Showing and Sharing on a Saturday Night
Showing and Sharing on a Saturday Night
Al Larsen
published in The Squealer, volume 18, issue 1, Spring/Summer 2008
The young woman sitting at the microphone abruptly stops strumming her guitar. “Oh my god,” she says, “I forgot the words. I never play in front of people – I can’t do this.” Her friends in the audience call out their encouragement and after some hesitation she begins another song. This time she makes it all the way through, to applause from the small crowd. There’s a saying among musicians that, “you only have to play your first show once,” and now, significantly, she’s crossed that threshhold.
Uploading a photo, posting a blog entry or a comment or a list of your tastes in music, movies, people: these have become common ways of social participation. But people still like to go out in the evening, to be together in person at a show or other entertainment and a handful of event series – Not the Usual Suspects, Slideluck Potshow, All Caps, Pecha Kucka – taking place locally and around the world echo the participatory modes of Web 2.0 in physical space.
Last fall and spring, the attic of a house in Buffalo’s University Heights became the site of Not the Usual Suspects, a showcase for local musicians, poets, visual artists, video makers, performance artists and comedians, many of whom were taking their first tentative steps into public exhibition. Frustrated by the wine-and-cheese atmosphere at local art events and the lack of opportunities for young and less-established artists to present work in public, Aimee Buyea, a video maker and a UB Media Study student at the time, launched the series with some friends. Describing it as “a DIY variety art show,” she placed an emphasis on participation over professionalism or even artistic quality. She consciously worked to maintain an open, non-critical policy toward booking the event. “I just made a point of being like, ‘I don’t care if I’ve never heard you, I don’t care how cool you are, I don’t care what set-up you have, I don’t care about your demo, as long as you have a good attitude and you have a commitment to play, then you can play,’” Buyea explained.
Not the Usual Suspects events embraced a range of creative work, not just the standard band-at-a-house-party. “When we first started I actually had trouble getting art… so then I had it switched around to being more, ‘Hey, get your markers out, get your cameras out.’ More of a, ‘We can all do this.’” said Buyea. Starting with the second show a bake sale was added to the event – with homemade cupcakes and cookies sold for 25 cents – as a way for people who wouldn’t consider themselves artists to contribute to the event. “The whole point of our show is to get everyone involved in this event, not just showing up to it,” Buyea noted.
A social element of involvement flowed from how the shows were structured. Each evening’s program was broken into three or four sections with breaks in between, providing plenty of opportunity for refreshment and social circulation. Sometimes the party vibe threatened to overwhelm the quieter or more introspective selections. This became a problem at some shows, although Buyea noted that, ultimately, “you can’t control your audience because that’s against the (open nature of the) show too.”
Through the combination of variety, informal atmosphere and participation the shows successfully brought together different cliques of college-age people: crusty punks, a literary crowd, hipster kids. “It’s like all these small niches of kids coming together for once,” said Buyea. “It’s not one single audience, it’s just this whole bunch of people that are interested in tons of different things.” Not the Usual Suspects worked to move from the model of performers and their audience of spectators to a community in which every person has their own way with a story, a song, a cupcake recipe. While the term DIY gets used a lot these days, Not the Usual Suspects moved the emphasis from do it yourself to we can all do this.
Not the Usual Suspects was a local-to-Buffalo project but different event series happening around the world are exploring related ideas.
For instance, Slideluck Potshow is an ongoing event series which combines a potluck meal with a slideshow of photographic work. It started in 2000 in Seattle and in early installments, when the event was relatively small, participants brought a home-cooked dish and slides of their images and then the meal and the show were both served up on-the-fly. Now it takes place in large loft spaces for crowds in the hundreds. It has become popular as an industry event where photographers can get noticed by creative directors and photo editors and there have been installments of the series mounted in metropolitan centers around the world.
All Caps!, a continuing series of all ages music events in Toronto, encourages a mix-cd exchange at their shows. Audience members drop off a homemade mix CD and leave with one by a compiled by a stranger.
Pecha Kucha is an event format in which presenters, usually architects, designers or others in the creative professions, work within a set constraint of 20 slides and a 6 minute 40 second time limit (20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each). Fourteen short presentations per evening allows for a variety of topics and approaches. The first Pecha Kucha was held in Tokyo in 2003 and the event has caught on around the world, including four installments in Buffalo at Soundlab. The enforced brevity of the format forces presenters to be concise, and it also takes some of the pain out of a presentation that misses the mark. Stella Buchan-Ioannou of London Architecture Biennale who organized a London installment said, “I’ve got friends who hate architecture and design but love Pecha Kucha. It’s just great entertainment. It’s really informal and, even if people mess it up or someone’s boring, it doesn’t matter because you just wait for the next person.”
One of the initiators of the format, Tokyo-based architect Mark Dytham, has described the intimacy of the Pecha Kucha events as “like the Internet in reverse.” This comparison is worth noting as we might look at all of these event series in light of developments in online culture.
In his essay “Showing,” artist and media theorist Jordan Crandall writes that the ways the online sharing sites are used represent “cultures of showing as much as those of watching.” Using these sites, “we are compelled to solicit the attention of others, act for unseen eyes, and develop new forms of connective intensity — as if this were somehow the very condition of our continued existence, the marker of our worth.” The actual act of participating – uploading, commenting, browsing, revealing – becomes more important than the quality or significance of any particular statement.
In much the same way, in all of these realspace event series participants find themselves alternately in the role of audience and producer. The events emphasize sharing and showing and they compile a variety of contributions from many participants, rather than presenting a “feature length” work. They explore the logic of Web 2.0 in physical, social spaces rooted in the local community.
There has been much interest in contemporary art around performances and environments that create social situations, but these pieces typically take the form of a project which runs for a short time at a site to which the artist has no particular connection and for audiences which are largely not rooted in the local community either. As artist and writer Doug Ashford has noted, “In terms of the art world’s current methods, art is considered socially relational yet nonspecific. Ideas of local or timely concern are being left behind.” By contrast, these event series, which work within and for local populations open possibilities for communities to form which are long-lasting and can have implications for the specific issues people face where they live.
Looking beyond the surface of these event series, contradictions become apparent. Slideluck Potshow seems to be bent on becoming a brand or franchise; All Caps makes sure to provide instructions on how one ought to make a mix CD. Pecha Kucha and Slideluck Potshow, rooted as they are in the creative industries, particularly bring up the question of who profits from the donated food, space and energy, if not monetarily, then in terms of reputation and professional connections. Attempting a move from audience to community is political, at the same time these events can also replicate the flipside of the sociable web spaces: you can seemingly “do whatever you want” but in a framework in which the limits of participation and the vectors of power are obscured behind a proliferation of user-supplied content.
The culture of showing and watching that Crandall describes is most clearly visible online but we should also look for its manifestation in general circulation. The invitation to participate holds the promise of community but also comes with its own sets of expectations, pitfalls and penalties.
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Aimee Buyea interviewed Winter, 2007. Buffalo, NY.
Stella Buchan-Ioannou quoted in: “Case Study,” Creative London website. <http://www.creativelondon.org.uk/server.php?show=conWebDoc.36> Retrieved June 14, 2007.
Mark Dytham quoted in Snow, Jean. “All Talk.” Time magazine: (Jul 17, 2006)
Doug Ashford quoted in Who Cares, New York: Creative Time Books (2006)
Crandall, Jordan. “Showing.” Published on nettime mailing list (June 27, 2007)
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