[csaa-forum] Reminder - Geoff Stahl seminar tomorrow

[Tony Mitchell]

IASPM Sydney occasional seminars present: Ping Pong Country in Berlin


  Dr. Geoff Stahl, University of Victoria, NZ, formerly post-doctoral
  fellow, Humboldt University, Berlin, and McGill University, Montreal,
  Canada

Chair: Tony Mitchell

In this paper, I want to draw out the salience of some
concerns regarding changes in city life by highlighting their
influence on cultural spaces and social relations of contemporary
Berlin. The eventfulness of post-Wende (post-1989) Berlin, the city-
as-scene, can be read as one indicator of the myriad ways individuals
and groups have come to grips with the rapid changes Berlin. The
example of Ping Pong Country is just one social and cultural practice
among many found in Berlin, but it usefully highlights the temporal,
social, spatial and semiotic dimensions of the city's current scene,
particularly as a manifestation of the overlapping contexts of work
and play. Certain ping pong-centred events help make the city a
scene, carving out a network of cultural spaces which facilitates a
number of activities central to Berlin's cultural and economic
renewal, and in this capacity it provides an occasion (Blum, 2001)
which both calls attention to, as well as sometimes ameliorates, the
ambiguities and paradoxes found in an "entrepreneurial," or
"creative," city. By considering in more detail what might otherwise
be dismissed as an insignificant and frivolous social activity, "just
a game," one can begin to see in ping pong events a much more complex
set of relationships which tells us a great deal about how young
adults in Berlin construct individual, group and urban identities in
the context of a "culturalized" economy, how they relate to one
another and to a particular place, how a particular relationship to
flexible work patterns and urban lifestyles is negotiated, as well as
how the city acquires and maintains its specific character by evoking
a particularly attractive structure of feeling as manifest in its
deliberate "playfulness."

  Date
  9 August, 2005, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM

  Location
  City - Broadway, CB03. room 210 (Bon Marche building)

  Entry Free - ping pong bats optional

  Contact
  Tony Mitchell phone: +61 2 9514 2335


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