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Accessible and Inclusive Events: the Significance of a Low Barrier

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Dive in deep
 Tech
Nothing fancy

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • Importance of low-barrier technology for accessibility
  • Low-barrier technology and privacy trade-offs
  • Oversimplification and managing expectations

When designing our hybrid experiments, one of the fundamental considerations was how to make the experiments accessible to a wide audience. In this context, the accessibility refers to a technological ‘low-barrier’. 

Low-barrier technology is important for ensuring that technological solutions to the question of hybridity are accessible to a broader and diverse population. It often exhibits the following characteristics: 

  • Accessibility: It is readily available and affordable, ensuring that cost is not a significant obstacle for users
  • Ease of use: The technology is designed with a user-friendly interface and intuitive features, so that individuals with varying levels of technical expertise can easily understand and operate it.
  • Minimal setup and configuration: Users do not need to invest a significant amount of time or effort in setting up or configuring the technology.
  • Compatibility: Low-barrier technology is often compatible with a wide range of existing devices, software, and platforms, reducing compatibility issues.
  • Inclusivity: It is designed to accommodate people with diverse abilities, languages, and cultural backgrounds, ensuring that it can be used by a broad user base.
  • Support and resources: Users have access to adequate support, documentation, and resources to assist them in using the technology effectively.
  • Low technical requirements: The technology does not demand high-performance hardware or advanced technical skills from users.

The privacy trade-off

When a low-barrier is facilitated through the use of existing – and familiar – devices software and platforms, privacy can be sacrificed. Big tech platforms that are less privacy friendly can be easier for a broader audience to use, because they are already familiar with them. In a scenario like this, it is a matter of choice: do you prioritise a low technological barrier, or privacy. Making technology more accessible might involve simplifying privacy settings or collecting more user data for customization. This can raise concerns about how user data is handled, stored, and potentially shared with third parties without clear user consent.

Equally, security vulnerabilities might not be purposeful, but instead they are the result of simplified and user-friendly interfaces. These might also inadvertently make systems more vulnerable to security breaches if not implemented with robust security measures.

Build-your-own-avatar

One of the aims of our Metaverses Cha-Cha-Cha experiment was to help people to understand that they could actively participate in the metaverse, and show them that the barrier to doing so was lower than they might have originally thought.

In the weeks leading up to the event, our guests are invited to create their own avatar at one of our in-person or online avatar workshops, or via this 4-step guide to building your own avatar. 

“It is super easy to make your own 3D model, based on just a photo”

Workshop participant

The workshops allowed people to learn how to create their own avatar in Mixamo, using just a photo of themselves. They showed that it was relatively easy to build your own character – you just needed a phone and access to a computer. All of the software that we used in the workshop was available for free online.

“you can use your phone to make a picture that is good enough to make an avatar! […] you can do all this with non-proprietary software! And that it is quite easy to do, even if you don’t have any programming skills”

Workshop participant

Managing expectations

Simplified technologies and interfaces might limit users’ control and customisation options, which can be frustrating for advanced users who prefer more flexibility. This concern was raised during our build-your-own-avatar workshop. For workshop participants who were already familiar with 3D modelling technology, the workshop felt easy and perhaps a little basic. However, for others, it was the first time they had created a digital model and it was an exciting opportunity to engage with what previously felt like a complex activity. 

A few of the workshop attendees felt that the workshop was not advanced enough for them, or that it did not teach them what they were expecting to learn. Particularly, they referred to the disappointment that they didn’t learn how to create an avatar (in unity) that didn’t look like them. One suggested that clearer information on the content of the workshops was needed when they were advertised. 

“it wasn’t very new to me and I expected a bit more of it. Like actually building an avatar that doesn’t look like me, with weird features etc. Something that you can get creative with. But It’d be nice for people who want to get used [to] these technologies.”

Workshop participant
Interview

Experiencing the Inbetweens

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
The sweet spot
 Participation
Join in... a bit
 Duration
You had to be there

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • Exploring the Boundaries of Embodied Virtuality to go beyond the traditional notion of digital bodies as avatars
  • Merging virtual and physical experiences to create emotional and sensory connections.
  • Co-creation, Collaborative and Subjective Experiences
  • The Significance of Embodied Experience

Angelique Spaninks had a long talk with architectural designer and Ph.D. researcher Paula Strunden who builds extended reality (XR) models, merging virtual and mixed reality technologies with physical objects and crafts. Paula’s research delves into possible futures of spatial computing and investigates how we can live, work and play within a hybrid physical/digital world. Her latest hybrid installation was called Rhetorical Bodies and premièred at MU as part of the Hybrid Tales for Hybrid Times exhibition. The ideas behind it as well as Paula’s Ph.D. research sheds light on several of the topics within The Toolkit for the Inbetween.

Paula Strunden: The idea to create Rhetorical Bodies stems from the interest to work with embodied virtuality and multi-sensory perception and to think about how we can use and interpret this. I really want to play with and explore our bodies within the virtual in a way that goes beyond this visual representational body that we often refer to that is more like an avatar. So when we think of digital bodies, we often have this kind of image of an actual physical body, but of course our digital body can be a very different thing.

It can be a very fluid and open thing that transcends known visual and physical boundaries. Not only spatially, but also in time. Every person has a body they can feel, but that body also relates with other people and things on another level, it creates connections … I have difficulty describing it, but basically, I feel that our bodily boundaries are very kind of fluid and dynamic and they’re always changing. They are in a certain relation to everything that we interact with, like people, but also of course things and places.

Then I had the idea to mix VR with dancing and create a collaborative experience that plays with these connections. 

So the initial idea for Rhetorical Bodies was to really just concentrate on this feeling of where your bodily boundary sits and how it relates to another person entering that space, and then gradually by moving you are both able to merge with each other and your surroundings.

When I started working on it, many things happened to me at the same time. I think I never had in such a short time, so much sudden experience of letting go and losing – my contract ended, I moved, a relationship ended and I lost my grandmother who was very dear to me. And I think all this very strongly influenced the way how the work turned out to become about letting go. Let go of our body even. 

My grandmother inspired the use of the inflatable wings and with those you go, into the virtual sky and through these portals. There you kind of dissolve and your body comes apart and becomes fluid, a bubbly representation of yourself. And then you start seeing yourself as such and you meet this other person, and you can move and even merge together, and when  you go further down everything starts moving around you and then you’re left to become part of that world.

What I learned is that also in virtual reality, where there often is a lot of technology around it and even when you try to tell a story that is outside of yourself, it is never really outside of reality. So in that sense VR is always a hybrid thing. You bring in your own experience and your own feeling and probably that is somewhere inside of the work that you make, and each visitor brings their experience and reality into it.

Designing for the gap

PS: In a way, I think this kind of work is very close to theater and performance. There you also design for the gap. You create something and then people come to see or to experience it. But you use a certain sense of abstraction or ambiguity and strongly play with the fact that you meet each other in between, in the middle, even though you don’t exactly know where that in between is. I don’t know what kind of people will come, what their memories are, and what the understanding of their bodies is and the abilities of their bodies are.

And I think for everybody, being a fluid blobby merging piece of something, is a new experience. It is very different. That is also so beautiful to see in this kind of installations that everybody co-creates this reality, that it’s not only me as the designer who creates something, but it is also contextualized in a certain way. The person you hire who guides the experience, and the space and the objects in it, everything contributes in a way. And then of course, the people that go in and their constellation and how they relate to each other. It’s all that together that then creates a certain experience. And this makes it a highly subjective, super individual thing.

AQ : For us of The Toolkit for the Inbetween, the in between is an area, the space between the fully physical and the fully digital. How do you look at this space, also considering you are trained as an architect. 

PS: I don’t like at all this idea of VR as alternative to reality or that it is a form of escapism. I don’t think in this quite binary differentiation between the actual and the virtual. I think they’re very much intertwined in the same way that we can have a conversation, but you have your own thoughts, memories and understanding of it and I have mine. I cannot fully grasp yours and you cannot get mine. But it is nevertheless the same real. Like a shared experience of love or an experience of beauty can be very real but will never be exactly the same. And I think these experiential inbetween spaces exist because we experience them extremely strong and we create memories of them.

So for the people that experienced Rhetorical Bodies, they also feel like they’ve been to the same space. I really experienced that while talking to them that they see these environments as a real place. A place that you can go to, that exists in your memory, that you can speak about and that you can share with others.

Places in between thoughts and dreams

And I think coming from the background of architecture, I designed them as places to go to, to be in and to experience certain things. And I think what’s really interesting is that it gives me as a designer the ability to design them as places in between your thoughts and your imaginations. To me the most interesting VR can feel to a certain extent like entering your thoughts or entering your dreams or memories. Something happens within our brains, that’s why it feels so intimate and why it triggers emotions strongly. And I think the moment you start combining these experiences that are perceived as very internal with external stimuli, like touch or smell or certain kinds of movements, one becomes highly alert and experiences very strongly. To me, that’s beautiful because you can reconnect to things and spaces, but also other people in a way that is quite internal. It’s like you extend your body a bit to envelope these things. And this bodily extension creates a certain form of empathy or empathetic imagination, a form of care for things just because it is so much part of what you would usually perceive as internal. I think this is super interesting also in how it affects design decisions.

Female pioneers of multi-sensory interfaces

I am having a public conversation with Jacqueline Morie soon. She’s one of the early pioneers in VR and at one point she systematically analyzed differences in the approach and idea of embodied virtuality. The majority of people building VR in the early days were men. They were building virtual kitchens you could walk around in to design your own, military training scenarios for wayfinding or other more functional VR experiences. But Morie wasn’t interested in those, so she did an in-depth survey where she tried to find artistic, meaningful, very creative virtual reality experiences, multisensory things, with full immersion and interesting interfaces. Of the 100 creations she found that were made between 1985 and 2006-2007 seventy percent were done by women.

Take for example Char Davis, her work is very much about dehabituating the senses and reconnecting sensory modalities to VR in order to understand about being in the world. And I think this goes against the idea of paradoxicality, that it is not something that you try to push these binaries further, but that you acknowledge, okay, I’m here, but I’m there too, at the same time. This is to me the most interesting part of working with VR. And it’s not interesting to overcome that, it’s all about staying within that sensation. 

A dialogue between the body and the brain

Architecture theoretician called Karen Franck wrote an interesting text already in 1996, titled When I enter Virtual Reality, What Body do I leave behind? In this she looks at science fiction literature quoting for example Gibson in Neuromancer where he calls the body ‘meat puppets’ or a ‘flesh cage’. It is his way of defining the virtual body versus the physical one, that should be overcome, because of it’s diseases and aging. While many female sci-fi artists at that point rather embraced the body, and pushed the potentiality of it within a realm that is not constrained by socio political circumstances. They perceive the body, the being in the body, not at all as a constraint, but more as a kind of ability. They try to stretch the possibilities of what can be done within that body.

That is also the way of how I work with VR and use digital tools, in a super bodily experimental kind of one-on-one dialogue. I spend a lot of time just testing and trying things. I rely on how the body responses. How does it tune? How does it change? It’s a very intuitive judgment. Sometimes the medium can make me laugh or cry, and it can make me stunned. I can create things that I don’t understand. For me, this is totally exciting because I am entering a dialogue that is very much between the body and the brain via this technology. It makes you go to places. You don’t know how you got there, but you are trying to understand it, and you can only do that by understanding how our body works, how we perceive reality, how we construct reality, how we constantly stabilize reality. And I think it is also interesting because it’s not about creating alone, but collaboratively.

It’s not about pushing any differences between whether it’s virtual or actual, it’s more about understanding how we are. It’s about being in a certain moment, in a certain time, in a certain presence. It is about staying with the body. It is a very sensual experience. And I do not only mean the common five sense, like touching, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting but all neuroscientifically distinguished senses, like our sense of time passing by or the sense of our body, our sense of light changing, and our senses of pain and gravity and balance. How we think and understand the world has evolved through the way in which we use our body. And I think in the digital realm everything can become quite fluid and dynamic. There we can connect these senses in a really powerful way. Not using technology to take over bodily experience but to extend and explore it more deeply and through that the realm of the in between. I look for these very small but very significant moments, where people feel present or have the awareness of connection or an understanding you can’t really describe. Like the couple that experienced Rhetorical Bodies together on their first date and fell in love, or the person who felt it came close to a near death experience at the end. I believe these are transformative moments, they suddenly make sense. And of course these moments are really fleeting, 

Finding a language native to the machine logic

But it is not only about our body, there is also the body of the device. The game engine plays a very big part as it defines the logic of the way how this is being set up. There are moments where I realize and have to laugh about how I internalized the logic of how this engine works and not of how my body works in the physical space. So that instead of for example taking off the headset, I wait for something that I know will happen when I do something within the experience. Then I start following the machine logic. And I think this is really interesting as a a designer to find out a language that is more native to the medium. A language that works within its logic and not to blindly follow it, but to be able to understand it as well as have a critical standpoint on it and be able to discuss it, both with the machine, with technology, and each other.

I think a lot about the way how we are being perceived as individuals. Like our fingerprints how they are being used in order to prove that it’s you and not me. And I think everything about us unique. Like within split seconds, machines can recognize whether it’s you or me wearing the headset by the way how you pick up something, the way how you grasp something. The whole way of how we interact with our environment and the things within it and how we understand them is highly subjective. I mean, we just know so little about how we think and how we feel and how we sense certain things. But our body is constantly giving clues about that, to ourselves, but also to others. Most of our communication and our interaction with the world is on a level that we are not aware of.

Technology is bringing the unconscious back

And it has evolved not consciously and that might be the in between also. Technologies in general allow you to go more into this direction. It can bring the unknown and the unconscious back into the quotation, allowing you to take certain decisions in design more intuitively.

It may sound a bit too vague, but I think most of the in betweenness we don’t know, we cannot say, okay, this is a point, and this is a point and there’s something. We only have kind of a cloud of that environment and we don’t know where it’s in between because we don’t know where it goes or how far it goes.

AQ: Is there enough space or room for experimenting and researching these kinds of things? Not only supported by big tech industry but especially for critical artists and designers.

PS: I find it very problematic that big tech companies are ruling VR. I don’t work with Oculus personally, but I think it’s like the biggest device and they are very much leading the content that’s being experienced by people. And I think the more you can help breaking and opening that up and also questioning that, I think the better. 

Many artists try to do that in a certain way, but you can see in the aesthetics that the work is often still defined by the hard- and software available. And there can or should be much more experimentation. But we must take into account the difficulties in developing and exhibiting these interactive and especially experimental works that are often still in progress too. I think there are so many variables, and it is often so fragile and constantly changing. Even for me as a maker it is super difficult to recreate an experience from a year ago.

The Netherlands has a few places, like MU and V2 and The New Institute, that make these kind of complex research projects possible and connect them to an audience. Digital culture does not feel like a niche thing here. And I sense that because of this, people are generally more open to it and willing to find out more.

Because the big thing with immersive interactive work is of course that you need to involve people to know if and how it works or not. You cannot do that by yourself in your studio. You need to have a dialogue with people while developing work. It’s a weird form of art because it’s so dependent on the interaction and the users. 

Even as an art form, it’s very much in between. And I think to have places where this in between is being shown, is super important. It is not theater, you don’t have a set stage to design for, and it’s also not an artwork that sits somewhere, and it’s not a game either that that can be bought and run as a product, and it’s not a performance that you can be in the presence of but are not really part of. It is in between all of this, really.

The body as input device

I like the idea of hacking, of play and experiment. Using technology in a more creative way, but I stil sense that is very much under explored. 

The argument in my PhD is that this comes out of over concentration on the visual. And I think the moment you start bringing in these other sensory modalities it opens up very quickly. But the concentration on the purely visual is an effect of these low cost devices that came on the market, as they were just reduced to a headset and a pair of controllers.

But historically, all the experimentation with virtual technologies was very much about how you interact through bodily movements and always through touch. VR needs to have the body be the input device and the space as the interface. Then it becomes spatial computing or like embodied computing. Then you get this relationship between your body and the things you interact with and the spaces you’re immersed in. And it doesn’t matter so much anymore whether it’s like a photorealistic environment, it will be more about this relation.

The underestimated role of the guide

An important last element that I think is a bit underestimated is the role of the people that can guide and take you through a hybrid or inbetween experience. Onboarding and understanding how to work with the technology is an important part of taking care of people. And if it works well it can be half of the experience, but at the moment, this is still something that is very little invested in. You have museum pedagogy and guided tours, but to be able to enter this in between space you need more dedicated care.

This is of course super expensive to do, but I think in the longer run it also brings a lot of knowledge and experience. It offers the option of building trust and letting go. And I think your emotional availability before you go into an experience, like mine but also others, strongly affects what you see and hear and dare to do. And when this is carefully guided when you enter, but also when you come out afterwards, by having a conversation with a dedicated guide adds to the overall experience and knowledge that is being build.

So not only to have places to show this type of work and dive into the in between, but also experienced people to onboard and guide you that do not change every day is something to wish for when you are exploring unknown territory. You can’t give people like a litre of water and say, like, go and explore. You need to help them with what you know already and how to help them along to get the most out of it. 
Case Study

Be My Guest (2021)

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
The sweet spot
 Participation
Take some breaks
 Tech
Pretty sophisticated
 Privacy
Big Tech galore

Live demonstration of Be My Guest.

IDFA Doclab 2021 festival experimented with a hybrid way of experiencing the exhibition and connecting online and onsite audiences.
One of these experiments included the use of two prominent tables equipped with monitors, cameras, and microphones, complemented by the Be My Guest app.

One of these tables, featuring a monitor, was positioned at the heart of the entrance lobby and served as the tangible representation of the online audience’s presence.

The second table boasted three sizable monitors securely affixed to chairs, with a central speaker and microphone assembly. As online participants joined the virtual space, they appeared on one of these monitors, appearing as if they were seated around the table. Thanks to the microphones and cameras, they could effortlessly engage in conversations with people physically present at the festival. Those connecting online enjoyed a comprehensive view of the room via a 360-degree camera attached to each monitor. When the virtual space was unoccupied, the monitors would blur and go silent, and for those physically present, it was apparent that online participants were present, albeit blurred out. A similar setup was also implemented in another section of the building to facilitate hybrid industry meetings.

The Be My Guest feature included an app designed to enable festivalgoers in attendance to stream their location to online participants who had signed up to follow them. This feature allowed them to provide personalized tours, effectively enabling a shared exploration of Amsterdam as if they were strolling together.

