to the author: please provide proof that hope exists and that such optimism is warranted

Does it seem wrong that I am so excited about this Visible Evidence conference at Concordia right now wherein various scholars & filmmakers get together to read each other their essays with titles like ‘Aljazeera, Counter-Hegemony and Neo-Colonialism’, ‘Memorialising on the Internet’ and ‘I Brought My Camera and a Gas Mask: Film and Global Justice Protest’?

There’s something just so comforting to me about sitting in a room with a bunch of other media theory junkies, listening to academic rants about the visualisation of public space, watching a plethora of clips which rearticulate a paper’s arguments and then exchanging inside jokes about the current repercussions of narrative on the authenicity of the documentary genre.

If you’re less into being a huge nerd, of course, and more into watching movies, the conference is also screening the documentaries all the cool kids are raving about in the evenings such as the canadian shorts Ryan and Hardwood.

Also, in keeping with the theme, the sound piece of the day is There’s a Risk of Arrest if you Turn Right. You’ll likely want to skip the intro and just jump right in. It takes a little while to warm up in flavour, but I swear that one of the protesters near the beginning sounds just like Napoleon Dynamite.