Conference Performance

Since 2008, Spatula&Barcode has regularly created site-specific performances for academic conferences--twenty-two of these to date.  While the majority have been at humanities conferences, the arts collaborative has also worked with the annual meetings of ecological scientists and food studies associations.  Initially conceived as unsanctioned or loosely approved interventions, these evolved into actual invitations and commissions (as was the case recently here in Melbourne). Like a sonnet form, with its genre constraints and predictable structures, the academic conference has provided the artists with a framework within which to play and innovate. In this lecture, Clark and Peterson will explore both the underlying epistemological narrowness of the archetypal conference and why they have found academic conferences to be such a generative context for creative work.

Professors Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson retired in May from their forty-year careers at the University of Wisconsin. In 2008, they adopted the collaborative identity Spatula&Barcode to make projects that explore conviviality, commensality, and criticality in the liminal zone between art and life. Their projects have been staged in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Abundant information about their creative work can be found at www.spatulaandbarcode.art. Both have independent and collaborative scholarship in performance studies and visual culture studies; their most recent publication is an essay on street food for the anthology Performing the Edible (Routledge, 2026).