Anyone remember BBCOne’s Tomorrow’s World? I guess BBC Click is its contemporary replacement. This clip from when the Beeb came down to the Vibe Bar to check out Hyperjam’s Club 21st Century in, yes, 1997!
It’s been an interesting 7/8 months for creative digital practice. It began as a flurry of streaming activity in all forms from individual IG Lives to big projects like the dance company Rambert‘s Draw From Witnin. The latter, a work created specifically for the screen and broadcast live, came in timely fashion. After being inundated with the kind of content that was previously only occasionally consumed by live theatre and dance audiences as compensation for missing that show they really wanted to see, audiences were beginning to question the value of watching work presented on stage on their screens. For many these presentations simply intensified pining for the real thing. Draw From Within opened up a conversation about form, creativity and innovation. When did ‘new media’ become ‘old media’? When did the Internet become TV?
What’s noticeable for me, in the midst of so much tragedy is an atmosphere akin to that of the 90s when we sought through digital media technologies a brave new culturally democratised world, enriched with social and creative innovation that the big four corporates (Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple) have since strangled, (re)asserting hegemonic social control and dampening the enthusiasm for the medium, technologies and practice, leading many to shift from revolutionary enthusiasm to viewing these platforms as reactionary.
Over the last 7 months however, it feels like a searching for ways to challenge artistic convention and to address negative beahviours has been revisited. There’ve been a few events that capture that spirit of the 90s. In August I joined an event online in which the artists debuted a musical work originally intended for physical live performance where, in order to make sense of it being streamed online, introduced a a level interactivity for the audience, whereby they could post images that the artist would weave into the live mixing and collageing of visuals to accompany the piece.
This event took me back to the project Club 21st Century my company Hyperjam ran with Cleveland Watkiss between 1997 and 2000. There we did something uncannily similar. Not content with being one of the few club nights at the time with VJing at the centre of its fortnightly programme and simply passively streaming, we mixed the live camera images with the work of the VJs for both physical projection screen and internet stream and invited audiences to upload images to us to provide the VJs with their palette. Back then we had to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) so it was mainly a community of digital designers that participated. Today we have “user friendly” technologies that while supposedly making the tech more accessible, trap the public in modes of engagement that arguably afford us less agency in our lives.
On the Tuesday 20th October 2020 I’ll be joining Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky, David Bering-Porter (The New School) Douglas Rushkoff (author of Cyberia) for “Reclaiming Cyberspace” to reflect on histories like the work of Digital Diaspora, the radical dreamings of Afrofuturism and the potential for taking back our cyberspace. https://cybersalon.org/reclaiming-cyberspace-afrofuturism-in-sci-fi-lit-and-vr-worlds-next-event/
Meanwhile one thing that has improved since the 90s, I guess, is the BBC’s grasp of the technology. BBC Click would not confuse uploading with downloading 🙂