label
performance
Linked to 25 items
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from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
00:43 When we started this research project, one of the starting points was my research on liveness. Esther Hammelburg’s PhD thesis was published as a book titled Being There Live!, which you can find on her website: https://www.estherhammelburg.nl At the time, I had just finished my PhD research into what ‘liveness’ means in a cultural setting. When we discuss livenesss, people tend to focus on the present, the ‘now’, and how everything is evolving at this moment. But when you look a bit more closely, it’s not only about the ‘now’. Liveness in fact bridges both temporalities and spaces. For intance, in live experiences we often experience a ‘now’ which was anticipated beforehand. what about non-real time and non-real space? Our minds thrive in those We look forward to an experience of liveness, we think about this live event that’s coming up. Also, we tend to make videovideos and still imagephotos of performancelive events, because we want to actively create future memories in the ‘now’. In other words, we’re creating a future past in the present. A habit researched by Hammelburg is how visitors post pictures and videos of concerts and festival on Instagram to fulfil the ‘liveness’ of being here, now. Continuing to exist online, these photos and videos extend the liveness in both spatial and temporal senses. The experience of liveness is also profoundly tied to issues of memory and remembering. How do we keep our memories? How do we share our memories? How do we archive them, and what do we do with these archives? These are some elements for the discussion in this chapter. This brings me to my first question: How do you look at hybridity as a phenomenon in the here and now, and how does it relate to the ‘afterlife’? The hybrid happens ‘now’, but does it need to be recorded? Also, I am curious about the connection between time and audioaudio. Who would like to comment?
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from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
06:06 When we started to think about hybridity, we thought about activation or involvement. How can you get an equal level of involvement online/offline? But also: How can we activate and make it a collective experience? I’m wondering: is 50/50 participation measurable? Can we not accept differences in modes of participation, while fostering different types of cultural meaning? That’s why we invited Roos, Derk, and Benjamin Pompe, another artist who also made a project and worked with a kind of game situation. So already there’s a set of rules, performanceyou have a role to play, and that makes people become active. Other formats have been ones where we would be eating and drinking together. It’s a very social experience that would make it easy for people to jump into a conversation cause it’s a low-pressure situation. It’s really a situation where you can say something silly like: ‘I like this wine, I don’t like this wine.’ The format of eating and drinking together has been explored by IMPAKT in their event ‘Wine Flows and Other Things’. To find out more about it, check about the blog post: https://networkcultures.org/goinghybrid/2023/06/20/ihwat-2022-the-event-wine-flows-and-other-things. https://networkcultures.org/goinghybrid/2023/06/22/project-stargaze-report That’s a very easy thing to say. And with Roos and Derk’s project, you enter a game situation and that makes it easy for people to engage with the environment that they’re being put in.
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from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
11:50 What also led me to invite you, Roos, was spacethe escape room you made. That’s an earlier work. It also made me think a bit about what Benjamin Pompe made, which was very different. Roos and Derk’s piece was a game for a selected (few) amount of people where everyone had performancesimilar kind of roles. Benjamin’s piece was set in a game engine and played with what games usually are about: you’re on an island, you need to find something, you’re confronted with an object, you don’t understand the object, it has a secret meaning… All these kinds of forms that we already know and that allow people to step into a certain context easily and engage with it. I think Roos did something similar. What I liked a lot about Roos’s work is that spacethe room we had was a nice gallery, like a white cube, but it was made into a gymnastic room with all the lines on the floor. I think that the background is an escape room. Escape living room The game reminded people a bit of Pictionary or Twister… this is a lifelong tradition I cannot break it like that by coming to the front row, I would loose my identity :(( So they were on familiar ground, but still engaged by a new set of rules, a new kind of gaming. I think that’s what we can take from game concepts in general… To activate people and to have them engage with each other in an easy way. ADHD friendly event Roos’s escape room project is called ‘I want to delete it all, but not now’. but tbh I do like this format … there is definitely some interesting and organic layering with having a small live audience who is also partially commenting on the streamed conversation, simultaneously having whispering giggling conversation
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from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
