[PD] some images...

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2007, Chris McCormick wrote:

> Well I guess there will be another Pd conference of some kind in the 
> future, right?

You can guess all that you want. It's the same as it was two weeks ago 
when I was saying the same thing: we don't really know. We're still just 
making speculations on where it could be in the next few years. London. 
Barcelona. Roma. São Paulo. Istanbul. New York. Sounds incredible, and 
yes, it's not very credible at the moment, it's still almost just 
name-throwing. I tried talking to a few people about this, but that's like 
0.1% of the job.

There ought to be dossiers about each of the cities so that they can be 
compared and chosen. Each report should include something about who uses 
pd in that city, which activities are pd-oriented, how the community is 
organised, which universities and artist-run centres want to give support 
to a pd convention, whether the national art council(s) or city art 
council(s) are interested to back it, other possible local funding, 
possibility of external funding (e.g. any funding programmes that can be 
applied to a collaboration between Montréal and/or Graz and the hosts of 
the 3rd convention). From that point, plans for 3rd, 4th, 5th conventions 
can be laid out according to forecasts of readiness of each city's 
community.

Montréal took several years to get ready, in terms of key people deciding 
to get involved and reserve the time to work on it... I remember trying to 
throw the idea around in 2004. It wasn't quite credible back then... nor 
during 2005... I mean in terms of having it happen during the following 
year: once the team is there and ready, it can take about a year of actual 
work.

About 2008, the thing is that since it takes over a whole year to organise 
something like the Montréal convention, and no-one wanted to discuss a 3rd 
convention before the 2nd was over, so it'll take at least a few months 
before the selection of the next city actually happens, and from that 
point it'll take roughly a year, plus or minus a few months. At the end of 
that process it'll already be 2009.

If you have magic shortcuts that you can take out of your hat, you are 
more than welcome (and more than encouraged) to share them.

Pd Convention is not a franchise, so anyone could actually do something 
completely on their own and call it Pd Convention 2008, but it'd be a 
shame if it's not roughly the same size as any of the last two 
conventions, especially as I know several people who would like to give a 
hand in making it big enough, no matter where it actually happens.

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada