäger, Ludwig (2002): "Transkriptivität. On the medial logic of cultural semantics". In: Ludwig Jäger/Georg Stanitzek (eds.): Transkribieren. Media/Lectures. Munich: Fink, 19-41.

Karola Pitsch

A robot as a museum guide? -Visitor practices of dealing with a new media artifact in a museum exhibition
In museum tours in which an employee offers information about works of art, historical objects and other exhibits, the visitors represent a specific form of audience. On the one hand, they are recipients of the explanations of the content, on the other hand, they can be conceptually grasped as co-actors who actively participate - through verbal and silent-embodied practices of displaying attention, spatial constitution, etc. - in shaping these explanations and the activity of the exhibition. - They actively participate in the design of these explanations and the 'museum tour' activity and co-construct them (Hausendorf 2011, Pitsch 2012, de Stefani & Mondada 2014, Dausendschön-Gay/Gülich/Krafft 2015). If a technical system, such as a humanoid robot, is to take over the task of the museum guide and be controllable by means of natural language communication, such interactive coordination is a long way off. Nonetheless, some of the research in this area aims to equip technical systems with basic options for reacting to observed visitor behavior as well as initiating specific visitor actions (Yamazaki et al. 2008, 2013, Pitsch et al. 2013, 2015a). A particular challenge here is to deal with the fundamental unpredictability/contingency of human interaction behavior and with the heterogeneity of visitors who encounter the robot individually or in small groups during their tour of the museum. It is therefore crucial to understand the interactive practices of such an audience, their processes of creating meaning in dealing with a new technical-media artifact and the resulting dynamics in the 'human-robot' interaction system.
Against this background, video recordings of a study on human-robot interaction are examined, in which a specific heterogeneous type of audience meets a robotic museum guide for the first time in a real museum exhibition: small groups consisting of children and adults (typically: families). The question of how these visitors deal with the - verbal and physical - communicative offers of the robot in the situation of first contact is investigated. How do children vs. adults deal with the structural relevance created by the robot? What dynamics arise in such a heterogeneous group as a result of dealing with any discrepancies? - This is exemplified by moments in which the robot (a) asks questions of the visitors and (b) refers to exhibits. It can be observed that - after accessibility in the sense of 'natural language communication' is established in the opening (Pitsch 2015b) - children not only act according to everyday logics of action, but also use institutional-school-like behavior (e.g. pointing out) or may initially address their answers quietly to the adult (instead of to the robot). In contrast, the adults often act spatially and sequentially from the "second row" and offer (supposed) support in the "correct" handling of the technical artifact on the basis of greater observation possibilities. Overall, this structurally doubles the visitors' processing of the robot's 'first turns', so that specific dynamics arise within the audience in such multi-party situations. In addition, the situation is also processed by the visitors in their role as "family", which manifests itself, for example, in the fact that souvenir photos of "children with robots" are taken during the ongoing interaction, which in turn leads to specific dynamics within the group. - Such observations are on the one hand relevant for the further development of the robot and on the other hand allow the 'audience' to be grasped in its heterogeneity and interactive dynamics, in which different degrees of everyday socialization are reflected as a basis for dealing with a new technical-media artefact.

Axel Schmidt

"Adaptation to prospective viewers? - A multimodal-interaction-analytical perspective on audience constructions in theater rehearsals"
"No audience, no performance" postulates Erving Goffman (1977) in his framework analysis. In other words, the presence of an audience is a prerequisite for understanding observable processes as performances. According to Goffman, theater performances are prototypical for this. In contrast to other social processes (from everyday actions to ceremonies), which are also partly observable or related to observation (cf. Goffman 1983), the social situation 'theater performance' ends with the disappearance of observers. The reason for this is the lack of a purpose beyond the performance. Goffman therefore calls them "pure performances".
At the same time, however, the process of creating and producing theater proves to be a process that is shielded from the public (especially in the early stages) as well as a tentative, experimental and intimate process that cannot and should not be audience-related due to its particular institutionalization as a 'rehearsal' (cf. Matzke 2012). Nevertheless, the performance designed for audiences is created in the protected space of the 'rehearsal'.
This tension between a creative safe space and the immanent reference of the performance to its (later) observation is consequential for the production process: on the one hand, audience impact is central, on the other hand, a (too early) orientation towards possible audience effects disrupts the creative process. This mediation is a central aspect of directing (Leach 2013).
In my contribution, I explore the question of whether and how theater makers anticipate the audience or their needs, wishes, reactions, etc. in the rehearsal process and what this means for the ongoing rehearsal work. The point of reference is therefore not the communicative appropriation by an audience, but the reflection of the audience in the production process on the producer's side. Looking at the 'other end of media communication' complements the question of the communicative "self-construction" of the audience with the question of the "other-constructions" of the audience by the producers. However, the focus is neither on the self-interpretations of theater makers (as they become tangible in interviews, for example) nor on conceptual preparatory work (basic orientation and structure of the play, possible audiences to be addressed, target group reference, relevance and 'statement' of the play, etc.), but on factual production practices in the rehearsal process itself.
The empirical basis for the reconstruction of productive practices in the rehearsal process is a corpus of over 30 hours of video recordings of amateur and professional theater rehearsals. Using selected excerpts, the article will show which different implicit and explicit forms of audience reference exist, how these are interactively realized and what conclusions this allows for regarding the ways in which audiences are constructed in the context of rehearsals.
Literature
Goffman, Erving (1977): Frame analysis. An attempt at the organization of everyday experience. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Goffman, Erving (1983): The interaction order. In: American Sociological Review, 48, 1, pp. 1-17.
Leach, Robert (2013): Theatre studies: the basics. New York: Routledge, Taylor Francis Group.
Matzke, Annemarie (2012): Arbeit am Theater: Eine Diskursgeschichte der Probe. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Paulo Astor Soethe

German-language amateur theater in Brazil (1919-1968): Archive Work and Presentation as a Discursive Process in Today's 'espaço público' of Art Communication
Between 1824 and 1952, around 350 thousand German-speaking immigrants arrived in Brazil. Today, it is estimated that around 6 million Brazilians are partly of German descent. Due to the development of medium-sized cities in settlement areas, especially in southern Brazil, and the internal migration of Germans or people of German descent to already existing large cities, the German language was considered an important component of urban cultural life there. The integration of the language and habits of these citizens through Brazilian institutions enabled the founding and impact of several theater associations until 1937. German language and culture were held in high esteem and their presence shaped everyday life in the cities and the development of Brazilian society. These are elements of Brazilian and German-language theater history that have hardly been researched to this day. The collection, analysis and digital presentation of documents from that time occupy young scholars in the field and can become historically, culturally and educationally relevant. My contribution intends to show how the audience practices of the time can become the subject of the (also virtual) "espaço público" in today's Brazil and thus contribute to transformations in the public space of certain communities and regions in the country.