#c21nonhuman

I attended the first lecture of the conference "Animality and Abstraction" by Brian Massumi. To be quite honest, I had a hard time following what he was talking about much of the time. I think it had to do with his lack of visual content. His talk could have been much more effective had he included photos and videos relating to compliment the content being discussed, or even if he was standing in a more central location on the stage. Luckily, he encouraged the audience to tweet throughout his talk with the hashtag #c21nonhuman. Paired with the abstract of the talk posted on the conference's website, I am able to piece a bit more together from what I heard. In the beginning I remember a lengthy example discussing the color of the beak of a bird. This part of the talk seemed to analyze its evolutionary purpose. Interesting, but without visuals I found it hard to follow. I also remember a section of the talk that focused on instincts, and how "play" is practice for self defensive and hunting behaviors. Looking through the tweets from the conference it looked like there were some very interesting topics and talks. I wish I could have gone to more or watched via u-stream, which I found out about on Twitter.