Read more about hybrid experiments at IDFA Doclab in their research publication in collaboration with MIT Open Doc Lab.

Credits

IDFA Doclab and OhYay.
External Link

Hybrid Spaces publication

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Wildly experimental
 Participation
Dive in deep
 Tech
Hardly any tech
 Privacy
Very privacy aware
 Duration
You had to be there

Hybrid Spaces was a year-long experimental research project by affect lab that involved mostly dancing and gossiping. Yes, you read that correctly. Through dance and gossip they explored how people create connections across physical and virtual environments. At the heart of Hybrid Spaces is the urgent human need for intimacy and togetherness, especially during pandemic times.

In 2021 the word “hybrid” found popularity in the creative sector. Cultural festivals, visual artists, performers and theatres became fixated on hybridity. Yet, hardly anyone knew how to design quality hybrid events or what hybrid meant exactly. Inspired by the need for more insights into hybrid experiences, affect lab began their research into Hybrid Spaces.

Download free publication
Article

Alone Together: Researching Togetherness in Hybrid Experiences

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Wildly experimental
 Participation
Take some breaks

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • Design moments of connection in your event.
  • Add a common ritual.
  • Make sure also the online audience feels seen.
  • Dancing or moving together adds a feeling of connection.
  • The power of a good host.

 

Through our research and experiments one specific insight emerged: the most profound and impactful moments in hybrid events occur when we unite audiences. These are the instances when individuals, both online and onsite, become genuinely interconnected and feel like they are together in the event. Be it in the form of group gatherings or intimate one-on-one connections, the power of bringing people together at events is clear. In such moments  networking opportunities arise, where individuals can engage in vibrant discussions about the theme of the event. The feeling of being together can enhance the experience of an event when an online visitor joins solo from their living room. Furthermore, a collective experience significantly boosts participants’ commitment, engagement, and active involvement, creating a dynamic and inclusive atmosphere that truly comes alive.

“Knowing more people are present at the same event is nice, but meeting them or chatting with them, or somehow interacting with them, is really nice for me as we can discuss the topics or just meet each other. Or else I can just watch a live stream and be easy distracted.”

Online participant of the experiment The Hmm @ 4 locations.

A tinder for events: making one-to-one connections

The experiment ‘The Hmm @ Real Feelings‘ facilitated one-to-one connections between onsite and online participants. What made this event most interesting was that both onsite and online participants experienced certain advantages based on their respective situations. For instance, the onsite participant had a better view of the exhibition, making them an excellent tour guide for the online visitor. Meanwhile, the online visitor didn’t have to wait for a drink at the bar and could easily access their own fridge at home, but the onsite participant had the opportunity to meet more people at the bar. The connections formed during the event were so strong that the couples decided to meet up more often, continuing in the same hybrid manner.

“During The Hmm @ Real Feelings, where we paired people with one another (one onsite, on online) there was a sense of togetherness, so I wonder if proximity is also a part of it, that there is a limit for how ‘together’ you can feel as a big group.”

Lilian Stolk

Dancing together

At the DuoDisco (hybrid) event, onsite participants formed a group of dancers along with online visitors. Due to the large projection on the wall, it often felt like one united dance floor. By introducing a game element and connecting to different dance partners for each song, it reinforced the sense of togetherness. The gamified element worked surprisingly well and was seen as a means of connecting the online and onsite participants. When the web app briefly malfunctioned for the onsite audience, they immediately paused and inquired about when they could rejoin the game to find new matches with online participants. The online participants felt as present at the onsite party, not much different from if they were physically there. We truly recognized the power of dance parties here, uniting people through music, movement, and, in this case, the screen. 

In the experiment ‘Metaverses Cha-Cha-Cha,’ we also used dance as one of the factors to foster a feeling of togetherness. The experience was not as equal to the power of a physical dance floor, as dancing together can’t be easily replicated online, and in your living room. However, the dance floor in the Metaverse, where everyone gathered with their avatars to dance, undoubtedly enhanced the sense of togetherness and added a significant fun element to the event.

“It was kind of strange, almost like how in covid you talk to someone, but you would never actually see them. Cause they’re wearing a mask and it’s almost like we met so many people without really meeting them. It’s kind of that sensation. Of meeting someone without actually having met”

An online participant of the Metaverses Cha-Cha-Cha experiment

Moving in groups

The experiment Counter Consideration invited online and onsite visitors at a timed event to visit a site-specific radio station. This took place in a park in Eindhoven (part of STRP festival) but also online with a special designed webapp for phone or desktop to navigate the radio channels. The fact that everyone was visiting at the same time added a feeling of togetherness. The spatial positioning of the sounds onsite also had a positive impact on the feeling of togetherness as everyone was together in discovering the different channels and moving around them. In this experiment the feeling of togetherness was stronger onsite than it was online as there was no visual indication for the online audience that other people were also navigating the channels. The onsite audience also found a limit in the feeling of togetherness in the fact that everyone is wearing headphones. You are experiencing together but still the headphones don’t invite you to approach each other and speak to each other.

“I would have liked to talk to other participants during the experience but didn’t know how to do it because they all had headphones”

Onsite participant Counter Consideration

Smelly connections

At the event, ‘The Hmm @ 4 Locations,’ a unique scent played a significant role in creating a sense of togetherness. This event unfolded across four different physical locations and an online platform. Each physical location was equipped with a specially designed scent dispenser, including a special designed scent of the internet. Online participants had the option to purchase this scent in advance, thereby becoming part of the shared olfactory experience. However, not all participants ordered the scent in advance, which meant that not everyone could partake in this sensory act of togetherness. Nevertheless, several other elements contributed to the overall sense of togetherness during the event, such as the initiation of a communal wave.

Similar to experiences at ‘Counter Consideration’ and the ‘Metaverse Cha-Cha-Cha’ party, the feeling of togetherness was not entirely equal, as online participants remained invisible and, consequently, couldn’t engage in the wave.

To have a binding factor wherever you are, helps in making this feeling of togetherness and connection. This could for example also be done through sending a package with some items to all participants beforehand, or through a participatory performance.

“One of the events that we did, The Hmm ON Screen New Deal, we invited Annika Kappner to link the online and onsite audience through a guided meditation.”

Margarita Osipian, The Hmm

“To warm up the participants of the online workshop, we translated our physical performance into an online format. In this setup, the participants were guided by a ‘character’ in the video conferencing chat. The small physical exercises helped combat Zoom fatigue and eventually led to human data visualizations on the screen, which were aligned with the theme of the workshop. This was a playful method to bring everyone together through the screen.”

Klasien van de Zandschulp, affect lab

The power of chat

Something that is often underestimated, but from our research and experience we have observed the chat as a powerful tool for creating a sense of community and togetherness. The Hmm events always ensure that there is a chat host who constantly monitors the chat to respond to everyone and provide additional information. At the Metaverses Cha-Cha-Cha, the chat played an important role in staying in touch with online participants during the dance party. During the online Distance Disco dance parties, the chat formed a crucial part of community building, where community members asked questions such as ‘Where is everyone from?’ and ‘What is your favourite song?’ Eventually, a WhatsApp chat group was even established by the community, including the most dedicated Distance Disco fans, to stay in touch before and after the disco parties.

“Follow the chat as if it whispers”

– online participant On A Lighter Internet

“An active chat is very important to get a sense of togetherness with your audience. It’s important that it’s low key to join the chat and let people feel welcome. […] We’ve had events with The Hmm where people in the chat really felt like a community. They shared interesting articles, based on the presentation of speakers. […]. This was mostly during full online events.”

Lilian Stolk, The Hmm

Group tickets

With the experiment ‘On a Lighter Internet,’ group tickets were offered to people at a reduced price. This was partly to connect with the theme of the event, which focused on how to create a lighter and less polluting internet. Surprisingly, it worked out extremely well for the sense of togetherness. Naturally, you feel a sense of togetherness with the group you are having this watch party with, but by watching with multiple groups, there was a feeling of togetherness shared among different groups watching together in different locations.

“We tried to create a sense of togetherness by offering group tickets (reduced price) for people who decided to watch together online, like a watching party. This also matched the environmental topic of this event.”

Lilian Stolk, The Hmm

Feeling seen

Simple forms of just everyone being visible also add a lot to the feeling of togetherness. For example, in the live stream interface created for our experiment ‘On a Lighter Internet,’ the online audience is simply visible as an emoji by choice. Just like what we know from popular live stream apps, during the event, the audience can constantly send emojis to react to what is happening. These emojis are visible to online and on-site audiences on the screen. Such a simple interaction increases the feeling for the online audience of being seen in a very low-barrier way.

“Sharing the emoticons was fun […] the website and the interface made it feel like I was more attending an event not just a ‘zoom lecture’ ”

Online participant On a Lighter Internet

Another example is the online experience of Nite Hotel, a 3D online space for performances created during the pandemic. Their first project, called ‘Swan Lake,’ played with a nice and subtle way to create a feeling of watching a performance together. Each visitor was represented as a purple animal ‘avatar’ floating in the space. This created a fun, intimate, and low-barrier way to feel the presence of other audience members. Everyone was equal as anonymous purple avatars, which also matched the design of the space and didn’t distract from the content of the event in any way.
Case Study

Nite Hotel presents Swan Lake the Game (2020)

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Join in... a bit
 Privacy
Very privacy aware

Nite Hotel, a 3D online space for online performances, was created during the pandemic by club Guy & Roni (a dance company from Groningen, the Netherlands).

Their online project during the pandemic is called Swan Lake. The project included an online 3D space with multiple rooms including different performances. Each visitor was represented as a  purple animal ‘avatar’ floating in the space. This created a fun, intimate and low barrier way to feel the presence of other audience members.

The online space also included a bar to meet other online visitors. The full experience used very subtle ways of creating a feeling of watching performances together with others, the spatial environment was designed in a way to not intefere with the aesthetics of the performances themselves, which were played as videos inside the online 3D space.

Credits

NITE HOTEL concept developed by
Guy Weizman & Martijn Halie

Art direction, design and technical concepting
HALIE (Halie.nl)

Development: SLASH2 bv – slash2.nl
Siljan Rienstra, Wytse Vellema, Jeffrey Zant, Jelle Faber, Jeroen Lammers
Project management by Werner Danhof
Interview

‘We are here together now’ is the Crux of Every Event

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
The sweet spot
 Participation
Dive in deep
 Tech
Medium tech
 Privacy
Don\'t care either way

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • How we experience ‘liveness’ changes over time.
  • There are three essential elements to achieving the feeling of ‘liveness’: time, place, and social bonds.
  • It is important to bring the physical and the mediated environment in line with one another.

When Lilian Stolk of The Hmm met on a July morning with media scientist Esther Hammelburg in Jitsi, she has been working away all night to prepare her dissertation for a test reader. For the last five years, Esther has been working on her PhD at the University of Amsterdam on ‘liveness’, which means following something remotely via media – such as our phones, televisions, and internet. Liveness encompasses different interactions: we can watch an event remotely – on television or online – or physically visit an event and tweet or post about being there. To what extent does the use of such media shape the live experience of an event?

Esther’s research, which she conducted before the COVID pandemic, included a field study at three different events: Oerol, an annual cultural festival on the Dutch island of Terschelling; Serious Request, a charity event where three radio DJs make radio 24/7 for three days from a glass house somewhere in the Netherlands; and Pride Amsterdam, a nine-day celebration of diversity in Amsterdam, with the Canal Parade as the peak of the festival. Esther visited and observed all three festivals and interviewed nearly 400 people who were either physically or remotely present at the events. In addition, she collected tweets and Instagram posts about the festivals.

Lilian wanted to talk to Esther because, through her research, she has a lot of knowledge about what the essence is of attending an event. What makes an audience feel part of the event? By dissecting the different elements that make up a live experience, it’s easier for us, as organisers of events to free ourselves from the habits and structures of physical events and really experiment with new, hybrid forms.

Esther’s research led to three core insights. First, how we experience ‘liveness’ changes over time. The experience is determined by the context in which it is achieved. Twenty years ago, that context was different from today. Secondly, often liveness is emphasised as a feeling of ‘now’, but according to Esther there are three essential elements to achieving this feeling: time, place, and social bonds. A live event is about a sense of ‘we are here together now’. Her third insight is that it is important to bring the physical and the mediated environment in line with one another. On the boat towards Terschelling, visitors post photos with captions like ‘Oerol, here I come’. While we might relegate it to the borders of our phones, the Instagram environment is also an environment where people are. If people attend an event and they don’t share that on Instagram, in the Instagram environment, they are not really there.

How do you ensure this alignment between the physical and the mediated space when there is no physical event space, like we experienced during the pandemic? Organisers of events are making a great mistake when they think they can simply transplant what they used to do physically into an online space. An online event is not a literal translation of an offline event. To investigate what makes a good online or hybrid event experience, it is useful to, once again, take a look at the three elements Esther defined as necessary to get this feeling of ‘now’: time, place and the social bonds. How do you shape place? How do you shape time? And how do you give shape to the social? During our conversation Esther tells me what she learned about these elements through her research.

Plants placed in the form of the word ‘place’, on the platform Gather.town

Place: play with the physical space of the online visitor

Lilian Stolk: As your research has shown, when people post a photo of their boat trip to Oerol on a platform like Instagram, an extra layer of spaciousness is added to the experience. It makes the experience more intense. How can this be translated to online events? How can you apply multiple layers of spaciousness when an event happens entirely online?

Esther Hammelburg: Let’s take this conversation as an example. We’re now speaking digitally via Jitsi, but we’re both in a physical environment. It would have been a different experience if we had met in a cafe. Our physical environment always plays a role.The difference with Oerol is that Oerol primarily takes place in one specific physical environment, whereas our meeting could happen in many different spaces. I think the physical location of visitors might play a role during online events, but that’s something we have yet to learn. Thirty years ago, you wouldn’t have even thought of using your phone to post online and share that you were present at a physical event. You can also add a layer of spaciousness to an online conference by tweeting about it. With conferences going online, the activity on Twitter has sometimes increased. Perhaps the need to tweet is even stronger when you’re watching a conference from your bedroom instead of being there physically. Attendees want to emphasise that they are really there.

But you also see that people consciously do not use media during events. Post-pandemic, this could also accelerate as we become tired of sitting behind screens. For a hybrid event, I imagine it’s nice to let people do something in their own physical environment, separated from the screen.

LS: As organisers of events, I think it’s a challenge to make an interesting event experience for physical and virtual visitors. But instead of reinventing the wheel for a hybrid event, maybe we can fall back on existing technology. Maybe we can learn from other fields, like television. Did you see elements in your research that cultural organisations could learn from?

EH: Indeed, we sometimes forget that television brought forward new inventions and ideas that could be used in different contexts today. Serious Request is an event that people follow physically and via television. I noticed during my research that people who follow this event via television created their own physical traditions and rituals. For example, they’d curl up on the couch with a blanket and decorate their living room with Christmas ornaments. Because Serious Request always takes place before Christmas, for many viewers I interviewed, this ritual was part of their experience. In addition to their decorated living room, people are collecting money by, for example, riding their scooter from Assen to Groningen. They share photos of their trip via social media, and sometimes their posts are also shared by the organisation. In that way this event has many physical event locations outside of the central glass house.

DJ La Fleur livestreams from her home in Germany. Image via Billboard

Place: an event can also take place in several locations at the same time

LS: It’s interesting to think about an event taking place in multiple locations. In a previous conversation we had, you gave the example of a football match. You can watch it live in a football stadium, but you can also invite a group of friends and watch it together at home. Both generate a live experience.

EH: For music performances, art gatherings, and maybe also for lecture events, it could work well to organise smaller meetings in different locations that people can come to. In the context of sustainability, more and more people don’t want to fly to the other side of the world for a three-day conference six times a year. Large conferences can also create hubs per continent or country. And if people can invite friends over to watch a football match at home, why not throw a festival party with streamed DJ music?

Place: use the platform as a ritual space

LS: I get that not understanding how a platform works can be a barrier to join an event – and this can be a reason to use a platform that people know – but it’s not like I’m going to an event in Zoom because it takes place in Zoom. For most online events you will simply receive a link in your mailbox to join an event. If you make sure the platform you use works well and is easy to understand, you can also use a platform that is new for everyone.

EH: I even think this is an added value. When you create a platform that is truly isolated from websites people regularly visit or use, it’s a new experience for people. If you broadcast your event via Facebook Live, you still send people to Facebook where a lot of people are used to doing other things. As a result, they easily get out of the flow of your event. If you want to create a ritual gathering – by that I mean that visitors follow your event with a certain dedication – I think this should take place out of peoples’ daily browsing habits. People go to a festival site. People take a boat to Terschelling. Then they can also click on a link to a platform that they do not know.

LS: I get that not understanding how a platform works can be a barrier to join an event – and this can be a reason to use a platform that people know – but it’s not like I’m going to an event in Zoom because it takes place in Zoom. For most online events, you will simply receive a link in your mailbox to join an event. If you make sure the platform you use works well and is easy to understand, you can also use a platform that everyone is new to.

EH: I even think this is an added value. When you create a platform that is truly isolated from websites people regularly visit or use, it’s a new experience for people. If you broadcast your event via Facebook Live, you still send people to Facebook where a lot of people are used to doing other things. As a result, they easily get out of the flow of your event. If you want to create a ritual gathering – by that I mean that visitors follow your event with a certain dedication – I think this should take place out of peoples’ daily browsing habits. People go to a festival site. People take a boat to Terschelling. Then they can also click on a link to a platform that they do not know.

Artist Annika Kappner starting The Hmm ON Screen New Deal with a meditation session.

Time: creating rituals

LS: For online events, we haven’t yet developed clear rituals. Often people watch television at a certain time, and sometimes for a specific program. But we use our laptop all day long, and we’re mainly using it for things other than visiting events. Many people are now getting tired of attending online events. I totally understand that if you’ve been working behind your laptop all day, you don’t want to open it again in the evening to attend an event.

EH: Indeed. That could be different if we no longer constantly work from home. Still, there are a lot of distractions on a laptop. Now that I talk to you, I also see new e-mails popping up on my screen. The power of Oerol, which takes place on an island, is that you leave the mainland behind. Going to a festival on a physical festival site has a similar effect. Of course you can still call and check your e-mail, but for many people it feels like they are gone for a while. Following an event while sitting at your kitchen table is the opposite of that.

