The College Art Association Conference (CAA) is a large annual event that convenes artists, art historians from all over the US. This year it took place in Boston. CAA usually takes over a large hotel or convention center. It's hard not to get sucked into the atmosphere of nervous tension in the hallways. People carry portfolios and are dressed for academic success. People smile at you more than usual as you could sit across from them in a hiring interview an hour later. This is where mostly graduate students get jobs. There is a large hall with interview tables, a book fair, and the rooms where the conference sessions take place. Exhibitions, lectures, and events at organizations in town coincide.

The conference follows the rituals of the traditionally formatted event and is relatively expensive. It's a good idea that the organizers allow for the purchase of access to single sessions. The core of CAA's function is hiring faculty. There are, however, flashes of intensive discourse and social networking. This gathering is valued in particular by those who otherwise don't have a chance to meet a broad range of colleagues. It is mildly disorienting to see many hundreds of people who all teach in the areas of art, technology and art history all throughout the United States. It puts a (still predominantly white) image to a field. There are far fewer conferences in domains like renaissance art history than there are in 'new media,' which makes this conference more important for some scholars. At the new media sessions that I attended (and spoke on) many more senior people showed up. They were hungry to catch up with technological developments.

Two observations stood out that relate to my earlier notes about conferencing here. Name tags are one aspect in the grammar of events. This sounds like a peripheral detail but it gets quite irritating. People pass you by wearing large tags around their necks. You become transfixed on the chestal areas of passers-by. Putting a face to a name is one thing. From the name tag we may recognize the person who wrote that seminal essay "What Cezanne means to us *now.*" But the self-branding makes many conference attendees uncomfortable. They don't wear the thing at all. At least half of the tags are hidden under coats or blazers. Some use these little cards to display status within the academic hierarchy. "HELLO! My name is: Mrs. so-and-so, Yale University." It's legitimizing and many listeners will be more good-willing when listening to their presentations. Perhaps instead of listing your institution on this social interface tag you could add a few keywords describing your interests and add that to your name. Then stick it onto your arm or bag. This would come close to a research tag cloud, a folksonomy of your interests. This method has more chance of connecting people on the level of discourse instead of status.

Another simple consideration for event organizers is that of power outlets. It sounds profane. But at CAA the lack of available sockets in common areas became a problem. Each power source attracted a small following of the laptop users desparately in need of electricity. You see people walking up and down the hallways: outlet scouting. They look under benches, behind chairs and in vacant rooms. This could be easily adjusted by organizers. Tables and benches equipped with large numbers of outlets would do the trick.

Another discovery at the CAA conference was that slide projectors are still in use. What gets lost for art historians if image presentation becomes technologized? Do we get a finer reproduction from slides (hardly). Or, does it just take some basic knowledge of scanning to figure out how to get the fine print of the image pronounced through pixels? Most likely more traditional colleges don't recognize the need to invest in slide scanners to transfer their large slide collections, groomed over decades, into digital formats. Is it harder to juxtapose two images in a presentation software instead of using 2 slide projectors? Powerpoint makes that somewhat problematic indeed as the seize of the images that can be juxtaposed is limited. Also the time to transfer all the slides into digital formats can be considerable. However, all of this only points to the fact that art historians and the institutions in which they work have to wake up to these issues (or join the Magic Lantern Society). Kodak terminated the production of slide projectors. Lights out.