Here are the notes from the UnConference session Paige Saez and I did at the art art&code conference last week. It was a real delight for me to meet other folks who really get the networked experience and performance. There were many great insights and questions including: why bother worrying about making the networked experience more emotional?
I created this inquiry (which I plan to stay on as it’s a broadening of my own performance work which doubles as web social research) because I believe live performers and performance will hold key insights to creating conditions for real-time emotional social engagement. I believe this is a necessary direction for the user experience, strategy and overall intent and structure of the web. Some popularly see social platforms as being G+, Facebook etc but the web itself is a social platform and one that is in its infancy, especially emotionally. The web’s emotional interface hasn’t progressed past the era of under construction gifs. What is being asked of each of us in a more consciously social web and a more relational economy is to create and hold a social space with each communication we put into the environment. Yet the environment is not designed best to help us do that.
Before we got blogging software, we were blogging. There were just a lot fewer of us and we didn’t always use that word for it. The platforms that got built for blogging were able to build on the actual writing experience that was already happening.
But social media platforms didn’t model themselves after actual social experience. Live performance is the closest thing we have to what social platforms would like to emotionally enable. It’s the kind of public emotional engagement we want to support (in big and small ways) through new platforms.
The thing that is driving all the massive use of what’s called social media is the fact that we are social. It’s who and how we are as humans. We want to connect and our economy and culture (that we ourselves have made and endured) have not given us enough connection, meaning, feeling, relationship with ourselves and each other. And art has all those things in spades. We are at a real changing point in the web, the economy, our currency and our culture. And the thing that is going to get us to the next place is feeling. And each other.
How can the digital world be more emotionally resonant and human? Now that a large amount of web activity takes place in real-time social environments we’re bringing together some of the best people in live performance: actors, directors, dancers, casting agents, comedians etc to investigate how they work to create conditions for great emotional engagement and mix them in conversation with innovative thinkers and makers from the digital world.
Heather Gold, solo performer, social artist and web veteran has mixed web and performance approaches for over 10 years exploring public intimacy. She’s now extending her inquiry to the broader community and will “tummel” the workshop, bringing her different worlds together to come up with our collective insights in this landmark gathering to discover directions for the next stage of where social media, the web and possible even performance.