LS: I also sign up for all kinds of online events, and only visit half of them. I’m even often doing things for work while I’m watching.

EH: Yes, it is easier to follow something on the side. Also because at online events, the audience is often not visible. For that reason I always try to turn on my camera at meetings. It helps you to be aware and feel seen. An audience at a physical event, even if they don’t contribute to the program, is still seen by the speaker and other visitors. At online events, the audience can watch and listen unseen. You can even do the dishes while attending an event.

LS: Do you think rituals are necessary to have a good live experience?

EH: I think so. Rituals can ensure that people join an event with time and attention. It is very difficult to accomplish this on a laptop, at a kitchen table, without having any rituals. We’ll probably develop all kinds of solutions for this that we don’t know yet.

Surprise boxes placed in the form of the word ‘time’, on the platform Gather.town

Time: during online events a transition time is lacking

LS: If you go to Oerol, you have to take a 2-hour boat ride. Even if you’re attending an event in the city or town where you live, you need to get ready and travel to the venue. This journey, a transition to an event, is missing at online events. To attend an online event, all you have to do is open your laptop.

EH: That transition is indeed very important. Next to the ritual, this also ensures people’s focus and attention. When I teach online, I always advise my students to turn on their camera and sit down for class, similar as they would do for a physical class. Also, sitting in a quiet and a peaceful place helps you to really experience online classes or events. In practice, people rarely do that. In my classes, but also at conferences, I see a lot of the people simultaneously checking their e-mail or homeschooling their children. 
Article

How Dance and Play Create a Deep Hybrid Connection

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Wildly experimental
 Participation
Dive in deep
 Tech
Medium tech
 Duration
You had to be there

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • See ME See YOU
  • Gamification for heightened participant engagement
  • The value of creating atmosphere
  • Dancing and moving bodies creates deeper connections


With the experiment DuoDisco (Hybrid) we researched the value of gamification and dancing bodies in creating a deep connection of a hybrid event. Within the project we created a gamified hybrid dance party at Tetem, Enschede. The project enabled participants to join online and on-site. The online participants joined through video conferencing interface (Jitsi), designed as a disco with bright and blinking lights. The on-site participants joined through a mobile web app. The game rules were simple: find the person dancing to the same song! When the on-site dance floor is connected to one of the participants online, they shared a moment of hybrid dancing via a webcam in the space.

“I really felt a connection with the online participants, because you had to keep concentrating on them, how they moved and sometimes even their mouth to see if they were lip synching.”

Onsite participant in DuoDisco (Hybrid) at Tetem

Gamification

The game element of DuoDisco (Hybrid) heightened participant engagement by providing a clear purpose and a shared mission. The game also sparked creativity from those who experimented with techniques to influence the outcome of the competition. We were stunned to see some dancers acting as decoys, purposely moving to another song to confuse and distract other players. The game part really drew the participants into the experience, which levelled out the commitment required. Members of either the physical or online group could simply have walked away from the dance floor, but the game component added an extra edge, keeping them engaged.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Regular dancers at Distance Disco know the value in creating atmosphere. They are really adept at pulling out props, setting up lights and getting all dressed up for the online party. At Tetem, we did the same – intentionally creating a similar party atmosphere with coloured lights and good sound. In addition, Tetem is a very alternative venue, situated in a warehouse-looking building with an edgy industrial look and feel. This contributed to a sense of expectation and atmosphere for the physical group of dancers.

“No dance, No life.”

Distance Disco regular.

See ME See YOU

Equal visibility for physical and online participants is the highest priority in a hybrid experiment. We realised our error almost immediately. Since the physical dancers at Tetem were not (virtually) visible enough, the online dancers couldn’t feel a connection to them. The online group only saw a small video frame with people dancing at Tetem, lacking any discernible features or gestures. This was in strong contrast to the physical audience who did feel a strong connection with the online group, thanks to the massive screen we put up for exactly this purpose. When the physical group correctly found their match online, that online dancer would appear enlarged on the screen, creating even more excitement at Tetem.

When both groups were able to let each other know they could see one other, it amplified the relationship between them. This happened through gestures – high-fiving each other, lip syncing, mirroring each other’s dance moves, and even holding up hand-written notes. These gestures showed how reacting and interacting with each other is essential for strengthening the connection between the groups. When both groups are visible, they feel seen, and this gives a sense of acknowledgement and togetherness. Ultimately, a more intimate connection forms.

Read more about experiment here.

“Dancing allows me to let go of what I want to get rid of, to reload/strengthen and celebrate feelings of happiness […] to connect with other dance-lovers and to burn calories at the same time.”

An online participant

Credits

  • Research – affect lab: Natalie Dixon, Anneli Huang Vanenburg, Klasien van de Zandschulp.
  • Creators DuoDisco (Hybrid) – Arjan Scherpenisse, Mark Meeuwenoord, Frank Bosma, Klasien van de Zandschulp.
  • Authors – affect lab: Natalie Dixon, Klasien van de Zandschulp (part of Hybrid Spaces).
  • Illustration – Iris Frankhuizen.
  • Photos – Ans Schuitema.
  • Location partner – Tetem, Enschede.
Article

Creating Intimacy and Collectivity Through Shared Stories

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Take some breaks
 Tech
Hardly any tech
 Privacy
Very privacy aware
 Duration
You had to be there

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • Create common ground
  • Timing is everything
  • The power of audio
  • Embodiment can create intimacy
  • Carefully design the balance between listening and making connection

With the experiments The Gossip and Counter Consideration we explored the power of anonymity and intimacy when creating an event with a high emphasis on storytelling and story sharing.

The Gossip provided a hybrid experience where visitors could join online and on-site by calling a specific phone number. Invoking the nostalgia of a landline call, it takes the form of an audio experience and an exchange over the phone between two people who have never met before. The stories in the experience work as inspiration for you to share your own story. The experience works like a ‘choose your own adventure’ style story where you press a number to choose how the story continues. In the end you are asked to share your own story with someone else, and you automatically get reconnected with someone else in the experience, anonymously. What story do you share? This experiment took place at Tetem, Enschede. Read more about this experiment.

“To hear the story of someone you don’t know and the idea that you can tell anything to that person because you don’t know them, is almost like a confession…”

An anonymous participant

Sharing an intimate story takes courage. All the participants in The Gossip joined the experiment anonymously. Interestingly, being anonymous became one of the key conditions for intimacy. While at first we thought this was counter-intuitive – after all, why would speaking anonymously engender more intimacy? Yet it seemed that staying anonymous created a space where participants could speak more freely without fear of judgement, thus inspiring a feeling of intimacy. This wasn’t enough for some participants though. Although being anonymous helped, they also needed privacy during their call. At the venue, we saw some people physically transform into cocoons, trying to become smaller and edge towards a wall, cupping their hands over their mouth. Two participants even bolted outside the exhibition space just to be out of earshot of others. Interestingly, they were happy to share intimate stories with one other person, but not many.

“The experience lasted over an hour! I had a true connection with this person and we chatted for so long. So this really amazed me and made my day :-)”

An anonymous participant

Here’s an example…

You lock eyes with someone you don’t know.

PRESS 1 If you smile at them

PRESS 2  If you hold the stare

The participants had to answer a total of 12 questions in this journey, allowing them to conjure up reflections on intimate connections between strangers.  The idea was to inspire participants and get them ready for their own story sharing. After answering each question, the participant heard a set of street-side recordings from when we posed the very same question to people in public spaces.

Second part of The Gossip

At the end of the voice prompts in the first half, the participant was given two choices: 1) To share a story of intimacy with somebody else (live), or 2) to record their story of intimacy. These recorded stories were collected in an intimate archive, called a treasury. If the participant chose option 1 we used a matching technology to connect callers randomly and anonymously. There was a small chance that participants might be connected with someone in the same space as them, i.e. physically at Tetem. Ideally though, and to the point of the experiment, we preferred to connect people at Tetem with the audience who joined online.

“…. it was a moment where I felt very liberated and also safe, I guess.”

An anonymous participant

Common Ground

Doing something new and unexpected made a lot of the participants feel very anxious and awkward. This was felt especially when they were waiting for a stranger to call them. In order to ease these moments of suspense, we found it was important for participants to find some form of common ground. For this, we played voice recordings of other people’s stories during the first part of the audio experience. Our aim was to give participants inspiration for their own story, but more importantly let them know that others had been in the same experience before and probably felt the same emotions as they did. In this way, they found common ground with other people who had been in a similar situation, providing a comforting sense of familiarity. Knowing that they were not alone in doing this experience helped ease their awkwardness while on the phone. Ultimately, having common ground ensured a pathway for communication which led to trust and, most significantly, contributed to a safe space without judgement.

It takes time to warm up to the idea of sharing an intimate story with a total stranger. The Gossip opened up the sharing space through the voice recordings, a way to ease people into the session. Yet we noticed that some participants needed a longer run up to allow their headspace to fundamentally shift. Some of the participants had arrived at Tetem fresh out of the Gogbot festival – a lively music, art and technology show. They were energised and excited by what the night had in store for them. While these same individuals were willing to try The Gossip, it required a warm-up phase with plenty of gentle instructions and some time to ground their energy. Many were curious about how long The Gossip would take as they might want to move on to another event, and this sense of urgency affected the intimacy of the event. Similarly, some people in the online group remarked that the need for dinner and other personal commitments were impacting the intimacy of the experience. We timed the event to start around 6 pm which, in The Netherlands at least, is prime dinner time. Timing was a critical success factor in decreasing distraction and thereby creating  the conditions for presence and ultimately intimacy.

“The stories made me feel less awkward to speak into the phone, knowing others are doing it as well or have done it before.”

An anonymous participant

Counter Consideration > Intimacy through embodiment

Counter Consideration is a hybrid experience that took place online and onsite, in a park in Eindhoven at STRP festival. Invoking the spirit of the transistor radio, audiences were invited to physically move between multiple audio channels while dropping into various sonic realities ranging from flash fiction, vibrant soundscapes, intimate conversations and tales of techno culture. The experience provided a space for navigating these stories and finding a form of intimacy with both the physical space and the stories themselves, moving through them together with other visitors, but within your own intimate audio space using your earplugs. One of the participants described it as “an intimate experience done collectively”. Read more about this experiment.

Navigating the stories

“Nice to walk around not looking at the map or the signs but exploring the voices”

An on-site participant of Counter Consideration

In Counter Consideration the location, the site, was more present and important in the experience. In the onsite experience, the audience members walked around in the park and saw visual clues of location for the radio channels, where they could read up on the artist providing the radio channel. The channels were carefully places in the space which connected the story to the location. By navigating your body to tune into different channels created a new form of intimacy and relation to the story. Many participants walked a bit inside a radio channel area. Moving while listening is a form of finding a different form of concentration or relation to the story. We learned from the participants that all these acts of movement through the space added to the feeling of intimacy.

For the online visitors this worked a bit different. They were navigation a specially designed website to move through the channels. The channels all had shapes that were corresponding to the shapes of the onsite park. This created the feeling of a map, which felt more like a game. This helped the online visitors with a playful experience that is not merely an audio channel on the speakers of your laptop or phone. The knowledge listening to these audio channels together with the visitors onsite also helped creating a more intimate experience. But after all, the online visitors did not have the same quality of intimacy as the onsite visitors had.

Creating connection in a hybrid sense

Both experiments took place on the mobile phones of the participants and both were very audio driven, but the difference between Counter Consideration and The Gossip is that at The Gossip we connected two visitors together in the storytelling experience. At Counter Consideration we ended all together as a group, to discuss what we have experienced more generally. Also the online participants and most of the storytellers were present through a WhatsApp group. This conversation was managed by two people, one of them managing the online group and the other the onsite group, bringing together all the questions and stories shared in the WhatsApp group and the onsite group. As the artists and storytellers were present this created more of a Q&A format than that of the story sharing format that The Gossip provided. One of the online participants commented that because she didn’t have visual clues of what was happening onsite she was not sure if her question was appreciated. We learned that this form of connection and sharing needs to be designed really carefully. It helps to make this a part of the experience, like at The Gossip, so it feels more connected.

The power of audio

“I like how the abstraction left space for imagination specially because it was a sonic experience”

An online participant of counter consideration

In both The Gossip and Counter Consideration, we learned the combination of audio and storytelling is really powerful. The impact that audio and sounds can have on the intimacy and experience of a story is often understimated. As both experiments used mobile phones, the audio became more personal and intrusive, directly broadcasted in someone’s ear. Some participants of both experiments commented that while using ear pieces and audio through phones makes the experience more intimate, it also limits them from making contact with other participants. However, this can be orchestrated. For example, at the end of The Gossip, you are connected to someone else. Still, it is definitely something to consider when designing an event when connection is an important element. 

Credits

The Gossip and Counter Consideration are both created by affect lab in collaboration with Faye Kabali-Kagwa.

Location partners: STRP, Eindhoven and Tetem, Enschede.
Article

Online Rituals and the Joy of Getting Ready

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Participation
Take some breaks

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • It’s important to resist the digital blur and develop new rituals for online habits
  • Be aware that an event starts as soon as you announce that it’s taking place
  • It’s important for the audience to know what to expect
  • Create a sense of community and togetherness
  • Be sure to guide your audience through strategies to focus

If we visit a physical event, we buy a ticket well in advance, dress up for the occasion, and maybe even meet up with a friend for something to eat. We cycle, drive, and travel to the event location. We can easily spend half an hour preparing for an event – an important transition moment in our day. But these kinds of pre-event rituals have yet to emerge for online events (and we’ve really missed them). 

Resisting the digital blur

Pre-event rituals ensure that the audience makes a clear and distinct transition to your event. This is extremely important, not only to get their full attention, but also to give them the best experience. In his book Flow, the psychology of optimal experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi reveals what makes a human experience genuinely satisfying. And one key element of such flow-activity is having a well defined goal. Csikszentmihalyi gives the example of a surgeon, whose work has clearly defined tasks (removing a tumor or splinting a bone) compared to a psychiatrist, for example, who is often presented with problems that are not so clearly defined. Csikszentmihalyi points out the ceremonial steps of the surgeon: “Before an operation surgeons go through steps of preparation, purification, and dressing up in special garments—like athletes before a contest, or priests before a ceremony. These rituals have a practical purpose, but they also serve to separate celebrants from the concerns of everyday life, and focus their minds on the event to be enacted.”1

These meticulous rituals are almost the opposite of our online habits that emerged during the lockdown. During the day, we worked from behind our laptops at our kitchen tables, and in the evenings, we visited online theater performances on those same laptops, in those same kitchens. Our colleagues appeared in the same windows, within the same interfaces, as our friends. ay back in 2000, Experimental Jetset created the Lost Formats Preservation Society—an archive of disappearing formats, from CDs to microcassetts to viewmasters. They write that “[t]here once was a time when every format contained its own specific data, while nowadays the CD-rom format is capable of containing all data, and even the CD-rom is slowly disappearing”. Twenty-two years later, we’re in a moment where the distinction between different social, personal, and professional interactions is dissappearing, with every aspect of our lives mediated by screens. The formats, the spaces, that contextualised our interactions are gone.

Our digital activities blurred into one, with constant video conferencing causing a pandemic of Zoom fatigue. In their research on social connectedness and excessive screen time during COVID-19, Apurvakumar Pandya and Pragya Lodha laid out a series of recommendations for socio-emotional connectedness, including that “[h]ealthy and discrete boundaries between the personal and professional temporal spaces is helpful”. Last year, Professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, examined the psychological consequences of spending hours per day on these platforms. He noted that one of the four causes of zoom fatigue is the higher cognitive load of video chats—the need to exaggerate gestures, always frame your face, and look like you are listening. Bailenson suggested giving ourselves an ‘audio only’ break during long stretches of meetings to take some space from consuming visual gestures and cues. So, if you’re organising an online event or meeting, how can you help your audience avoid these unhealthy digital habits?

Five tips to get you (and your audience) started:

1. Be aware that an event starts as soon as you announce that it’s taking place

“90% of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand”, writes event facilitator Priya Parker in her inspirational book The Art of Gathering. 2 That’s a lot! It’s important to realise your event or meeting doesn’t start from the moment people get together, but from the moment you announce that the event is taking place. You can ask your audience to do a specific action to prepare. For example, when organising a tour through five different presentation platforms, we asked people to prepare a few technical things in advance, to get the best experience. For example, creating a Discord account and making sure they had the right browser installed.

A screen capture from a Club Quarantine event.

2. It’s important for the audience to know what to expect 

One of our former Hmm speakers was Club Quarantine, an online only queer party that took place every night during the pandemic. Club Quarantine was a great example that, even if you’re just opening another tab on your computer, you can still transform for a party. For the CQ parties, the audience would get dressed up and decorate their rooms and houses like a club, complete with disco balls and lights. To get people into a party mood you have to prepare them in the pregame. Like Parker writes: “It is hard to get a dance party started when people show up subdued and in the mood for quiet conversation.” 3

3. Hospitality is important, especially for online events! 

When people attend a gathering in a physical space, they enter a building where someone is there to welcome them and tell them where to go. This physical guide is absent at online gatherings. Your guests just have to open a link and don’t know into what situation they’ll enter. That’s why with The Hmm we always send detailed (but fun) instruction emails to visitors of our events. And when our gathering starts, we make sure someone from our team is present in the online space we’re meeting in. Welcoming both the audience and the speakers, in the same way that you would have someone take your ticket and greet you at a physical event. This might sound a bit obvious, but we have visited plenty of online events where this crucial piece of hospitality has been forgotten.

Dishes from the Brexit Banquet – a project from the Center for Genomic Gastronomy

4. Create a sense of community and togetherness

When we’re working mainly online, it’s hard to intervene in people’s physical environments. In an interview we did with media scientist Esther Hammelburg she said: “I think that the physical location of visitors might play a role during online events, only this is something we have yet to learn.” With the Hmm we’ve tried to get a sense of where people are by asking them to share photos of themselves watching The Hmm or asking them to let us know in the chat where they are watching from. But intervention into the physical environment can be taken even further. One thing we’ve seen organisations do is sending their audience packages with ingredients for making food, crafting supplies, or even a cocktail mix in advance.  For example, for the Brexit Banquet—an Online Eat-A-Long with the Center for Genomic Gastronomy—audience members were given a list of ingredients to buy so that everyone could cook together.

Annika Kappner guiding our audience through a short meditation online.