18:32 The question made me think of what Benjamin Pompe did in his game. He gave the online audience extra agency. The in-house audience was supposed to answer certain questions but they weren’t able to see the consequences, because only the online audience could attach consequences to certain decisions. performanceSo the online audience was disrupting the in-house audience. A similar experiment was conducted by XPUB 1 students in a radio broadcast titled ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to an Active Archive’. It was a choose-your-own-adventure story which depended on the interaction of the audience to function. For further mention of this, see ‘Chapter 4: Forms of Hybridity’. Of course, we come from a past where being present online is considered like a second level. memoryzing is always speculating, with a touch of fantazy much often I mean, that’s only what you do when you can’t travel there or whatever. Being in the physical space is thought of as the best thing you can do. To balance that, he played around with giving the online audience more agency and power over the in-house audience. And I think when the default situation is online, like in gaming, then maybe off-site people have more agency. It depends on where you’re coming from and how you’re spacemaking this environment into a hybrid environment. If it’s an websiteonline gaming environment, then the hybrid situation will perhaps put the in-house audience at a disadvantage. Because it’s not the natural habitat for a game. So to answer the question, it depends very much on what the original format is and how you want to bend it into a hybrid format. To find out more about Benjamin Pompe’s work ‘The Great Idle’ check out: https://benjaminpompe.com/project/the-great-idle
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
01:07 What is the red thread in this conversation? There are many points of connection. Both Michael’s and Sepp’s groups work with the ‘afterlife of liveness’. Thinking about how the public engages with (post-)live content of, for instance, performancecultural events and audioradio programs, both groups have asked: How to create an afterlife of liveness that also engages with collective practices of sense-making? In their experiments, both groups engaged with different forms and mediums within hybridity, seeking out different narrative structures and forms of non-linearity. Moreover, they’ve experimented with the form of databases, repositories, and protocols. For this work, both groups try to make use of existing open-source tools, such as etherpads and wikis. They also think about hybridity as a way to create publics through the use of different interactions it enables. So hybridity is a way of making things public, but also a way of creating publics. These many points of connection lead me to my first question.
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
12:42 I’ll start by giving some context. Since September 2023, XPUB has taken part in Going Hybrid, so we came a bit late into the process. Going Hybrid started in January 2022. Since then, we have been running audioa weekly radio program at Radio Worm, which is an online radio stream. Each week, Tuesdays from 10 to 12, we’re producing a radio program ‘Protocols for an Active Archive’. A texttranscribed excerpt of that program is included in this book as one of the intermissions. In that snippet, Leslie, our course coordinator, describes pushing back on protocols. performanceIt's a very personal story of a friend who resists the conformity imposed by an outdated dress code.
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
14:08 An important text that we read in the XPUB program is textSimon Yuill's 'All Problems of Notation Will Be Solved by the Masses'. Simon Yuill, ‘All Problems of Notation Will Be Solved by the Masses’, Mute, 23 May 2008, https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/all-problems-notation-will-be-solved-masses. In it, Yuill described how musicians in the sixties and seventies devised various forms of protocols, as well as different systems of textnotation, to break out of the esthetic and social conventions. Think of examples like audioCornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra. student-at-the-back is brought to the front without anticipation I feel disturbed in my distanced identity For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnN5bAkd6jw&ab_channel=INVIGORATION. These protocols would often have the form of games that played around with leadership roles. The point is that, just like a children’s game of tag, you’re playing out different possibilities and it’s disrupting the established order. There is not some informal, implicit leader, but by defining a protocol together, these people speak about who’s the leader now, and how and why to give the leadership over to someone else. /camera:75 performanceAfter this conversation, performers are more 'awake' and responsive to each other. I think it’s really exciting. /camera:70
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
21:27 Each Tuesday, we would have an interview. textWe had an Etherpad, where we would write some possible as we started to think, and in the process, we would allow our focus to shift. Etherpad is an open-source web tool for collaborative writing. I think this resonates with the earlier discussion about the archive. Michael refers to Chapter 1 Radio Worm’s archive shouldn’t be just about collecting all the audioMP3s and dumping them somewhere, as, by the way, they’re already doing on websiteMixcloud. Maybe we should focus more on the community, on how this radio is made, and who the makers are. And so we’ve shifted to interviewing the makers. Tuesday morning we started for the first time at the studio with no set ‘caretakers’, as we call them (in the past we had prearranged a caretaker role). ‘Caretakers’ are the students in the radio studio during the broadcast, who take care of that weeks radio show plan. We started by playing a recording of something we presented on Sunday at the spaceZine Camp in Worm. To find more about Zine Camp 2023 check: https://zinecamp2023.hotglue.me/?home. While that was happening, the class was voting on questions to ask the makers. Then, performancewe had a rotating shift, of different question askers and engineers to do the mixing. unfortunately we need to keep a low volume here :( Ash, Lucas Simonis, and Lieuwe Zelle, the main makers of Radio Worm, got asked these questions. It was in the space of 48 hours, so much had been happening. We were textconnected on the pad but also spacevisible through the studio window. I think that was an amazing experience.
