Coeditor's Foreword

The Features section of this issue contains papers first presented at the conference "Terms of Address: A Symposium on the Pedagogy of Film and Video Exhibition," organized by the Center for Media and Culture in Education of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto and held in Toronto, March 7 and 8, 2003.¹ The city is the site of the Toronto International Film Festival and scores of media arts festivals, venues presenting curated programs, and single-screening events. It was a highly appropriate setting for this investigation into the processes of media presentation and an exquisitely conceived event. The coordinators, Richard Fung and Roger Simon, both of OISE, took great care to limn framing questions and attract knowledgeable, thoughtful participants so as to guarantee a stimulating and fruitful forum. The attendees, who numbered about one hundred, included curators, programmers, filmmakers and video makers, teachers, and activists. We discussed and debated with intense focus, aware that this brief gathering of people with common interest and expertise in the critical practice of film and video presenting was a rare event. The few recent precedents include "Show the Right Thing: A National Conference on Multicultural Film and Video Exhibition," held at New York University in 1989 and organized by B. Ruby Rich, Coco Fusco, and Yvonne Rainer; and the Tate Modern's symposium in 2001, "The Moving Image as Art: Time-based Media in the Art Gallery." Other than such occasions, curators and programmers are mostly on their own in the attempt to develop a thoughtful practice.

"Terms of Address" inherited the critical, activist spirit of "Show the Right Thing." The highly developed discourse on politics of identity in the succeeding fourteen years, assumed as common property by most of the presenters, permitted a relatively nuanced discussion. The focus was on the pedagogical potential of media presentation, independent film and video being privileged as intellectual objects no less significant than written scholarship although not as well integrated into intellectual discourse. The coordinators posited five aspects of film and video presentation: "(1) the provision of information; (2) the provocation of insight; (3) the soliciting of pleasure; (4) instantiation of cultural memory in the form of images, sounds, and gestures; and (5) the formation of social settings in which identities, communities, discourses and solidarities are reconfirmed or put in question."² In this spirit the conference devoted time to three curated programs, as well as paper sessions and the keynote address by curator and scholar Hamid Naficy.

The four paper sessions were designed to elicit considered discussion of particular aspects of curating and programming practice. "Programming and Curating: Are They Different Projects?" compared the institutional location and mode of selection of these two arguably different practices. "Metaphors and Models of Contemporary Practice" allowed us to reflect on the effect of order, juxtaposition, and performative framing. In "What Is at Stake in Film and Video Presentation? Histories, Identities, Politics," speakers discussed the roles of curating and programming in the constitution of communities, whether established or emergent, and in building alliances among communities. "Context, Space, Audience" approached the flow of audiences among different institutional spaces, from cinema to classroom to community group to Internet.

We chose to publish papers from "Terms of Address" that reflected on concerns common to curators and programmers of independent media within and outside pedagogical contexts. Three papers address the curator's struggle both to shape the meaning of a program through context and argument, and to yield to the emergence of unforeseen meanings. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus of the Berlin Kino Arsenal reflects subtly on the effect of context on the reception of a curated program, arguing that the curator defer to the nonverbal intelligence of the work, in "Showing Different Films Differently: Cinema as a Result of Cinematic Thinking." Curator and education scholar Karyn Sandlos, in "Curating and Pedagogy in the Strange Time of Short Film and Video Exhibition," describes the unique pedagogical experience that a curated program can elicit and compares it to the deferred knowledge of the psychoanalytic encounter. My paper, "The Ethical Presenter," appeals to the emergent knowledge of the audience and...