5. Guide your audience through strategies to focus

With our Hmm event, The Hmm ON a Screen New Deal, which took place in December of 2021, we invited artist Annika Kappner to take our audience through a short guided meditation to transition them into our event environment. Annika guided the audience to close all the tabs on their computer or phone that were not related to the event, put on comfy clothes, and get their favourite drink or snack. Having the guided meditation prior to the event created a moment of space and transition before the event began. Some of our audience loved this moment of relaxation, while others loved it a little too much; saying that it made them too relaxed and unable to focus on the complex topics of our speakers. Overall, we learned that this moment of transition is a valuable way to create distinctions in online activities. Putting on comfy clothes to watch an event from home has a similar purpose as a surgeon putting on their scrubs before entering the operating room.

We hope these tips can help you create an environment where your audience enjoys not only your event, but all the new rituals we can build leading up to the event itself ♡

* This article was originally published on The Hmm website as part of our Hybrids Newsletter: https://thehmm.nl/the-hmm-hybrids-1-the-joy-of-getting-ready/

Experiment

The Hmm ON a Lighter Internet

Date: March 30, 2022

Location: Framer Framed

Online format: Livestream

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Taking some chances
 Participation
Dip a toe in
 Tech
Pretty sophisticated
 Privacy
Quite privacy aware
 Duration
Archived but not active

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • The growing increase in internet use and the generation of more and more data impacts both the environment and the global digital divide.
  • It’s important to create platforms that allow viewers with unstable or unaffordable internet access to join online events.
  • Sometimes there can be a tension between accessibility and using open source tools.
  • When thinking about accessibility, our decisions, choices, explorations, and interests are all situated in our individual contexts.

How can we make hybrid events more sustainable and accessible?

Over the last few years, there has been increasing awareness about how the internet contributes significantly to the world’s global carbon emissions. In 2020, every internet user generated an average of 1.7 megabytes of data per second. Online advertising accounts for 25% of the total internet bandwidth today. And all that data has to be stored somewhere, like in data centres that use around 1% of electricity worldwide and whose water-guzzling cooling facilities are predicted to cause drinking water shortages in the Netherlands. 

The growing increase in internet use and the generation of more and more data not only impacts the environment – it also exacerbates the global digital divide. While the internet has been a solution, and a lifeline, to the many problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it has also made more visible the billions of people worldwide (around 45% of the population according to UNESCO) who lack internet access, and the even larger number of people who lack access to affordable and fast internet. Those on the wrong side of the digital divide are disconnected from opportunities for education, employment, and social interactions.

Our on-site audience present during the event at Framer Framed.

There seems to be a growing tension between increasing connectivity to the internet and the impact of this on the environment. How do we balance these two things with one another? Especially when faster internet, more digital storage, and more connectivity are considered ways to increase development and access to opportunities globally. During The Hmm ON a Lighter Internet, which took place physically at Framer Framed in Amsterdam and online, we explored how the current internet experience is influenced by bandwidth access, and what a lighter internet actually means.

For the event, we brought together digital anthropologist Payal Arora, artist and media philosophy scholar Radek Przedpełski, and arts coordinator, cultural curator, and arts writer Faye Kabali-Kagwa. All the speakers joined remotely either due to COVID restrictions or due to their location, and our audience joined online and onsite. 

The different view modes toggled on, on our livestream platform.

Creating a ‘lighter’ platform 

Since the pandemic started, we’ve been experimenting with a series of hybrid events that build on our knowledge of hybridity and the tools and platforms we can use to bring audiences together. The pandemic has shown us that we really have too little knowledge about how we gather and come together in online spaces. We believe that zoom fatigue is unnecessary and that digitisation can offer a lot to the cultural sector – as long as programs are hybrid and designed fundamentally differently from physical programmes. With (almost) every event we organise, we aim to explore a new format or tool—allowing our subject matter to shape the tools we create.

For The Hmm ON a Lighter Internet we updated our livestream platform, in collaboration with Karl Moubarak, with different view-modes—video (with a range of resolution options), low-low res, audio-only, and text only—to make it more accessible and to explore what low-tech and low-data internet solutions can look like. As an extra treat, we offered specially discounted (online) group tickets to stimulate people to watch our livestream together rather than watching on one computer or phone alone. By providing these different view modes, we also allow viewers with unstable or unaffordable internet access to join one of our events. Having these options also gave viewers a choice in how much data they were sending and receiving during the course of the event. 

“I really enjoyed the content of the talks whilst watching within this experimental site. I think having the video embedded in the interface with the chat, emojis and even the orange border around it, really made it feel like i was more attending an event than just a ‘zoom lecture’. I loved that I could PAUSE it whilst it was happening! This was fantastic but didn’t take away from it being live!”

– Survey response from one of the audience members.
Our livestream with the ‘audio-only’ mode on.

A multiplicity of view modes 

With this experiment we wanted to explore the inequalities present in hybridity and who can even access the often data-heavy digital interactions and online events that those of us with affordable and stable internet access take for granted. In addition to these questions about access was the larger question about the ecological impact of heavy streaming. In our updated livestream platform, we added network traffic visibility, which gave each visitor information about how much data they were sending and receiving throughout the course of the livestream. We hoped that this information would provide visitors with the extra insight that is often hidden, sharing in the responsibility of our internet use.

For our audience that joined online, visitors responded that they did end up switching between view modes throughout the programme: 

“Today I tested the different modes to see how they were, but ended my shuffle on auto. I felt like this was how I got the most info and since I was only focusing on the event I preferred it that way.” 

– Survey response from one of the audience members.

Some viewers also said they liked the other modes, such as audio-only, as it allowed them to take a break from screen time but still follow the event. Another visitor noted that because their internet was cutting out a lot, the ‘text-only mode’ was delayed. However, in ‘video mode’ a poor internet connection would have caused the live stream to cut out entirely. Thanks to ‘text-only mode’, the visitor did not miss anything.

The livestream platform with the ‘text-only’ view mode on, which generated live captions.

The thresholds of access

Implementing our ‘text-only’ functionality also allowed us to implement live-captions in our updated livestream platform. However, having the live-captions brought up a tension between accessibility and using open source tools. We used two live-captioning libraries, Google and MUX—one for the video and the other for real-time captioning. The live-captioning was auto generated, so it was not always clearly picking up the language, which is different when someone is editing the captions in real-time. In addition, by using the Google captioning library, we ran into issues with the censorship of language—swear words like ‘fuck’ were blocked out. From this process we learn that no matter what live captioning libraries we use, they have their own subjectivists and contexts, which can be colonial and ableist. This is a tension that many small organisations struggle with when trying to create an accessible platform within limited means.

Another choice we faced was whether to use MUX for video hosting and live-streaming. Early on, when building the first iteration of this platform, we had to decide how to host the videos and livestream. What kind of server would we use? We chose MUX – a private US company and the biggest video platform. We first explored the idea of self-hosting our livestream or trying distributed hosting across individual servers. While self-hosting is great, it is also very resource intensive, not the most ecological option, and requires a lot of maintenance. Due to its scale, MUX is efficient, and efficiency is also an ecological question.

The low-low-res mode on, which generates a thumbnail image every 15 seconds, in addition to live captions.

When thinking about accessibility, it is important to highlight that our decisions, choices, explorations, and interests are all situated in the context of The Hmm as a cultural organisation running experiments and trying new things—we do not propose a solution or blueprint for accessibility and ecology that we want to scale across different networks, organizations and crises. Of course we offer our code under a public license, but the answers to these questions will differ in every situation. We are developing these tools from a specific urgency and within a specific context, and when you’re working on your own event or project you should do the same. 

Credits

  • The Hmm On a Lighter Internet was created by The Hmm. The speakers presenting their work were Payal Arora,  Radek Przedpełski, and Faye Kabali-Kagwa.
  • Design of the livestream website by Toni Brell, development by Karl Moubarak. 
  • The event took place onsite at Framer Framed.
Case Study

Ludwig’s Subathon (2021)

Hybridity
Fully online
 Participation
Join in... a bit
 Privacy
Big Tech galore
 Duration
Neverending

Whereas in watching television, we mainly consume content, with Twitch, the viewing experience is active. Millions of users livestream their activities through this website. Live streaming games is especially popular. Twitch streamers are in constant conversation with their viewers in chat. Sometimes viewers can also very directly influence what happens in the stream

On March 14, 2021, American live streamer Ludwig Ahgren started a subathon – a subscriber marathon. Ahgren would livestream for 24 hours, but each time a subscriber joined and donated $5, the time left on the clock increased. Once the clock hit zero, the stream ended. Ludwig’s subathon was so popular that he livestreamed for 31 days in a row.
Case Study

Blast Theory: Uncle Roy All Around You (2003)

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
On the safe side
 Participation
Dive in deep
 Tech
Hardly any tech
 Duration
You had to be there

Uncle Roy All Around You is a game where physical and online players have one shared mission: find Uncle Roy. The physical players are on the streets of a city. The virtual players move through a virtual translation of that same city. They have access to important details about Uncle Roy’s location that the physical players do not have. Instead, the physical players receive text and audio messages from online players via a handheld computer. They have 15 minutes to find Uncle Roy. Online players can choose to help or to hinder them.

With the city as a playing field, Uncle Roy All Around You is a form of urban gaming and interactive storytelling. It was first performed in London in 2003.

A more detailed description of the game can be found here.

Credits

Uncle Roy All Around You is a collaboration between Blast Theory and the Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham, with support from British Telecom, an Innovation Award from the Arts & Humanities Research Board, Equator and the Interdisciplinary Arts Department of Arts Council England through the National Touring Programme.
Case Study

Liquid Learning (2020-)

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Participation
Dip a toe in
 Tech
Hardly any tech
 Privacy
Don\'t care either way
 Duration
Neverending

“The future is liquid – and education should be too.”

This is how IE University in Spain is announcing its Liquid Learning method.

You might call it an in-between approach to education. IE University believes that narrow studies with fixed curriculums and traditional structures are outdated. They are convinced that learning does not only happen within school walls but also in conversations with friends or virtual spaces. Therefore, the university combines physical and virtual environments for students. In Liquid Learning classes, some students attend physically and others online. Teachers use whiteboards and PowerPoint presentations that are viewable to all students. There are polls and breakout rooms to engage and support all participants. Their online library virtual space has fixed study session times where students can also chat with a librarian.

Here you can find more information.
Case Study

Royal Shakespeare Company: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2021)

Hybridity
Mostly online
 Setup
Wildly experimental
 Participation
Dip a toe in
 Tech
Tech overload
 Privacy
Big Tech galore

Most people are familiar with Shakespeare’s plays, but what if you could enter the worlds he created? In a corona reality, the Royal Shakespeare Company welcomed audiences into a Shakespeare-inspired universe through their computer screens. Online participants are welcomed by a host who transforms into an avatar, meets some sprites and engages in battle with a great storm. Both Puck and the sprites are played by actors wearing motion-tracking costumes. They respond live to what the audience is doing. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a hybrid of gaming technology, orchestral music and theatre. The Guardian wrote about the experience: 

Tech rehearsal of Dream

“The most exciting moment comes when the technology itself is exposed to the audience; the camera pans into the studio and shows us both the screen with the avatars adventuring in the forest alongside their human counterparts, enacting the drama in real-time motion capture, below the screen. The actors perform a kind of human puppetry, lifting each other up and manipulating limbs for the effects on screen.”

Arifa Akbar for The Guardian

Dream ran from 12 – 20 March 2021 via dream.online and daily reached around 7000 visitors.
External Link

Lowtech Manifesto

Setup
Wildly experimental
 Participation
Sit back and observe
 Tech
Hardly any tech
 Privacy
Very privacy aware

A rant approximating the content of this document was delivered to an audience of new media artists and activists by James Wallbank, Coordinator of Redundant Technology Initiative, at The Next 5 Minutes conference in Amsterdam in March 1999.

“Lowtech includes hardware and software. We advocate freeware and low cost software. We particularly advocate the use of low cost, open source operating systems.”

James Wallbank, 1999
Available here
Case Study

Ali Eslami and Mathilde Renault: Eclipse (2021)

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Join in... a bit
 Tech
Tech overload
 Duration
Archived but not active

With the interactive exhibition Eclipse in Tetem, artists Ali Eslami and Mathilde Renault explore new forms of human connection in virtual worlds.

Eclipse is an interactive, hybrid exhibition that could be experienced via Virtual Reality at the physical exhibition space of Tetem in Enschede, and online via Twitch. In the VR world ‘False Mirror’ visitors could embody three different entities: Alless, a being who leans towards order; Lena, a fluid form inclined to chaos; or an observing and overseeing bird. Via Twitch, online participants could also crawl into the (feathered) skin of this bird personage. The characters can’t actually see each other, but they can see traces of each other’s presence.

“This new chapter of False Mirror is playfully designed to blur the borders between physical and virtual and it is intended as a common online and offline space within which people can share a social virtual experience and dreaming out loud together!”

Ali Eslami

Credits

  • Director: Ali Eslami
  • Co-director: Mathilde Renault
  • Production: Ali Eslami namens ALLLESSS
  • Technical artist: Alap Parikh
  • Designer: Rein Blank, Maisa Imamovic, Barthélémy Vielle
  • Developer: Ali Eslami, Alap Parikh
  • Music: Shahin Entezami
  • Sound Design: Shahin Entezami
  • Film Research: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
  • Screening copy: Ali Eslami namens ALLLESSS
Case Study

The Infinite Conversation – a Hybrid Event in the Dark (2022)

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Taking some chances
 Participation
Join in... a bit
 Tech
Nothing fancy
 Privacy
Quite privacy aware
 Duration
You had to be there

Introduction of the Infinite Conversations experience (in combination with the work Garden of Ghost Flowers) at STRP festival 2022

At one of the live events at STRP festival 2022 the artists Lundahl & Seitl created the experience ‘Infinite Conversations’ – a hybrid event in complete darkness. In this space, guided by invisible hosts, microphones captured discussions of onsite visitors that were broadcast online for the virtual visitors. At the same time, online visitors could also contribute their voices to the onsite space. The experience took for the form of a listening and sharing session in the dark and contributed to a wider, infinite number of conversations.

This work is based on the “The Infinite Conversation” – part of the Performance Exhibition series at Magasin 3 curated by Richard Julin.

“It’s interesting, in silent it feels like I dissapear, but in a normal event I’m present with my body. This means like you become anonymous. It is like I’m only existing when I’m talking”

Anonymous participant at STRP festival 2022

This innovative approach revolved around the immersive experience of visitors, shaping the exhibition space through their embodied voices and interactions. Visitors embarked on a sensory adventure as they passed into a dark space, guided by voices and engaging in profound dialogues. The work’s fluidity allowed it to adapt to different environments and shape-shift when placed in different contexts (from Magasin 3 to a STRP festival space).

Credits

  • Lundahl & Seitl – artists
  • 2011 performance at Magasin 3, curated by Richard Julin
  • 2022 hybrid performance at STRP festival, curated by Nadine Roestenburg.
External Link

Serpentine Podcast: Art & The Metaverse

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
Wildly experimental

The Serpentine Arts Technologies programme has released two episodes of The Serpentine Podcast in conjunction with their publication “Future Art Ecosystems: Art x Metaverse (FAE2).” FAE2 explores the intersection of art and the metaverse, featuring discussions with artists, technologists, and thinkers on advanced technologies and virtual worldbuilding. The series delves into topics like counter archives for liberation and decentralized, community-focused futures. The “Playtesting” series was hosted by Tamar Clarke-Brown and produced with Sasha Edye Lindner from Reduced Listening, with sound design by Alx Suutoo Dabo.

Listen to the podcast series
Case Study

Absent Sitters: a Virtual Séance for Culture (2019)

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
Wildly experimental
 Participation
Take some breaks

A 2019 performance that took an unforeseen turn as the global pandemic highlighted the very essence of “liveness.” At York Mediale 2020, Absent Sitters debuted as an online audiovisual experience, allowing only six participants at a time to engage with its reflective narrative. This premiere serves as the starting point for a series of project iterations, with the audience playing a pivotal role in shaping the concept’s evolution. The project Absent Sitters is a online audiovisual experience that transports you from your chair and through your screen, inviting you to delve into the essence of the ‘missing’ performance.

Within this shared virtual event, you’ll be guided by a medium, prompting you to question the nature of live performance in 2020. Are we truly live? Can we authentically connect through screens? And perhaps most intriguingly, who are you in this unique experience?

“Absent Sitters” fundamentally captures the theme of absence, reflecting on the emptiness caused by the pandemic and envisioning reconnection in the future. Through its meditative and unsettling portrayal, it becomes a seance for culture in the challenging context of 2020. It poignantly highlights the experiences we missed and contemplates new ways of connecting in the constantly evolving landscape of the arts.

Absent Sitters was meticulously developed through a series of intensive residencies. The production is rooted in three key areas of inquiry:

  1. The Dynamics of Collective Imagination: How do performer-audience dynamics generate the atmosphere of a live performance, and to what extent does a performer’s presence impact the sense of “liveness”?
  2. Technology and Narrative Storytelling: How can technology catalyze artistic exploration and creation?
  3. The Artist’s Absence: How can technology enable the creation of experiences without the artist’s physical presence, reshaping the way we perceive live events?

Read more about this research in this article by Mark Carlin.

Credits:

  • Gazelle Twin, one of the UK’s most influential voices in electronic music.
  • Kit Monkman, artist and filmmaker
  • University of York’s Music Department (UoYMD)
Article

Ohyay! Ohyay! Ohyay! A Platform That Lets You Define Your Own Interactions

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Dive in deep
 Tech
Nothing fancy
 Privacy
Don\'t care either way

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • We’re just in the very beginning of what interaction online could be, with video
  • Let’s rebel against the rigidness of technology
Bar for the online event The Hmm @ IMPAKT built with ohyay

During the COVID-19 lockdown, exhibitions, cultural events, chats with colleagues, and even romantic dates moved to the internet. There were live concerts on Twitch, Zoom parties, and guided exhibition tours via YouTube. Now that existing platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are not only used to announce events – they also serve as the platform where the event takes place, and their shortcomings come to light. Meeting with friends in Microsoft Teams is like inviting your friends to hang out in your office space. But at least in a physical office you can have a lot of plants or hang posters on the wall to give the space a personal touch. If you want to personalise your environment online, you most likely need to know how to code. And on many of the Big Tech platforms you can not really change things—all interactions are pre-determined for us.