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from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
23:02 I’d like to bring up another experiment that XPUB students have done. In the choose-your-own-adventure game audioradio broadcast, the audience could textwrite in an Etherpad and guide the people who are audioon the radio where they’re going next, and which part of a narrative they’re performancepresenting. This game was based on David Maroto’s research into the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ gamebook, which was very popular in the 1990s, just before the advent of the internet. See: https://www.davidmaroto.info/The-Wheel-of-Fortune. Radio was no longer one-directional, but the audience had agency and even guided the people who were supposed to be the presenters. They were changing the medium and allowing it to be more than what it was conceived to be. The choose-your-own-adventure radio broadcast was called ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to an Active Archive’
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from: Participatory Livecasting (chapter)
At the moment, as an online visitor of a hybrid event, you can just performanceask a question to the speaker, which may or may not be seen by the moderator. Of course, you can also textchat with each other, but there are relatively very few other ways to show what you think. Or what knowledge you have to share. That return channel from the online audience to the event and to the on-site has not yet been developed at all. That is still very simple.
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from: Participatory Livecasting (chapter)
During one of the first meetings we had, we agreed that a better hybrid live experience is not necessarily more immersive. We’ve experienced that more connection between audiences (on-site, online, and among each other) can also be achieved in a performancelow-barrier collaborative spreadsheet drawing session, for example. On websiteThe Hmm’s live stream website, developed by Karl Moubarak and designed by Toni Brell, online visitors are visualized by still imagea simple dot at the top of the page. Visit The Hmm’s livestream website here: https://live.thehmm.nl. When people performancesend an emote, the dot of that person for a moment changes into the emote of their choice. This is a very subtle way to let the online audience feel seen and acquire some agency: they literally claim a bit of space on the live stream page and can operate somewhat autonomously by changing the contents of this space45px * 45px area. But this agency remains tied to the online environment. We decided that, in this project, we wanted to research how the online audience’s agency can extend beyond this 45px*45px area and into the physical space of the event, and how to make a more direct connection between online and on-site audiences. We wanted to develop mechanisms and prototypes that enable the translation of input from the websiteonline audience to outputs in the spacephysical space and vice versa. This, for us, is the essence of ‘particpatory livecasting’.
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from: Participatory Livecasting (chapter)
During the project, we focused on the development of the tool Emoji Proxis & Ghost Messengers, which translates changes in the online environments (like textchat inputs, a new online performancevisitor entering the space, or a still imagereceived emote) into something that happens in the spacephysical space (like a light goes on, a smoke machine turns a vote is cast, or the program shifts). This tool is a kind of open-source plug-in we developed for The Hmm’s livestream website.
