Introduction

As digital communication tools increasingly move are towards recording and broadcasting capabilities, everyday users gain the ability to share experiences immediately from daily life. Through the affordances of such technologies we are only now beginning to see signs of a transformed role for participants in a cultural event, in addition to evolving techniques suited to their needs. For example, digital media technology has revolutionized our ideas about music and how it will move from the artist’s creative process to audience reception, both in real space and in mediated, networked environments. Spontaneous, contextual, and socially driven networks can be seen emerging within the boundaries of specific shared experiences, yet the audience’s understanding of how to leverage these artifacts into new works is only in its infancy. While technology has offered promises for such innovative applications, it has not yet delivered fully in this respect. However, even if the technology is there, we must consider social as being just significant a role in digital culture’s ongoing development.

For this research project, Fan with a Movie Camera, we draw upon the culturally and historically situated practice of constructing personal media collections using available technologies and techniques in “everyday life”. Such practices and techniques include, but are by no means exclusive to: (re)mixed tapes, concert bootlegs, mp3 file-sharing, podcasting, and bittorent networks. The varied forms of repurposing musical artifacts that are typically available are a response to the inundation of sources to which we are increasingly exposed in postmodern western culture. Within this culture, an individual’s personal actions, expressions, and experiences are inspired and mediated by a variety of sources. These sources include close personal contacts (family, friends, etc), the recurrence and availability of artifacts in the culture itself, and the recombination or remixing of those artifacts with artifacts created by others.

For this design intervention, we situate our research at the source of transmission itself: a given musical performance in the ordinary culture of a local rock music scene. We focus our attention on the ability of media technologies to extend the performance through the actions of its audience members. Using the metaphors of reverberation and stock market as potentially general tools for accessing properties of the live music recording and trading phenomenon, we then propose a design solution and prototype in the form of a business plan for a technology startup. This prototype reflects the successful social software and networking model of Vancouver’s Flickr, who offer a digital photo sharing system that is itself modeled as an photography equivalent to the text-based blogging phenomenon. The design proposed here similarly repurposes this phenomenon with respect to video capture technologies, however, it focuses on the live music performance as a common and available source of content.

Contact

Please send email to joearthurshow "at" gmail.com.