There was one platform that gave users the power to change their space in their own creative way: ohyay1. You could choose your background image. You could decide how many people are visible in the space you create. You could add a chat window, emoji reactions, or play some background music to let your visitors feel at ease. Best of all, you didn’t need any knowledge about coding to do all of this. One of the first ohyay experiences we had with The Hmm was a meeting in the virtual Chinese restaurant of IDFA DocLab. Since then, we started building our own bar environments where we come together after our events and hold our team meetings. We’ve experienced that, with ohyay, it’s easier to get together in a fun and informal way. 

Ohyay was developed in the summer of 2020, and Lilian Stolk of The Hmm spoke with one of its founders, Andrew Lin, when the platform was still in a beta stage. To what extent did the pandemic influence the development of ohyay? Why is it important to give users so much freedom? And what are the most creative rooms that the ohyay community has built so far? Lilian visited him in his virtual office, where he gave her a tour through his favourite ohyay rooms.

1. ohyay was officially taken down in November 2023

Andrew is welcoming Lilian to his office space
The beginning of ohyay, how did it started?
Why is it called ohyay?
Is ohyay another video conferencing tool? No, it’s completely different!
Not every office has a fireplace with playing cards
Back to the office. Why is there so little room for users’ creativity on platforms such as Facebook or Twitter?
Does Andrew think users will have more freedom on our future internet?
What’s the best way to explore the space of online interaction? Explore together!
Curious what this will yield? Andrew takes me to his favourite ohyay rooms.
And even more ohyay gems…
What does Andrew think is the biggest and most interesting thing they’ve done with ohyay?
Ohyay is still in a beta stage, but everyone can join for free. What about the €?
And what would be the future of ohyay? Ohyay world!
Case Study

Raumklang (2023)

Hybridity
Mostly on-site
 Setup
Wildly experimental
 Participation
Dive in deep
 Tech
Tech overload
 Duration
Neverending

Raumklang is a hybrid installation that was presented at STRP festival 2023. In the site-specific part of the project, you explore a spatial 3D sound experience where virtual sound objects are triggered when you move pass them. While doing so, you create a trail, a unique soundtrack of your movements. Visitors wear special backpacks with tracking technology (see video).

Visitors online can follow a trail of a visitor on-site. In this way, the visitor on-site takes you on a tour. The trail is beautifully mapped in a 3D scan of the physical space.

“The way you hear sound is determined by the space you’re in, hence the importance of a concert hall’s acoustics. But what if you can experience a space through sound?”

STRP website

Credits

  • Zeno van den Broek, composer and artist.
  • Robin Koek (NL), sound artist.
  • Raumklang is co-produced by V2_Lab & CCU and supported by Creative Fund NL & AIAIAI.
External Link

Bodies in Space: Extended Realities in Live Performance

Hybridity
Mostly online
 Participation
Dive in deep
 Duration
You had to be there

Bodies in Space: Extended Realities in Live Performance was an online Public Program that took place on Friday, December 18, 2020.

This programme was presented by ONX Studio — a NEW INC & Onassis project. The conversation featured moderator Janet Wong, the Associate Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, in conversation with three artists – Sarah Rothberg, Theo Triantafyllidis, and Lu Yang – whose practices embrace the fluid nature of various “realities.”

Watch recording of the program
External Link

Public Spaces: The Future of Online Events

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
Wildly experimental
 Participation
Dive in deep

A long read by Monique van Dusseldorp – Curator and Moderator of events on media, technology, and innovation. Van Dusseldorp outlines some first ideas on what makes events special and how this can be translated online. She gives examples of successful and innovative online events in 2020 that sometimes even worked better online.

View article
External Link

The Hybrid Museum Experience (HyMEx 2021 – Proceedings)

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
Taking some chances
 Participation
Take some breaks

The Ludwig Muzéum in Budapest organised an online symposium enfolding the idea of the hybrid museum experience within an international, collaborative, practice-based research project Beyond Matter (2019–2023) that takes cultural heritage and contemporary art to the verge of virtual reality. In the first quarter of the 21st century, the palpable boundaries of museums seem to be less clear: Where does the museum begin? The museum’s reality and even before that, the audience’s reality intertwines the physical with the virtual, blurs the edges of sensing the dimensions that called the institution of the museum to life, such as the linearity of time. Under such circumstances, the museum shall transmogrify into a hybrid entity that may embrace at once a geographical location, various digital platforms, manifold ways of mediation, immersive knowledge production, participation and exchange.

As the roles museums may hold within a wide spectrum of societies, completed with a perspective where virtual has a meaning beyond computer-generated technology anticipate an approach where the question is less about the technological side of the hybrid experience than the participatory side.

HyMEx aims at deconstructing and reconstructing the hybrid museum experience through the involvement of multidisciplinary angles. The two-day symposium will bring together leading researchers, scholars in digital and experimental museology, curatorial practice, and collection care, as well as researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines to exchange views on challenging situations and the latest innovations in the field of hybrid museum experiences, with a focus on contemporary art.

The publication of the HyMEx 2021 symposium is called HyMEx 2021 – Proceedings. Following a foreword and greetings by Julia Fabényi and Peter Weibel, 22 contributors share their written proceedings, accompanied by links and pictures.

The project was co-founded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union.

Download publication
Experiment

The Hmm ON the Creator Economy

Date: October 5, 2022

Location: Youseum, Amsterdam

Online format: live.thehmm.nl, our custom live-stream website

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Join in... a bit
 Tech
Pretty sophisticated
 Duration
You had to be there

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • This experimental event involved the audience moving through spaces in the Youseum, using a completely mobile livestream setup, which also needed a lot of testing in advance.
  • In these experimental setups be prepared for some chaos and forgive yourself when things (inevitably) go wrong.
  • The experiences for online and on-site audiences doesn’t have to be the same, but it should be fun and of the highest quality for both.
  • Speak directly to your online audience to increase interaction and engagement.

In recent years, the ways in which you can make money as a creator on social media have grown and broadened considerably. With that growth, the mutual dependence that popular creators and powerful social media platforms have on each other seems to have also grown more tense. What are the consequences of being financially dependent on creating content on social media? How do these economic systems shape the content itself? And how do platforms and lawmakers respond to creators monetising their content? During The Hmm ON the Creator Economy, we explored these questions.


To immerse ourselves and our audience into the lives of content creators, we took our event to the Youseum, a social media experience/selfie-museum where you create the best memories and, of course, the best content.

Setup with a big ringlight

Set-up

The event took place in several spaces of the Youseum, and the audience travelled with us to hear the different speakers. We didn’t use a typical livestream set up, but instead were completely mobile, with cellphones mounted on ring light tripods, connected to MagSafe battery packs, streaming live to OBS, which we use for our livestream.

Before the first speaker started their presentation, we invited the physical audience to experience the museum on their own for a little bit. While they were snapping selfies in the different rooms, we took the online audience on a walk through the space, where they could watch the physical audience move around, take their new Instagram posts, and wave to the camera. We also had them play a little game: ‘spot the aroma diffusers’ (diffusing our scent Hmmosphere). The audience members with the quickest eye and reply won a free ticket to our next event. 

The second speaker was tuning in from the United States, and thus joined through a video call. We usually broadcast this video call on a big screen in the space – similar to watching a livestream. Since this event was nomadic in approach, we instead urged the physical audience to roam around and find a comfortable place to sit in the museum, after which they would watch the livestream on their own device. During the ten minutes in which the physical visitors were finding their ideal spot, we walked the online audience through a few more spaces and then addressed by the host as he explained our technical set up of the night, à la YouTube influencer. After this second talk had concluded, we instructed the physical audience through the livestream to join the final speaker in the ball-pit room.

Online audience gets a tech tour

This was our first time using such a mobile set-up, and despite testing as much as possible beforehand, we ran into some issues. The sound on the livestream fell away for a few minutes, one presenter’s slides weren’t configured correctly, the physical space had an echo of the livestream sound for a while, you could hear us discuss problems in the background, and so forth. Sometimes, these issues were valuable in ways we couldn’t have predicted beforehand. One visitor told us:

“Weirdly, I felt a bit connected by eavesdropping. We were able to hear quite a bit from conversations going on onsite and these people were not aware of us picking up on them. This is an interesting privacy question.”

Luckily, we have an incredibly forgiving audience that’s happy to participate in experiments. Although experiments sometimes have their set-backs, our visitors come back time and time again. 

Visitor Responses

Physical visitors were excited about the mobile set up as they got to experience the different social media rooms as well as the presentations. They praised the livestream experience during the second presentation and didn’t feel it lacked physical qualities.

Watching the virtual speaker together

“The change of scenery was nice. Also the switch from in-person speakers to the online speaker was good. It was fun to see people huddling around a screen to listen to the speaker.”

Responses from the online audience tell us they enjoyed being toured around the museum, as it broke up the talks that are sometimes hard to keep your attention on. 

“I am surprised that I didn’t feel fomo to not be there onsite myself to be honest.”

The online audience was active in the chat, maybe because we encouraged them to be watchful during the first walk around while playing the game and incentivised them to speak up. We also asked them a few questions during the break, which more than a few answered dutifully. We don’t always have a very responsive online audience, so it seems that this little push in the beginning helped them to open up and be present during the event.

“Online it was nice to be in the room as people streamed through it, and then “walking around” (picked up and carried) was also cool. The mirror room was good to have a fixed place to enjoy the scene changes as the mirrors moved. Definitely felt immersive, though not interactive. Being able to speak rather than simply chat (at least for QA) would feel more interactive.”

Unfortunately, this set-up was not the best for connecting the on-site and online audience with each other. While the online audience did enjoy watching the on-site audience walk around and take selfies and felt mildly connected through this, physical visitors said they were missing some relationship with the online audience, and online visitors didn’t feel very connected to other online visitors. So, connecting to the online audience is the biggest challenge. Visitors said they enjoyed the chat and the emojis in the livestream – functions we implemented to help the online audience to relate to and feel each other’s presence.

Touring the Youseum on live

Learnings and Insights

  1. Always check your tech set up in advance, and make sure you have a direct connection with your technician in case of hiccups. We often found ourselves in a position where we received immediate feedback from visitors (e.g. “we don’t have sound on the livestream”) that we had to quickly relay to the tech team to fix. With some issues like this, time is of the essence so the audience doesn’t miss out on too much of the event.
  2. Be prepared for some chaos. Make sure you don’t get too overwhelmed even when things go wrong and, most importantly, forgive yourself when things do (inevitably) go wrong. The audience will too – if you prepare them in advance for the experiment.  
  3. It’s difficult to create the same experience for online and on-site audiences and, in fact, shouldn’t really be the goal. It’s a different set up and should be treated as such. It’s more important that both audience have a similar quality experience, however that is achieved. For example, while the physical visitors had the agency to walk around the museum, the online visitors got a private tech tour and a fun game. In this way, we took care of both audiences in different, equally important ways.
  4. Having an incentive to speak up in an online chat helps visitors be more present and active for the duration of the event. This could involve asking simple questions, but something more is possibly better. In any case, be sure to address the online audience directly from the livestream, so they feel as visible as the physical audience. We have noticed during other events where we never directly speak to the online visitors that the chat was less responsive – even if we asked them questions from within the chat itself. Although this is probably not the only contributing factor towards an active online audience – especially depending on your audience – it might be an important one.

Credits
Case Study

Even tot hier – S3-S6 (2020)

Hybridity
Mostly on-site
 Setup
Taking some chances
 Participation
Dip a toe in
 Tech
Pretty sophisticated
 Duration
You had to be there

Even tot hier is a Dutch satirical news show with a live audience. The hosts, Van der Laan & Woe, go through the last weeks news in a musical format, and quiz the audience about their knowledge on current affairs at the end of the show. The member with most correct answers is dubbed ‘the all-knowing’ and invited to answer the final question on the show. 

Like all live shows, in 2020, they had to come up with a way to translate their production to a pandemic-proof version. In season three till five, the audience appeared on a large screen in front of the hosts, video calling in from their homes. They wave at the camera and laugh at the jokes. Their invited guests appear highlighted in the middle of the screen when it is their turn to talk about something the pandemic cancelled for them. The quiz questions are answered by holding up anything the corresponding colour to your chosen answer. At the end, the ‘all-knowing’ is highlighted in the middle of the screen and gets to decide which cancelled event, discussed earlier in the show, should happen anyway. The show ends with a pandemic-proof version of that event happening for the disappointed guest from earlier.

By season six, Even tot hier could host a small live audience again, and transitioned to a hybrid format. Most audience members still appeared on the screen, but a small number was present in the studio. At the end of the quiz, two “all-knowing” were appointed, one in the studio and one at home. At the end, the “all-knowing” audience member in the studio would go down a slide in the space, leading to a joke at the end of season seven.

Find out more here

Credits

  • Produced by: BNNVARA and MediaLane
  • Hosted by: Niels van der Laan and Jeroen Woe
  • Music by: Miquel Wiels
Case Study

JODI: OXO (2018)

Hybridity
Fully on-site
 Setup
Wildly experimental
 Participation
Dive in deep
 Tech
Tech overload
 Duration
You had to be there

OXO is an interactive installation with a contemporary take on tic-tac-toe. It’s shown on a grid of nine displays, with four different types of players competing against each other: human, chicken, computer, and AI. Visitors can participate in the role of human on one of the corner displays. 

Tic-tac-toe is one of the earliest known computer games. JODI based their installation on the version by Alexander S. Douglas — OXO, developed in 1952 — one of the first computer games that allowed humans to play against the computer. It’s virtually impossible to beat the computer program, and its extreme simplicity could be precisely what serves as a power source for today’s technology.

The chicken player refers to another part of the history of tic-tac-toe. In the past, people would ‘play’ tic-tac-toe against a live chicken in a game called Bird Brain. The chicken was locked in a small booth and would press a button connected to a simple computer program that determined the corresponding tic-tac-toe move. 

JODI uses this installation as a way to reflect on the early days of computing and gaming, as well as the long history of artificial intelligence. 

Credits
Case Study

Amateur Chess as an Online Spectator Sport (2020)

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
The sweet spot
 Participation
Dip a toe in
 Tech
Hardly any tech
 Privacy
Big Tech galore
 Duration
You had to be there

In 2020, as the sports industry came to a standstill, so would the world of chess. Offline, over-the-board tournaments were cancelled or paused halfway through. But chess, as a 1500 year old game, is nothing if not adaptable, and moved online swiftly. Where online chess streams had maybe a thousand viewers at most before the pandemic, that number multiplied tenfold as people were urged to stay home. Platforms like Twitch and YouTube hosted everyone, from amateurs to Grand Masters, as they played the game.

“Twitch is a platform that has made chess appealing and accessible to persons who might be fans but who don’t know where to go and watch and cheer.”

Coleen Cusack, US Chess Federation-rated player competing in the 90s

Since chess, compared to other streamed video games, is relatively slow, the players are able to narrate their thoughts and choices as they move across the digital board. This fosters a sense of community in the audience, understanding the player’s moves, and allows them to learn from their choices. In preparation for PogChamps 2020 – an online chess tournament featuring top streamers as competitors – chess Grand Master Hikaru Nakamura coached the players and streamed their sessions live, allowing all viewers to learn from his advice. 

In June 2023, the Olympics hosted the first Esport Series, which included chess tournaments. 

“It’s quite amazing. If you look at how chess was looking online prior to the pandemic, nobody really treated online high level tournaments seriously. Nobody was considering organising high level tournaments online. This is an awesome initiative. I don’t know how it’s going to expand, but it’s a great initiative.”

Arturs Neiksans, competing in the Olympic Esport Series
Case Study

Atelier des Lumières exhibitions (2018-)

Hybridity
Fully on-site
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Join in... a bit
 Tech
Tech overload
 Duration
You had to be there
Van Gogh / Klein exhibition

Atelier des Lumières is a digital art centre based in Paris with locations in the Netherlands, France, Germany and the United States. Their exhibitions use large projections on the walls and floor of the spaces they occupy, displaying visuals ranging from classic paintings to abstract patterns to nature scenes. The audience is surrounded by moving images across the whole room of the exhibition, accompanied by specially curated playlists to evoke more senses. The centre focuses on creating a sense of immersion with the artwork, to feel its emotional world to your core.

The art centre also has an accompanying mobile application where you can discover more about the ongoing exhibitions, take a closer look at the artworks on display, read about them, and listen to the playlists compiled for the show.

Credits
External Link

A Catalog of Formats for Digital Discomfort

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Join in... a bit
 Tech
Nothing fancy

The Catalog of Formats for Digital Discomforts was compiled by researcher and cultural mediator Jara Rocha, for the workshop series on Obfuscation as an online gathering. It provides insights into different vectors of thinking that influence the organisation of online events. During the pandemic, big tech corporations were quickly monopolising the formats available and creating an online-gathering-monoculture. This evolution also made way for counter-forces to mobilise and provide alternative solutions to these forms. The Catalog was created to document the practices of these counter-forces.

Credits: Jara Rocha

Open PDF
Case Study

Shinseungback Kimyonghun: Mind (2019)

Hybridity
Fully on-site
 Setup
Wildly experimental
 Participation
Take some breaks
 Tech
Tech overload
 Privacy
Quite privacy aware
 Duration
You had to be there

The interactive installation Mind creates a space brings people’s minds together as a sea. The piece, created by the duo Shinseungback Kimyonghun, is composed of drums filled with tiny metal balls that move to create ocean sounds. The movement is determined by the emotions of the people in the space. A camera in the centre of the room tracks the visitors and analyses their facial expressions with software that interprets the emotion behind them. The ocean drums raise the sound of the waves based on the average emotion of the latest 100 faces to pass by. 

The audience and the AI software come together in this piece to co-create the sonic experience. The sea constantly changes by the state of the collective mind. 

Credits
Case Study

The Late Late Show – Amanda Gorman (2021)

Hybridity
Mostly online
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Tech
Pretty sophisticated
 Duration
You had to be there

In January 2021, the Late Late Show with James Corden invited Amanda Gorman onto the show to talk about her recent reading of the poem “The Hill We Climb” during the inauguration ceremony for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Gorman appeared on the show on a metre-high monitor, opposite Corden on his chair. They talked as if they were not on a video call but simply in the room together. Why Gorman was behind her computer was not addressed, and the show fared as normal. The big vertical screen holding a guest is something we have seen more often during the pandemic, for example, during The Voice of Holland with jury member Anouk judging from the safety of her studio.