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from: Participatory Livecasting (chapter)
Working on this concrete prototype, it became easier to think experimentally. You start to see the different ways it can be used, for different purposes. Testing, development, and participation naturally merge. During a workshop we organize in November of 2022 in Page Not Found, The Hague, we invited the audience to help us join us in building a system encompassing several different hybrid networking experiments. We explained to both audiences (online and on-site) that Emoji Proxis & Ghost Messengers runs on objecta little ESP32 module, and we taught the on-site audience to develop their own prompt. These performanceprompts would trigger small, mechanic on-site events: lights going on and off, a scentscent dispenser going off, and a objectblower turning on. During this fun experiment, we exchanged knowledge about assembling systems like these and thought together about how to situate them in the context of hybrid events.
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from: Hybrid Trains of Thought (chapter)
Most of the stuff displayed and announced on the
spacetrain is also pulled from the websitenet,
and in the meantime everyone is glued to their
objectphone, microdosing drops of dopamine,
mindlessly performancedoomscrolling.
Yeah, yeah, yeah…
A boomer cliché, right?
Maybe.
In the meantime,
while we argue over the freshness of this critique, /camera:90
our hyperinterdependence on hybrid systems has
remained unchallenged,
unregulated,
unconditional,
and ultimately underestimated.
Chapters are written,
panels are moderated,
slides are presented,
research is funded,
but radical discourse is not met with radical action,
and thus the hyperinterdependence stays on track
towards an increasingly gloomy destination.
Well, on track, not always.
When the computational infrastructure of NS failed
on 3 April 2022,
the effects were telling.
The whole train infrastructure stopped nationwide,
and NS employees,
without their daily software-generated instructions
and schedules,
simply went back home,
unable to do any kind of task.
Maybe that’s the problem.
The path to the offered destination,
regardless of what or where it could even be,
is so broken that we wouldn’t be able to reach it
before the infrastructure supporting the journey
completely collapsed.
In the meantime:
Let’s write more software.
They say it’s cheap.
LOL.
The meme/tired adage that ‘computation and
storage are cheap’ is not going away,
despite their well-documented extractivism,
resource-heavy labor, and bloated infrastructural
requirements that
(despite being ‘merely’ computational)
demand a recursive amount of even further
investment and resources. Fun fact 3: All dots at the top of the screen represent members of the audience. So there’s about a classroom full of us. Curious to know which dot you are? Use the ‘emote’ function at the bottom of the screen, and you’ll see
But, hey, we need apps.
More apps.
It’s not surprising that the software side of the
NS infrastructure is becoming an increasingly /camera:100
important part of its agenda and financial
investment,
even boasting new performance indicators such as
‘user-friendly travel information’. From the NS annual report ‘Performance on the main rail network and the high-speed line’, 2021, https://www.nsannualreport.nl/annual-report-2021/our-activities-and-achievements-in-the-netherlands/performance-on-the-main-rail-network-and-the-highspeed-line/performance-on-the-main-rail-network-and-the-highspeed-line.
As a traveler whose existence needs to be validated
by take-it-or-leave-it data extraction,
I don’t really feel like a friend of the NS.
More than anything else,
to me,
this clearly shows how operating systems and
software interface language is transforming the
traveler into a computer user or a pawn used by
computers for who knows what purpose. -
from: Introducing Etherport.org (chapter)
Our main objective was to to find new cultural and digital strategies that expand the room for reflection and collectivity, with the use of alternative ways of online publishing. In this process, we were keen to experiment with making event reports can more open-ended, multi-voiced, and non-linear. Instead of creating FOMO-inducing descriptions, or bureaucratic documents, we wanted to create a structure for event reporting that would give readers an interesting, explorative experience. We looked at textreal-time transcriptions and instant publishing, non-linear and modular formats, objecton-demand printing stations as part of spaceexhibitions, and audioaudio-texttext hybrids. We found inspiration in zines, websiteinteractive digital longforms, wikis, annotated maps, hybrid indexes, chat-to-print tools, objectbook printing machines, and performanceinterventions in spacepublic space. There are so many alternatives to the boring and bureaucratic event report! Among the interesting practices we found, five deserve a special mention:
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from: Introducing Etherport.org (chapter)
To question and circumvent paywalls that enclose knowledge that should be public, Maria van der Togt has created the artwork Hard Copy Soft Copy—Impermeable Domains (2021). Read more about the work here: https://sandberg.nl/alumni/maria-van-der-togt/work/hard-copy-soft-copy–impermeable-domains. The work consists of websitea virtual platform with an open-source collection of textdigital publications, run on a objectraspberry pi, and a spacespatial printing and binding set-up. Members of the public use the objecton-site computer to select any of the documents and performanceprint and bind it on the spot. In rescuing material from the clutches of corporatization, the work upholds the true definition of ‘public’ through the simple gesture of providing resources without any expectation of return.
