Michael Shanks' kickstarted the colloquium with a summary of the many investigations that are taking place around the notion of Presence. In this regard, The Politics of Presence represents the attempt to make sense of one of the most contested and ambivalent notions in our culture. This theme, Michael noted, "resonates with different fields" thus, to have a fruitful conversation it is necessary to adopt a truly multidisciplinary approach. As an aside, I could add that "multidisciplinary" is a concept that works extremely well on paper, but in reality it is often plagued by practical deficiencies. The Metamedia Lab and the Stanford Humanities Lab, however, proved that it is possible to tackle complex issues without getting lost in methodological, political, and intellectual cul-de-sacs.

Chris Witmore asked the audience what we mean by "presence". He used an etymological approach to answer the question and recalling Derrida and Heidegger's definitions. Chris discussed the notion of "praesentia", that is, the "condition of being present", noting that such definition is underpinned by a hierarchy of presence. In other words, rather than talking about presence, we are confronted with an order of presentifications: first, the supernatural (i.e. God), followed by the natural (human beings, animals, plants) and, later on, by the inanimate (objects, tools etc.).

Investigating the notion of presence requires an understanding of space and place - presence is, after all, a "relational element" - presence has a relational function because reality it is "what we do" and "what we cannot do". Chris also underlines the fact that presence has a particular charisma, an aura, recalling Benjamin. But there is also the notion of presence as "not being physical" - for instance, the notion of presence as influence, or presence as "supernatural manifestation" (e.g. phantasms, ghosts).

Thus, to understand presence, we need to understand the complex relations between things and tenses (that is: "Where is the present? Where is the past?" - this is a key question for archeologists - "The past is somewhere else" is the usual answer - Chris suggests, on the contrary, that The past is here). Using a Greimasian approach - the semiotic square - we can rethink the notion of presence/absence, developing the notions of Quasi-presence and quasi-absence.

(to be continued)