Credits

  • The Late Late Show with James Corden
Case Study

Erkum Seker: Drive and Listen (2020-)

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
The sweet spot
 Participation
Take some breaks
 Tech
Medium tech
 Duration
Neverending
Driving around Amsterdam

During the lockdown in 2020, many simple pleasures of life were hard to attain, like leisurely car rides, exploring new places, or simply seeing your home town.

In May 2020, after the first few weeks of lockdown, Erkum Seker released the app Drive and Listen, which allows over 15 million people to combat some of these cravings. The app lets you pick from a list of over 50 (and counting) cities, after which it shows you videos from behind the steering wheel, driving around the town. You can pick from several local radio stations while you cruise, and opt in or out of hearing the street noise around you.

Erkum, a grad student from Turkey, started developing the app during the lockdown in Munich when he was longing to see his hometown again. He later discovered it was not just a great way to return to a familiar place, but also to discover new cities when travelling was near impossible.

“I was missing riding around my city, even the traffic and the fuss of daily life, so I found myself watching videos of Istanbul online. It was so fun to see my city but I thought, why not listen to some radio in the background to get the whole riding in cars experience? I realised that other people around the world must be missing that same experience of being on the road.”

Erkram in Lonely Planet
Driving around Yekaterinburg

Erkum initially collected the videos from YouTube, but quickly people were contacting him to contribute to the growing collection of videos with ones from their hometowns. Even now that the lockdowns are far gone, the website continues racking up hits as people visit places around the world. Feedback on his membership platform reads someone becoming emotional as they drive around Kyiv or someone grateful for being lulled to sleep at night.

Discover Drive and Listen

Credits
Case Study

Playgrounds Online Fest #1 – The Art Department (2020) 

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
Taking some chances
 Participation
Sit back and observe
 Tech
Nothing fancy
 Duration
You had to be there

When Playgrounds Blend festival was cancelled, much like most live events in 2020, they substituted the space left behind with an online edition. They invited artists from all over the world, much easier now that it was online, to give demos, panel talks and portfolio reviews. The presentations streamed on two Twitch channels, with a lively chat full of people from all over.

Unlike most online events at the time, Playgrounds decided not to record their event for later publication, which urged the audience to be present and focused throughout the night. When feedback was gathered about how the event was received, visitors were positive, and told them they felt equal during the event.

For each edition, Playgrounds Festival commissions artists or studios to create their opening title sequence. 2020 was no different. Studio The Panics, under art director Erwin van den IJssel, animated this edition’s titles the only way that seemed appropriate: through Zoom.

“If there’s one thing that’s come out of this pandemic it’s aesthetics that make use of this gridded platform known as Zoom. That’s what these titles do — for the most part — to great fun and effect. If you’ve got limitations, exploit them.”

Louise Sandhaus, designer, educator, author and panel judge for Art of the Title’s Top 10 Title Sequences of 2020

Credits
Article

Exploring the Landscape of Online Events and Purpose-Built Platforms

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Take some breaks
 Tech
Pretty sophisticated

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • When developing your own tools, don’t work as an island. Collaborate with other organisations, share knowledge and resources, and afterwards extend your new infrastructure to others for their use.
  • The audience interplay is a key part in live events, so it is vital to find a way to circumvent the passive audience behind a livestream for digital ones, and interact with your visitors and let them interact with each other.
  • Building online spaces as recreations of physical spaces is almost never the best solution.

In March 2020, when events, exhibitions, and performances suddenly had to take place in online spaces, the infrastructures required for this didn’t exist. In the early days of the pandemic, most of the platforms that were being used to socialise with one another or host events were for business meetings. The effect was that attending cultural events felt a bit too much like being in a meeting – leading to hours and hours behind our screens staring at the same interfaces. Video chats are much heavier for our brains to process than regular face-to-face interactions or phone calls, and a 2021 research paper from Stanford University shows that Zoom fatigue is real. 

How can we combat this Zoom fatigue? Since the pandemic, artists and cultural institutions have considered the best way to translate their activities to the Internet. We have seen all kinds of new platforms emerge and experienced many experimental events. With The Hmm @ Online events on June 23rd 2021, we gave our audience a lay of the land. We invited the following eight artists, cultural organisations and developers to our livestream to talk about the platforms they’ve built, the events they’ve organised, and how they’ve translated their programs to the online realm.

Florian van Zandwijk about Enter, a platform he’s developing for Het Nieuwe Instituut 

In addition to Florian’s presentation, we also did an in-depth interview with him about the Enter platform, why they developed it, the hurdles encountered along the way, and its future iterations. You can watch the full interview here.

Amy Langer about the San Fransisco Neo Futurists and their theatrical experiment The Program

Aurélien Lepetit about their online interventions: Speed Series

Jannes Heidinga about NITE HOTEL, a virtual environment built by the interdisciplinary theatre ensemble NITE

Tereza Havlíková about watching and visiting art online via common.garden

Jara Rocha and Seda Gürses about the ‘platframe’ built for the Workshop on Obfuscation

Gary Burnett about teaching in Nottopia

Monique van Dusseldorp about her research into online events

To find out more about Monique’s research, you can read our expert interview with her.

* This article was originally published as part of The Hmm’s Hybrid Events dossier here: https://thehmm.nl/report-the-hmm-online-events/ 
Article

Enter: A Friendly and Experimental Digital Space

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Take some breaks
 Tech
Nothing fancy
 Privacy
Very privacy aware

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • Try to be critical about big tech platforms if you have the infrastructure and resources, big institutions have an obligation to work on providing different solutions, and to work together with other organisations that need the same solutions.
  • An artist’s perspective on everyday, formal things like video conferencing can prove beneficial or even vital, to design other ways of interaction.
  • Be responsive to changes that happen in your field, experiment if you can, or learn from others’ experimentation, for example by facilitating as a bigger institution.
  • Be inspired by and also use other existing platforms and softwares, and combine them into something that works for you.
  • Always ask yourself: How do you design these spaces to be accessible (for example with a weaker CPU or a slow or splotchy internet connection)? Don’t let accessibility be an afterthought.

In 2020, because of the pandemic, most cultural events took place online via Big Tech platforms such as Zoom or YouTube. The fact that these platforms are made for business – not for culture – influenced our event experience in many new ways. Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI) is a cultural centre in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, focused on architecture, design, and digital culture. HNI is often a central hub at the intersection of these different fields. When the pandemic hit, they felt it was important to continue to fulfil this role online. The result is Enter—a digital art-inspired platform where you can meet with people about research projects, organise public events or simply hang around. 

In 2021, we met Florian van Zandwijk, project manager of Enter, at Enter’s Coffee Room to talk about the development and ambitions of the platform. Watch our conversation here: 

Read more about Enter and their residencies here: https://nieuweinstituut.nl/projects/enter and discover the platform for yourself here: https://enter.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/ 

Examples of inspiring websites, softwares or events mentioned in the video:

* This article was originally published as part of The Hmm’s Alternative Platforms dossier here: https://thehmm.nl/enter/ 
External Link

Security in-a-box

Tech
Hardly any tech
 Privacy
Very privacy aware

A toolkit for maintaining good digital security, Security in-a-box is a toolkit full of advice for how to protect yourself online – whether that be by protecting your passwords, internet connection, operating systems or files.

Security in a Box was created in 2007 by Front Line Defenders in collaboration with Tactical Technology Collective, and significantly overhauled by Front Line Defenders in 2021. Security in a Box primarily aims to help a global community of human rights defenders whose work puts them at risk. It has been recognised worldwide as a foundational resource for helping people at risk protect their digital security and privacy.

Open toolkit
Case Study

Nam June Paik: Video Commune (1970)

Hybridity
Mostly on-site
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Join in... a bit
 Duration
Archived but not active
Still from Video Commune: Beatles from Beginning to End 1970 © Nam June Paik Estate

Between 1969 and 1970, Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe worked on developing a video synthesiser that would allow the colours and shapes from different images to be mixed, overlaid and manipulated. Creating this video synthesiser would enable video manipulation during live performances – similarly to how existing audio synthesisers are used in concerts.

Paik and Abe’s video synthesiser was first used in ‘Video Commune’ – a participatory video artwork. The four-hour broadcast was transmitted live by the US TV station WGBH in 1970. The broadcast mixed existing video and live camera images featuring passersby that Paik and the production crew invited into the studio. This improvised montage of distorted moving imagery was accompanied by Beatles music, giving it the name ‘Video Commune (Beatles Beginning to End).

Still from Video Commune: Beatles from Beginning to End 1970 © Nam June Paik Estate (via SF MoMA)

Video Commune is just one example of Paik’s determination and curiosity about creating a more democratic and interactive broadcasting system. With this in mind, Video Commune is an attempt by Paik to simultaneously navigate the modes of direct participation and representation of multiple perspectives.

“Both modes involved a reduction of authorial control – either during the broadcast, when viewers were asked to modify the images emanating from their sets, or before it, when Paik made a work’s initial content permeable to contributions from others. Both strategies aimed to correct omissions in the mainstream media environment: reasserting individual agency in the face of corporate hegemony, or remedying the uneven representation of national, racial and cultural groups.”

Marina Isgro (Via Tate)

Credits

  • Artist: Nam June Paik and Juf Yalkut
  • Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
  • Produced by WGBH TV, Boston
Case Study

Victoria Vesna: Cellular Trans_Actions (2001)

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Dive in deep

“Telephones, with their rich social history arguably continue to be the most ubiquitous communication technology used by humans. With the introduction of cellular phones, established analogue, centralized systems have been most visibly fragmented and many social environments have been changing in radical ways. […..] With no social protocols for cell phone use in public spaces established, constant sounds of interruptions have become a daily collective performance, whether we are using the phones or responding to someone in close proximity receiving a call.”

Victoria Vesna (via n0 time)

Cellular Trans_Actions is a performance/talk created by Victoria Vesna. The performance centres on mobile phone conversations between members of the audience carried out in real-time during the performance, streamed live and finally archived for later use.

Much of the content of the performance is left to chance — dependent on the size of the audience and the number of audience members who choose to leave their cellphones on. Through its context-dependent and chance-driven nature, Cellular Trans_Actions also exposes the differences that emerge across geographical locations, cultures, and languages. In a 2001 performance, the audience was asked to discuss issues around the September 11th attack on the World Trade Centre. They were encouraged to speak to each other in their native language, leaving the artist out of the conversation.

Cellular Trans_Actions exhibits a medium level of hybridity. While the performance can be watched online remotely, the interactive part takes place exclusively on-site.

The performance involves a series of one-on-one conversations between members of the audience. The audience are encouraged to engage with each other on a specific topic, and express their views on that topic based on their cultural background. In this way, the discussion is not led by the artist but led by the audience, allowing for a deep connection between callers.

Credits

  • Artist/creator: Victoria Vesna
Article

Bringing Hybrid Experiments to the Cultural Sector and Beyond

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Dip a toe in
 Tech
Nothing fancy

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • Some parts of an online experience add more value to the physical experience, not just vice versa.
  • It is important to remember that while hybrid events might sometimes feel awkward, physical events can be just as awkward, so don’t let that deter you from hosting hybrid.
  • The experience for a virtual visitor is not the same as a physical one, so make sure you keep them in mind when deciding on the proceedings of the event.

It was mid-September 2021 at the time we wrote this article. The coronavirus measures were loosening up, and cultural institutions could slowly open their physical doors to the public again. While the cultural sector was hit hard by the pandemic, the need for digitisation has also created new opportunities. With thousands of viewers for live-streamed theatre performances and museums that virtually open their doors to guide tours throughout the country, the cultural sector can no longer leave the internet unused. By offering physical and online programmes, you can reach more audiences and make your program more accessible.

However, such hybrid programming is a challenge. How do you address a physical and virtual audience at the same time? Should the physical and virtual experience be the same? How do you ensure a fruitful and meaningful exchange between both audiences? Sharing Hybrid are sessions that bring together several people working in the cultural sector in which we exchange knowledge and experience about online and hybrid events. In this second session we share our experiences with our first hybrid events.

Physical visitors showing their buddies around the exhibition.

It is valuable if the online experience is a unique experience 

One hybrid experiment we discussed worked with a buddy system: every physical visitor guided a virtual visitor through an exhibition via their smartphone. For some virtual visitors, it was valuable that they saw the exhibition through the eyes of their physical buddy. Physical buddies even described their feelings about certain artworks or the atmosphere and smell of the space. In this way, virtual visitors saw the exhibition in a way they would never see it themselves – through the eyes and physical experience of another. Therefore, it was not a problem that virtual visitors didn’t see the artworks properly due to the poor audio and video quality of the smartphone.

Awkwardness isn’t necessarily a bad thing

Linking physical and virtual visitors directly, without them knowing each other, can be awkward. But this discomfort isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It can also be exciting to be paired up with someone you’ve never met. Moreover, it is good to realise that a physical event also has many awkward moments.

Mixing physical and virtual speakers works well and feels natural 

For the experience of the physical audience, it doesn’t make a difference when there are both physical and virtual speakers speaking at an event. This is true even if there are more virtual than physical speakers. The variety in formats is good. It offers a lot of potential for cultural organisations. Programming international speakers creates a stronger programme, and inviting them to attend virtually is more sustainable.

Behind the scenes tech set-up

A challenge: how do you make the experience for the physical and virtual visitor equal? 

For a hybrid event, you should not just directly transmit the physical program to virtual visitors but also think about how virtual visitors can contribute. During this session we talked about the buddy system. In the buddy system, physical visitors were responsible for the virtual visitors’ experience, and virtual visitors were dependent on their physical buddies. It’s interesting to see how this exchange could have been more of a reciprocal collaboration. For example, during the guided tour of the exhibition, the artworks can be seen physically by the visitor. Hover, the description texts and background information can only be read online by their buddy. 

Double check the tech in advance 

When you’re organising an event where speakers and audience are present both physically and virtually, where they give a presentation with sound, and where they need to be able to talk to a moderator who is physically present, there are a lot of different audio outputs and inputs. It is good to check all of these in advance. But even if you do, things can go wrong, and they probably will so stay calm and be prepared to fill the silence (maybe with quiz questions) while the audio gets fixed.

Show virtual visitors where their perspective comes from 

We tend to show only the content (the speakers, the exhibition, etc.) to virtual visitors, but for their orientation, it is also important to see the context: how is their perspective put into place? How is it filmed? For example, an exhibition space that worked with robot tour guides first showed virtual visitors the robot tour guide through a mirror before starting the tour.

Chatting as a valuable part of the online (and offline) experience.

How would an experimental approach work with a different target group? 

We recgonise that the target audience with whom we do these experiments – even if they feel uncomfortable at times – is open to these kinds of interactions. It would be interesting to explore how a different, more corporate audience would respond to such live experiments. Based on the experiences of the group, it is more difficult to get them to go along with such experiments and get them out of their comfort zone. Although these experiments might be a big step for a wider audience, it is interesting to see how experiments in the cultural sector can expand beyond it.

Involve the physical space of virtual visitors at your event 

Research shows that when people watch something on television, their home environment is essential. If we want exciting hybrid live events, it’s essential to involve the physical space of the virtual visitors. For example, you can instruct the audience to go for a walk during the break, grab a drink, or do something else physical. If you ask them to take a picture and share it afterwards, you can get a nice glimpse of the environments that everyone is looking from.

Chatting during presentations adds value 

An advantage of online events is that visitors can chat about the topic being discussed, or exchange information during a lecture. During the event with the buddy system, the physical and virtual visitors were also chatting with each other during the presentations, and this was regarded as pleasant. Visitors talked together about what a speaker was saying, and sometimes questions rose from this conversation. Some visitors liked to discuss the question they wanted to ask with their buddy first.

* Featured image is a visualisation of ‘hybrid spaces’ by AI VQGAN+CLIP

* This article was originally published in The Hmm’s Hybrid Events dossier here: https://thehmm.nl/sharing-experiences-02/
Article

Looking Back On One Year of Organising Online Events

Hybridity
Fully on-site
 Setup
Taking some chances

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • Experimentation lies at the heart of the cultural sector, so we shouldn’t be afraid to embrace it when hosting online or hybrid events. 
  • An online component to an event can bring many new things, from audiences to experiences, and this is something to embrace, not shy away from.
  • When things go technically wrong during an online event, this can also give the audience a unique experience.

In March 2020, all cultural institutions had to suddenly change their plans. Because of the lockdown, physical visitors could no longer visit exhibitions, programmes, and performances that cultural institutions had worked on for months. The only way these productions could still be seen or experienced was via the Internet. But how do you do that? What’s the best way to translate your art space into the confines of a browser window? How do you engage an online audience with your event? Every maker or organisation ran into these questions, and everyone tried to reinvent the wheel. The acceleration of these processes of digitisation – that the lockdown forced us into – has the potential to give the cultural sector a huge boost. Of course, we could approach our online events like a television broadcast, with good lighting and multiple camera angles. But there must be sufficient financial resources for this. Moreover, the cultural sector is predominantly a place with room for experimentation, where new things are invented, and later used by other sectors. Therefore, we clearly see a task for our institutions to develop new formats and approaches to presenting cultural projects. If we want to take our experiences during the pandemic to the next level, we must work together, learn from each other, and exchange knowledge.

In May 2021—towards the end of a long lockdown winter—we looked back on a year of organising online events with several people working in the cultural field. What have we learned so far? And how did we take these experiences with us when we could welcome physical visitors again after the lockdown? Here are some points that came up during the first online meeting we had together discussing these very questions:

Aftertalk at The Hmm ON TikTok, December 2020

Online events have brought new audiences

Several institutions indicated that their online program had suddenly reached an international audience, which was not the case before the pandemic. One visitor joined an opening from the London underground and someone from Australia set her alarm for 6 a.m. to attend a lecture in The Netherlands. In addition to reaching audiences outside their geographic borders, the travel restrictions also made some institutions organise things hyper-locally instead. In this way, they developed a close relationship with residents.

Online events are more accessible

It’s not only easier for foreign visitors (or speakers) to join an event online, but it also opens up accessibility for visitors within the country of the event. It can be a barrier to visiting a program in a city further away from where you reside. Even when we’re allowed to travel across the country, some visitors prefer to follow the program online than jump on the train. This can also be the case because of financial or physical reasons or care responsibilities at home. Therefore, online or hybrid events are more accessible in many ways.