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from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
We’ve seen videolive streams set up on a spacestage, with performancespeakers giving a lecture and no audience except the viewers at home behind their computer; clunky live events with pre-recorded interviews that pixelate with every hesitation of the WiFi; videoInstagram Lives that nobody watches or that everyone is watching; countless videoZoom live streams with break-out rooms and tens of people on audiomute, fighting the Zoom fatigue or their clingy cat. Already in November 2020, Geert Lovink wrote about the phenomenon of Zoom fatigue: Geert Lovink, ‘The Anatomy of Zoom Fatique’, Eurozine, 21 November 2020, https://networkcultures.org/geert/2020/11/21/anatomy-of-zoom-fatigue. And we’ve also seen marvelous experiments: objecta big screen on a spacelive stage that shows a lively, textonline chat which is actually integrated into the conversation; performancea buddy system where an offline visitor takes their online friend by the hand (meaning, on their phone) and guides them through an spaceexhibition, event, Q&A’s with speakers live on stage.
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from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
We’ve witnessed performanceTravis Scott playing a concert in the game websiteFortnite, for a whopping 27 million viewers—and he wasn’t the only one. Roel Vergauwen, ‘Will Games Become the New Concert Temples?’, Boekman, https://catalogus.boekman.nl/pub/P21-0355.pdf. Cultural institutions, usually relying on their audience having to travel to an offline destination to attend an event, found that they could reach a bigger and more international audience, and on top of that, speakers didn’t need to travel which saves both time and costs. Also, the common use of videolivestreams and textcaptions created new accessibility features for audience groups with different needs. It became possible to be sick and participate in culture, to be cooking dinner for your children and participate in culture, to have hearing impairments and participate in culture. These needs existed before the pandemic and will exist in the future too. It remains important not to forget the issue of accessibility now that on-site programming is the norm once again.
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from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
The events group created Emoji Proxis & Ghost Messengers, a tool for interaction between on-line and on-site audiences, giving online audience direct agency over things that happen in space. For instance, by typing a command in the livestream chat, online audience members can performanceactivate an on-site scentscent objectdispenser, or performancephysically move objectthe camera. A version of this tool was presented during the Going Hybrid conference. Read more about this tool and the workshop here: https://networkcultures.org/goinghybrid/2023/03/29/workshop-emoji-proxies-ghost-messengers-conference-report-day-2.
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from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
You may hold this objectbook in your hands, read it from your websitescreen, or encounter it as a recorded videolivestream. That’s because we practice what we preach: this book is an experiment in hybrid publishing; the first time the Institute of Network Cultures has produced an event as a book. We started with an event, which took place on the 10th of November 2023 on the websitelivestream platform of The Hmm, and then used the recording to start forking and expanding. You can watch back the full recording of Screentime Airtime Facetime on the website of The Hmm: https://live.thehmm.nl/screentimeairtimefacetime. The recording was made in the audiovisual studio of the Amsterdam University of Applied Science. Rethinking the book as starting from a videolivestream, we composed a program of elements that can exist in both an event and a book: live textchapter-performanceconversations, videopre-recorded intermissions, textchatroom annotation, and a audiospoken colophon.
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from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
‘Thresholds of Access’, the second chapter, reflects on what kind of mediation is necessitated by performancelive events to provide both human and technological access. In this chapter, the Participatory Livecasting group and the Hybrid Publications group joined in conversation.