Online programming has remained, even though physical meetings are possible again

Because of the advantages of online programmes, most of the participants in this conversation have continued programming online and offer hybrid gatherings for the public and speakers. How? That’s something we all struggle with, but it opens up many opportunities for creative and innovative thinking.

Online can be completely different from offline experiences

Offline and online should not be treated as a contradiction

Online and offline should be seen as an extension of each other rather than in opposition. We must understand the entanglements between the ‘online’ and ‘offline’ realms and learn how to apply this during cultural activities. We should remember that the online experience can be a completely different experience than the offline experience and that this is okay. To get a better sense of this, we can learn from sports tournaments. You can follow a football match in the stadium or live on television (perhaps even with face paint, banners, and with a group of friends). Both audiences experience an authentic live experience, but it is not the same.

How do you connect on-site and online audiences?

This is a challenge that everyone is still struggling with, which is especially relevant now that physical events are possible again. Allowing the online audience to be present in a physical space through a projection screen with Zoom squares is not the solution. What worked well for some organisations during this session was to send online visitors something physical, like a bottle of wine, or to invite them to do something with their environment (grab objects in their living room, cook, get dressed up, etc).

It’s not only the event itself, but everything leading up to it, that matters

Normally, when you visit an event, you first get dressed up, followed by a bike, train or car ride to a physical location. This transition is missing when you visit an online event. All visitors have to do to attend an online event is open their laptop or even just a new browser tab. This lack of event preparation ensures that they can easily forget about going to an online event and it’s just a small step to decide not to go. If you’re hosting an event that people can follow from their living room, it’s important to realise that the audience’s physical space is different. You might be able to give them some tips to get them in the mood and make the transition into the event more fun and exciting.

Mozilla Hubs as an alternative platform

Experimentation is important

Many cultural, online events take place via Zoom or YouTube. The services of these Big Tech companies are comfortable: they are ‘free’, stable in quality, and easy to use because the public knows them. However, they are not the most privacy-friendly. As a public institution, you require attendees to share their data with US technology companies when they attend your event. By using these services, we contribute to the dominant position of Big Tech companies, even though we don’t want to do that. While people are becoming increasingly aware of this, it is also difficult to find good alternatives. This may be because we accept fewer mistakes from technology. We’re afraid it won’t run smoothly and that the audience will be irritated by the disruptions, forgetting that during physical events, many things can irritate the audience (a long line for the bar, visitors who talk too loud, a broken microphone). When things go technically wrong during an online event, this can also give the audience a unique experience. It is perhaps even more interesting to be part of an experiment than to (passively) watch a smooth linear program, similar to a television show.

* This article was originally published as part of The Hmm’s Hybrid Events dossier here: https://thehmm.nl/sharing-experiences-01/
Article

Our Active Experiments with Hybrid Events 

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Wildly experimental
 Participation
Dive in deep
 Tech
Nothing fancy

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • The moments before an event are equally important to the audience as the event itself, as it creates the space and energy to take in the information presented during the event.
  • A playful chat environment invites the online audience to be more actively engaged with each other and the livestream.
  • It is important to find different ways to connect the onsite and online audience with each other, for them to find a sense of belonging.

We believe that solely streaming your event does not facilitate the best hybrid experience. Our aim is that the experience of the virtual audience is not inferior to the experience of the physical audience. How? We don’t know yet, but we’re definitely trying to find out. There is so much to learn about creating meaningful and vivacious hybrid experiences. For example, how do we connect a physical and virtual audience? Should the experience be the same for virtual and physical visitors? How can we give online visitors a sense of place? Since the fall of 2021, The Hmm have been actively experimenting with hybrid events as we delve even deeper into the internet cultures that shape, complicate, and transform our lives—further blurring the boundaries between the ‘online’ and ‘offline’ worlds.

Below, we list the formats we’ve tested, what we’ve learned from each experiment, and how visitors experienced it.

A visitor showing their online buddy the Real Feelings exhibition

inti-mate – A buddy system 

Our first experimental hybrid event, The Hmm @ Real Feelings, where we invited eight speakers to give pecha kucha style presentations, physically took place in the exhibition Real Feelings, fittingly about emotion and technology, at MU in Eindhoven. MU was also our collaboration partner for the design and implementation of the experiment. For the experiment, we linked individual online visitors – via their phone – to a visitor physically present in the exhibition space. To start the evening program, the physical guests guided their online buddies around the Real Feelings exhibition and brought them into contact with other visitors. During the presentations, which the online visitors were following via our live stream website, the online audience could only ask questions to the speakers via their physical host. Each physical visitor ‘hosted’ one of the online visitors— creating a more intimate one-to-one experience. We offered all kinds of experimental devices and prototypes to mount a phone to ‘host’ a virtual buddy hands-free, such as headbands, extra limbs and tripods. 

“I experienced the evening extra alertly and extra intensely because I had a great time showing my buddy around the exhibition and chatting with them all evening. It was really kind of magical, perhaps even enough to allow me to connect with full attention during the event, being ‘in the moment’ together.”

A comment from a visitor

Something that went well: As organisers, we didn’t feel that there was a big difference between the online and the offline speakers. When working with hybrid formats before, we felt that the audience might consider online speakers secondary to in-person speakers. However, in our experience, the audience was just as engaged with the speakers who joined us remotely as they were with those physically present. 

Something that went wrong: We experienced technical issues with sound. We learned that with hybrid events, there is several different audio inputs and outputs from different sources simultaneously. It is crucial to test all the configurations in advance for the different scenarios, be prepared to troubleshoot and solve technical issues on the spot, and have backup plans just in case. 

The Hmm ON Online Fandom event at Felix Meritis, with two chat screens
The Hmm On Online Fandom event at Felix Meritis, with Lilian reviewing questions and comments from our chat

Visitor says: YasBirb – Embracing the chat 

During The Hmm ON Online Fandom – one of our more in-depth and focused events with only three speakers – at Felix Meritis in Amsterdam, we wanted to explore the power of the chat. Instead of streaming on our livestream platform, which – at the time – was quite limited in functionality, we used Twitch for this event because of the playful chat interactions Twitch offers. To give the online audience a literal place in the room, we placed two screens on stage, displaying the live chat. The physical audience could see the conversations happening in the chat, and we also invited them to join them. We added custom emotes to our Twitch channel related to the topic of the event. The emotes people sent popped up and floated across the livestream online and the projection in the physical space. As always, we had a chat moderator, who oversaw the live-stream chat on Twitch. 

“Because you can ask a question without interrupting the main talk, it feels like both standing at the bar and having a front row seat at once.”

A comment from a visitor

Something that went well: The chat was really active and was experienced as ‘fun’ by our audience. In our feedback form, one visitor said that seeing their messages appear in the chat on stage made them feel important. Because the emotes appeared on the livestream, the audience got the opportunity to give direct feedback on what was being said. We were inspired by Twitch’s possibilities and updated our livestream website to have more options for interaction by the online audience.

Something that went wrong: There could have been more interaction between the physical and virtual audience, as the physical audience was not really participating in the chat. There could also have been more direct interaction with the chat. For example, the moderator could start a conversation with the online audience active in the chat by addressing them directly through the camera. Several online visitors told us they would have loved to see more of the space and not only the stage.

Annika Kappner and her guided mediation to bring the digital and the analogue spaces together with our audience

Prepping – A warming up for online visitors 

When we visit a physical event, we get dressed up, maybe grab a drink, and travel somewhere. This process automatically ensures a particular type of dedication to the event and a clear separation from other things happening in the day. These pre-event rituals have gone missing in the process of organising online events. To visit an online event, you simply open your laptop or turn on your computer. We usually have several tabs open and see e-mails popping up, creating a situation where we often do other things while following the event. During The Hmm ON Screen New Deal, a more in-depth event about the tech sector’s growing influence on the world, especially after the pandemic, we invited artist Annika Kappner to prepare our online audience for this program—linking us together between the digital and the analogue worlds. She prepared a guided meditation to watch from the livestream to get the audience to engage with their bodies and environment and make space for the event in their night.

“I appreciated the introduction as a break between the rest of my day and the stream of information and inspiration that was about to come with the 2 great speakers.”

A comment from a visitor

Something that went well: The ritual created a focus for our event. During the event, we discussed politically dense topics. The meditation was a nice counterpart for it. By reminding people to declutter their digital environment and give attention to their bodies and the space from where they were watching the event, the audience could locate themselves and focus on our program. And the fact that all viewers participated in the meditation brought them together. They were commenting about their experience in the chat.

Something that went wrong: Because of new COVID-19 measures introduced shortly before the event, we couldn’t do this event in the hybrid form we had planned but had to do it solely online, so it was difficult to get a sense of how this could have worked in a hybrid format. The advantage was that everybody could experience the guided meditation. Some visitors also noted that because they had long days, the guided meditation put them into an almost ‘too relaxed’ state, and it was difficult to fully follow the talks. We had also intedend to remind the audience of the meditation again during the break, but because of time delays with the presentations, we decided to get rid of the break.

* This article was originally published in The Hmm’s Hybrid Events dossier here: https://thehmm.nl/the-hybrid-formats-we-tested/

 
Article

Jitsi? Zoom? Twitch? Searching for the Best Platform for Online Cultural Events 

Hybridity
Fully online
 Setup
Taking some chances
 Participation
Join in... a bit
 Tech
Nothing fancy
 Privacy
A bit of Big Tech

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • The structure of a platform has a great influence over how your audience experiences the event, and also how easy or hard it is for everyone involved to make the event run smoothly. 
  • There are many different platforms available to us, that all have their own possibilities and limitations, and the best way to figure out what works for you is to simply try it out.
  • To have the most control over the experience of the event, making your own livestream platform is also an option.

As it became clear in March 2020 that we wouldn’t be able to organise physical events until summer earliest, we had to face the question, like many cultural institutions: what would be the best way to translate our activities to the internet? None of the existing platforms seemed like a perfect fit, which isn’t surprising as most of the platforms we now use for our social life were created for business or gaming. What would be the best platform to host a cultural event like The Hmm? And how do these online platforms influence how we share and produce knowledge?

This kind of influence has been a focus of The Hmm for a longer time. When it became clear that Facebook’s algorithm pushes video to the top of newsfeeds, users and news media took advantage of this by posting more video content. According to The Atlantic, this cost the jobs of hundreds of journalists who produced non-video content. On Instagram, selfies work better than photos without a person in it. As a result Instagram has become the platform for self-promotion and narcissism. These examples show how a simple change in the algorithms of the platforms we use daily can have a huge impact on our society. Platforms influence the way we share information. It’s important to be aware of that and look at it critically. 

Fariborz Karimi on Twitch

The experiment 

We set out to organise an event to find the most suitable platform for our cultural activities. Instead of opting for one platform and hoping it would be a good fit, we made our research part of the event and included our audience in it. And so, our first livestream event became an experiment. On 29 April 2020 we invited five speakers for a 5-minute talk about the role of the internet during the coronavirus pandemic. Each speaker was presenting on a different video conferencing or streaming platform. Visitors had to jump from platform to platform to view all the presentations. 

We set out to organise an event to find the most suitable platform for our cultural activities. Instead of opting for one platform and hoping it would be a good fit, we made our research part of the event and included our audience in it. And so, our first livestream event became an experiment. On 29 April 2020 we invited five speakers for a 5-minute talk about the role of the internet during the coronavirus pandemic. Each speaker was presenting on a different video conferencing or streaming platform. Visitors had to jump from platform to platform to view all the presentations. 

We chose five platforms that differ most from each other. From livestream platforms to video conferencing platforms. From the business-minded Zoom (which was also the most popular platform during this pandemic among our Instagram followers) to the mainstream YouTube. From one embraced by the gamers’ community (Discord) to one embraced by privacy advocates (Jitsi). Every platform had its own technical opportunities and limitations—listed at the bottom of this article—which made organising this event quite time consuming for our team. Because some platforms allow only a limited amount of visitors, and not all of our technical tests went smoothly, we decided to use Twitch as our backup platform. On Twitch, all our presentations (except for the one over on YouTube) were streamed. It became the place where our audience could go to if they were running into trouble with the other platforms or wanted to chat with us. Following the experiment, we asked our audience to complete a survey about their experience. You’ll see the results of this survey and some of our visitor’s comments quoted throughout this article. 

“An emoji representing my The Hmm in Quarantine experience? A life is worth living again face.”

Quote from a participant
Discord’s playful chat environment

How did it go?

A consistent stream of 100 viewers watched the talks of The Hmm in Quarantine. Thirty viewers stayed on Twitch, while seventy viewers switched along with us through the five different platforms. Moving from one platform to another really created the feeling of ‘a real audience’, as we could see people in one platform that we had seen previously in another. Our audience, who could not just sit back and watch but had an active role, experienced the switching in a similar way: 

“For me the collective moving around created a stronger sense of togetherness then I have experienced in these events so far. It gives the web almost a sort of physicality where we are moving around together as if there are various rooms and stages.”

Quote from a participant

It resulted in a very engaged audience. The chats were filled with people introducing themselves, giving us feedback on the quality of the stream, and lots of questions for the speakers. Sometimes, interaction was even greater than during physical The Hmm events. If there wasn’t enough time to answer all the questions, speakers could stay on (either in the chat or on the video itself) with any audience members who still had questions and answer them there, while the rest of us moved to the next platform. This is really not possible in a physical event, as we have to move on to the next speaker together. In real life, a visitor can always meet the speaker for a talk or question at the bar during the break, but that takes more courage. We also experienced some unexpected forms of engagement, like when audience members were updating us that they had to leave the experiment early via the chat, showing us a new kind of online event etiquette.

Wouter de Boer on YouTube

The chat environment in Discord is very playful: there are different chatrooms for different purposes, and you can post customised emoji or GIFs. It was nice to see that as soon as the audience moved on to this platform, they totally embraced this playfulness. In our online survey, Discord was described as the most fun platform by almost 40% of the respondents. Our speaker on this platform, Sjef van Beers, also played with the platform by playing music during the transition time and using face filters while he was talking. It opened up possibilities for presentations that are only possible online.

YouTube was described as the platform that was most easy to use by 38% of the respondents. On this platform you could just watch the stream, and only had to log in in order to ask questions. Since YouTube is one of the most well known platforms we used, people were familiar with its environment. 

On the question through which platform the presentations most resembled a physical The Hmm event, we received many different answers. Some answered Jitsi, because it was easy to interact, and the non-hierarchical environment gave our audience the opportunity to unmute themselves for a virtual applause at the end of the event. YouTube was favoured for its comfort. You can watch the talk like an audience and ask questions in the chat. Zoom had a nice way of showing the speakers: next to each other instead of on top of one another.

“I really like to have seen people from across the internet-ecosystem. I tend to forget that it’s not just artists, trolls and venture capitalists that make up the population online.”

Quote from a participant
Joran Backx and Esther van Brakel on Zoom

What did we learn?

The experiment introduced our audience to platforms they had never used before. One respondent won’t use YouTube for streams anymore because the quality was lacking (Twitch worked better) and the interaction was better on other platforms. A few people acknowledged that they will use Jitsi more often, especially as an alternative to Zoom. For some, this open source platform was totally new. Others were surprised by its improved quality, just like us. While Jitsi allows a maximum amount of 75 people in a video conference, on its community page it is written that the quality can suffer when more than 35 people are in. With around 60 viewers, the quality of the talk by Cas van de Ven on Jitsi was surprisingly stable. 

“This was emotionally useful for me, thanks” 

Quote from participant

Esther Crabbendam from digital rights organisation Bits of Freedom, will be glad that our experiment stimulated the use of Jitsi among our audience. During our discussion after the event, she shed light on the privacy of the platforms we used. What data do we give away when we’re sitting behind our webcams? According to Esther, Jitsi is the safest to use because it’s an open-source platform. You don’t need to download an app when you use the browser version, and you don’t need an account to participate in the chat, making the platform very accessible. You can also choose to host Jitsi on your own server, if you want to keep control over your own data. 

Most of the platforms we used are owned by Big Tech companies who do not offer any transparency about what they do with our data. Google owns YouTube, Amazon owns Twitch. This last fact opened the eyes of some of our audience, who had no idea about this affiliation. Via our survey some people shared that they planned to delete their Twitch account or stop using it.

“These kind of events are really motivating and so helpful for cultural spaces.” 

Quote from participant

Zoom experienced an interesting development during this quarantine. After its 378% increase in active daily users at the start of the pandemic, the platform faced a backlash because of its privacy issues. This backlash must have been a wakeup call for the company. Esther found out they updated their privacy policies only a few weeks later. In contrast to the start of the pandemic, they now clearly describe on their website what information they use. Besides having cookies for advertisements, they don’t use any data from Zoom calls. At least, they say they don’t.

The live stream experiment showed us that the platform’s environment influences the interactions during an online event. When it’s possible to share funny GIFs via the chat, people will embrace that. It opens up their creativity. We noticed that a harsh control over your audience like Zoom offers – as a host in Zoom, you can control whether other participants stay muted and invisible – is not really necessary. Just as it is rare in a physical lecture that someone from the audience stands up and talks through the presentation, this also doesn’t happen when you give the audience the freedom to open up online. On Jitsi, everyone has the power to kickthe speaker out or unmute their own microphone, but no one did this – not even our visitor ‘5GcausesCorona’ that flooded our chat with messages claiming our speaker on Jitsi was lying.

Based on what we learned from this experiment, we have built our own ideal live stream platform for our future online events. It is self-hosted on our own website, so that we determine the atmosphere ourselves and provide a safe space for our audience and speakers. The source code for this project is freely available, and we encourage you to make your own platform to determine the environment and interaction.

Cas van de Ven on Jitsi

Technical notes 

Below, you can find our setup for every platform. We also added their conditions and limitations. As we wrote this article in 2020, it’s possible that some of these conditions have changed since. We invite you to check them out yourself if you haven’t, to get the full picture.

YouTube
For the YouTube stream, we used Skype to connect the speaker, moderator and technician. The speaker did his presentation via Skype. Our technician made sure it was broadcast on YouTube along with his presentation using OBS (Open Broadcast Service). An unlimited amount of viewers could watch the stream. The audience could see the stream via the link we sent but needed to log in to YouTube to ask questions via the chat.

Twitch
Similarly to YouTube, we used Skype for Twitch to connect the speaker, moderator and technician. The speaker did his presentation via Skype. Our technician made sure it was broadcast on Twitch along with his presentation using OBS. An unlimited amount of viewers could watch the stream. The audience could see the stream via the link we sent but needed to log in to Twitch to ask questions via the chat.

Discord
In Discord, the moderator and speaker joined a voice channel on a server we created on our account. They couldn’t show their video, as there’s a limit of 25 people who can see this. The speaker used ‘Go Live’ and OBS to share his screen with his presentation. Discord has upgraded the limit of viewers for their livestream from 10 to 50. Viewers who did not make it onto Discord before the 50-person limit was reached could watch the stream via Twitch. The audience had to log in to Discord (either the browser version or the app) to hear the moderator and speaker and see the presentation.

Zoom
We created a Zoom meeting before the event and let it begin during the Discord presentation. The moderator was the host in Zoom, which gave her the power to unmute the speaker. The speaker shared his screen. Zoom automatically shows both the speaker and the presentation in a nice way. A Zoom meeting (based on a free Zoom account) can have 100 participants and lasts for a maximum of 40 minutes. Tip: in your settings, you can allow participants to join the Zoom meeting from their browser version. In that case, they don’t have to download the app and don’t need an account to join the meeting.

Jitsi
When we first organised this event you could just open your own Jitsi meeting by typing a name you made up behind the URL https://meet.jit.si/. Since August 2023, you need to login via Google, Facebook, or GitHub to create a Jitsi channel. We created a link before the event and opened the Jitsi right before the event started. In our settings we specified that everyone started muted, hidden and followed the screen of the moderator. There’s no hierarchy in Jitsi, so in fact all participants are free to unmute themselves and turn on their camera. By enabling ‘everyone follows me’ the moderator had control over which screens were shown. When ready, the speaker unmuted himself and started sharing his screen. Jitsi has a limit of 75 participants. The quality can suffer when more than 35 join the conversation. This went surprisingly well during our event, probably because there were just a few people who had their camera turned on. 

* This article was originally published on The Hmm website at https://thehmm.nl/jitsi-zoom-twitch-we-set-out-to-find-the-best-platform-for-online-cultural-events/
Article

The Power of the Chat

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Taking some chances
 Participation
Join in... a bit
 Tech
Nothing fancy
 Privacy
Quite privacy aware
 Duration
Archived but not active

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • Don’t underestimate the chat
  • Remove barriers for access
  • Moderation is key
  • Choose your chat tools and platforms wisely
  • Bend hierarchy and proximity

 

An image of AOL Instant Messenger, otherwise known as AIM

The chat is the place online where interaction takes place. It’s an essential part of live-streamed events and maybe even our internet experience in general. When those of us who grew up with the internet look back on our own internet histories, we often don’t remember the websites we visited. Instead, we remember the chat conversations we had and the connections we made online.

We remember how, in our first chat experiences as young teens in the late 90s, we were peeking into topical chat rooms and starting up conversations with people we didn’t know. Instead of divulging all our personal data and private information to engage socially online, chatroom users often identified themselves by anonymous names and the only private information shared was A/S/L (age, sex, location). Back then, the internet was still a great voyage of discovery for us and many users, and that discovery started in chatrooms. A few years later, instant messaging platforms like MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and ICQ took our social lives into a more hybrid form. We could connect with friends we were in class with during the day and hit them up on MSN messenger in the evening. These early chat platforms allowed for new ways to connect with one another outside of social situations like school and work. And before Bumble and Tinder were even a glimmer of an idea, people were meeting new lovers and partners online—through chatrooms and instant messengers.

ICQ chat and the myriad of status possibilities that were available

The first chat programmes were created by universities. However, they were coopted almost immediately for conversations about everything. Talkomatic – born way before the World Wide Web, out of a computer-based education program at the University of Illinois in 1973 – was one of the earliest forerunners of online chat, where only five people could chat at a time and where messages were displayed letter-by-letter as they typed. Every chat program that came after that had different qualities, attracting different kinds of groups and users. Compuserve, a commercial chat service from 1980, was able to exceed a hundred thousand users for the first time. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was a network-based chat developed in 1988 by Jarkko Oikarinen that became popular as the internet became mainstream. Through IRC, you could meet other internet users. You didn’t need an invite to IRC – anyone could join. From 1990, IRC rose in popularity, particularly when users started to use it as an information resource during the Gulf War. The next generation of chat platforms arose around the need for chatting with friends, like MSN Messenger. In the MSN era, being online was expensive and inconsistent, so people weren’t continuously online yet. MSN users could choose different statuses: offline (you were online but others couldn’t see it), online (available to chat) or online but away (you were online but busy with something else). In our current online life – where we are always present, and that presence is also emphasized by check marks indicating that we have read a message, or dots indicating that we are typing – an ‘online but away’ status would be a warm welcome. 

The chat very prominently on stage during The Hmm ON Online Fandom at Felix Meritis in Amsterdam

In addition to apps with the chat as their main function, like Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp, there is a chat on all social media platforms. Although taking place on a different time scale, even comment threads on platforms like TikTok, Instagram or news websites are also an extension of the chat. The chat has an essential role on live streaming platforms such as Twitch, ensuring that the stream does not feel like a televised broadcast. Since most streamers immediately respond to what is said in the chat and engage with the chat, viewers feel part of an experience.

Although chat rooms have been around since the early days of the internet, many organisations struggle with creating a lively and active chat during their events. During our online and hybrid events over the past two years, we noticed that chat rooms are a great way to bring online and onsite audiences together.

So, naturally, we wanted to share our five tips for a more vibrant and active chatroom with you:

A message from one of our users in the chat during The Hmm @ Hackers & Designers

1. Don’t underestimate the chat 

During our last event, the very ambitious The Hmm @ 4 locations, we tried to use different elements to connect our onsite and online audiences together—like drawing games, our new atmospheric scent, and emotes. But from a survey with our audience following the event, the chat was listed as the most successful way of bringing people together and creating connectivity. So, don’t underestimate the power of the chat! Because of our long internet history with chatrooms and chat interfaces, we can often forget the value and importance of the chat room, particularly for hybrid events. But it is precisely our familiarity with the chat room – and its ease of use – that makes it the ideal interface to bring audiences together. 

2. Remove barriers for access 

Participating and interacting online often involves making accounts and giving up some of your data and privacy. But the more hoops people have to jump through in order to interact with one another, the harder it will be for them to engage. That’s why we believe it’s important to make your chat room as accessible as possible. On The Hmm livestream website you don’t have to login or create an account to participate – just pick a chat name, and you’re ready to go. We even added a new feature where you can control how long your chat name and data gets stored on our servers. Historically, the chatroom has been a place where strangers come together, so removing barriers to access also allows people to stay anonymous.

The chat very present in the space at MU during The Hmm @ 4 locations

3. Moderation is key 

Just like at any gathering of strangers, it’s important to have someone present in that chat room who sets off that little spark to connect people and get conversations going. With The Hmm, we always have a moderator in the chat who welcomes the audience, oversees the chatroom, shares relevant links and information, and updates the audience if there are any technical issues. We encourage conversations in the chat room by asking the audience questions during the break, finding out where they are watching from, asking quiz questions, and engaging with them throughout the program.

A comment in our chat during The Hmm @ Tactical Visual Culture

4. Choose your chat tools and platforms wisely

If, as Marshall McLuhan noted, “the medium is the message”, then we need to think carefully about the tools and platforms we use to chat. The chat tools and platforms we use can influence the energy in the chat and the conversations that take place. During our The Hmm in Quarantine event, at the start of the pandemic, we hopped from platform to platform to see which one would be best for cultural events. But what we also learned was the impact that different chat environments could have on our audience interaction. On Discord, for example, there are lots of GIFs and custom emotes to use. The audience made use of these fun visual elements right away, filling up the chat room with them! While on YouTube and Zoom, which only allows you to use emojis and text, the audience was much more subdued and quiet. And even in our own livestream chat, we had a bit of an awkward design for filling in your chat name, which many users mistook for the place where they could write their first message—resulting in chat names like ‘Hi!’ and ‘I completely disagree with the person above me’. But this awkward design also influenced fun chat interactions, and a lot of laughs.

The very active Twitch emotes used in our chat during The Hmm ON Online Fandom at Felix Meritis in Amsterdam

5. Bending hierarchy and proximity 

Being physically present at an event is often seen as the more superior and better position—think about watching a concert on television versus being there live in the crowd. But with hybrid events you can play around with hierarchy and proximity by giving importance to the chat and the chat room users during an event. Twitch is a great example of this, where Twitch streamers have the chat featured very prominently while they are streaming. This makes the presence of the audience much stronger. And on Twitch, some streamers even let the audience influence what happens in the stream based on what they say in the chat. During our The Hmm events, we’ve been experimenting with having the chat room very prominent by displaying it on stage as a second screen so the onsite audience can see what’s happening in the chat room and connect with the online audience. Following our The Hmm ON Online Fandom event—where we used Twitch and created custom emotes that would float up on the screen as direct reactions from the online audience to speakers’ presentations —we integrated emotes into our livestream page that give the audience more presence in the online environment and allow them to share more reactions and emotions than they would if they were physically present onsite. 

We hope these tips can help you elevate the chat to a whole new level in your hybrid events—and have a lot of fun doing it! (/^-^(^ ^*)/ ♡

* This article was originally published on The Hmm website as part of our Hybrids Newsletter: https://thehmm.nl/the-hmm-hybrids-2-the-power-of-the-chat/
Experiment

The Hmm @ 4 locations

Date: April 28, 2022

Location: Waag, Amsterdam
 / Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam 
/ MU, Eindhoven 
/ IMPAKT, Utrecht / Online

Online format: live.thehmm.nl, our custom live-stream website

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
Wildly experimental
 Participation
Dip a toe in
 Tech
Tech overload
 Privacy
Quite privacy aware

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • Always check and test your livestream setup in advance, to catch any last minute issues.
  • Including a scent brought in another sensory element to the hybrid event and helped bring audiences together.
  • With the right audience and expectations, you can push the bar with experimental events.

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan wrote about the concept of the global village, proclaiming that “we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” Almost sixty years later, we’re still asking how different forms of media can bring us together across time and space. With this experiment, we wanted to explore just that. The Hmm @ 4 locations was a decentralised event that took place simultaneously at four locations in four provinces in the Netherlands. This event was one of our most challenging experiments and – as far as we know – it was the first time something like this had happened in the Netherlands!

The idea for this hybrid format emerged during our conversation with live-ness researcher Esther Hammelburg. Esther questions the role of being together in one place in creating a sense of togetherness. During this experiment, we wanted to investigate just that. How can we create a sense of togetherness across four locations? The Hmm @ 4 locations was hosted in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and Eindhoven and, of course, also online. We invited eight speakers to join us across all four locations. Each location had two speakers physically present there, and the other speakers were followed via a livestream.

Rotterdam watching the Amsterdam portion of the event

Set-up

Visitors could either buy a ticket to join us at one of four physical locations, or follow online. We started our tour in Amsterdam, where we first introduced our new scent, ‘Hmmosphere’, followed by our first two speakers. In the other three locations, visitors followed the event via a big screen displaying our live-stream website – the same view the online visitors would see. One by one, we went through the physical locations. Our technicians at each location kept everything running smoothly and ensured the livestream kept up with the real-time event in the right place. In the final moments, all four locations came together and collectively performed a ‘wave’. From one place to another across the country, the audience performed this gesture altogether and (hopefully) created an even deeper sense of connection.

Of course, some things worked better than others. It took a little work before everything was up and running the way it should be, but after a little struggle in Amsterdam, the rest of the event went smoothly. To ensure everything worked as it was supposed to, we had at least one Hmm team-member present at every location, with additional help from the locations’ teams. The locations’ technicians were particularly vital in ensuring the event worked out.

Spraying Hmmosphere in Amsterdam

Hmmosphere

Leading up to this event, we collaborated with artist Cesar Majorana to develop our very own scent, Hmmosphere. Being online stimulates many senses, except our sense of smell. Hmmosphere is a scent that encapsulates the smell of the internet: creative, experimental, critical, transparent and weird. The world of The Hmm translated into one diverse scent experience. We asked our audience what they thought Hmmosphere smelt like:

“Grass in a server room.”
“New computer, clean clothes, artificial nature.” “Foraging mushrooms.”

For the launch of Hmmosphere during this event, we offered a special ticket for those online who wanted to share the experience the Hmm smell with those physically present and sent them a bottle before the event. At the start of the night, we took a moment to reflect on the process of creating Hmmosphere, and then together at the four different locations – and online – we spread the scent through the room to make each location our own.

“Since I was a child, I have been dreaming of transferring scents online. It is not possible as of yet. With the current technology, sending via mail is the second best option.”

Read all about the creation of Hmmosphere on The Hmm’s website.

Doing the wave together in Eindhoven

Visitors’ responses

Visitors were positive about the experiment, despite some technical difficulties throughout the evening. We asked them what togetherness meant for them in relation to online and offline events.  Most agreed that being onsite brought a different sort of connection between them, because it is easier to share ideas and experiences when you are next to each other:

“Knowing more people are present at the same event is nice, but meeting them or chatting with them, or somehow interacting with them, is really nice for me, as we can discuss the topics or just meet each other.”

Others commented that it’s also already satisfying to know that other people are watching the same event, something that our livestream website attempts to do by showing the number of people online and allowing them to chat or display reactions: 

“It’s nice to find a certain connection, often the chat works good. Today the collective drawing was also nice :)”

“It’s great to experience things all together, even if that together is mediated through a platform/stream.”

Everyone agreed that just watching a livestream with no one to interact with or feel connected to is hard to value.

“The physical and digital interconnectedness of 4 locations enabled me to sense the interconnectedness with the online participants more strongly.”

Spraying Hmmosphere in Utrecht

Learnings and Insights

  1. Always make sure you check your technical setup at least a few hours in advance on the day itself. It always takes longer than expected, and things always happen last minute.
  2. The scent was an exciting addition to the experiment, and the simultaneous moment of spraying across all four locations definitely brought a sense of togetherness between the cities. Online visitors were invited to spray along with us, if they bought a ticket that included a scent.
  3. The visitors were all excited to be part of an experimental approach to an event. Even when things went less than smoothly, they were very patient and understood it as part of having an unusual setup. This is good to remember when feeling nervous about being more experimental: with the right audience and expectations, it will be a success in any case. 

“It is an amazing research project as I truly feel that it enables us to feel and work with the fusion of the digital and the analogue in a more ‘natural’, a more encompassing and hence more valuable and positive way.”

Credits

  • The Hmm @ 4 locations was put together by The Hmm. The speakers presenting their projects were Ester van Vugt, Ola Bonati, Timo Meilof & Kwan Suppaiboonsuk, Suëda Isik, Ying-Ting Shen & Yu-Ching Chiang, Ananya Panda, Lulu van Dijck, Ted Oliekan and Marta Ceccarelli. 
  • Design of the livestream website by Toni Brell, development by Karl Moubarak. 
  • Design and development of The Hmmosphere by Cesar Majorana. 
External Link

TAIT: Talking About Immersive Theatre (Podcast Series)

Hybridity
Fully on-site
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Dip a toe in
 Tech
Tech overload
 Duration
You had to be there

TAIT is a podcast series about immersive theatre and performance. Dr Joanna Bucknall travels around the UK, meeting immersive theatre makers, producers and performers in their natural habitats to chat with them about all things immersive. Throughout the podcast series, listeners get an insight into the thoughts, processes and practices of the people driving the phenomenon of immersion in theatre and performance.

Credits: Dr. Joanna Bucknall

Listen to podcast
External Link

Researching Proxemic Interaction

Hybridity
Equally on-site & online
 Setup
The sweet spot
 Participation
Dive in deep
 Tech
Nothing fancy

Proxemic interaction: designing for a proximity and orientation-aware environment

Nowadays, much of what we do is dictated by how we interpret spatial relationships or proxemics. What is surprising is how little proxemics are used to mediate people’s interactions with surrounding digital devices. We imagine proxemic interaction as devices with fine-grained knowledge of nearby people and other devices — their position, identity, movement, and orientation — and how such knowledge can be exploited to design interaction techniques. In particular, we show how proxemics can regulate implicit and explicit interaction, trigger such interactions by continuous movement or by movement of people and devices in and out of discrete proxemic regions, mediate simultaneous interaction of multiple people, and interpret and exploit people’s directed attention to other people and objects. We illustrate these concepts through an interactive media player running on a vertical surface that reacts to the approach, identity, movement and orientation of people and their personal devices.

Authors: Till Ballendat, Nicolai Marquardt, Saul Greenberg

Open research paper

Dark patterns in proxemic interactions: a critical perspective

Proxemics theory explains peoples’ use of interpersonal distances to mediate their social interactions with others. Within Ubicomp, proxemic interaction researchers argue that people have a similar social understanding of their spatial relations with nearby digital devices, which can be exploited to better facilitate seamless and natural interactions with them. To do so, both people and devices are tracked to determine their spatial relationships. While interest in proxemic interactions has increased over the last few years, it also has a dark side: knowledge of proxemics may (and likely will) be easily exploited to the detriment of the user. In this paper, the authors offer a critical perspective on proxemic interactions in the form of dark patterns: ways proxemic interactions can be misused.

Authors: Saul Greenberg, Sebastian Boring, Jo Vermeulen, Jakub Dostal

Open research paper
External Link

MIT Tangible Media Group

Hybridity
Mostly on-site
 Setup
Wildly experimental
 Participation
Dive in deep
 Tech
Tech overload

The Tangible Media Group, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishii, pursues the vision of Tangible Bits & Radical Atoms to seamlessly couple the dual worlds of bits and atoms by giving dynamic physical form to digital information and computation.

TMG strives to push the boundaries of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) by inventing new digital/physical materials and inspiring people through engaging interactive applications. Their work centres on the vision of new materials, which they call “Tangible Bits” and “Radical Atoms.” They seek to advance mission-critical fields such as design, communication, and artistic expression. Among them, they are focusing on “Tangible Telepresence” to reinvent distancing and to strengthen the connectedness among people separated spatially and temporally by introducing “tangibility” to interpersonal communication and collaboration channels.

Open project page
Case Study

Nineties Productions: Memento Mori (2020)

Hybridity
Mostly online
 Setup
Pushing some boundaries
 Participation
Sit back and observe
 Tech
Tech overload
 Duration
You had to be there

When 2020 became a global memento mori and shut theatres down everywhere, theatre collective Nineties Productions developed their immersive online ritual Memento Mori. At Memento Mori, you could mourn for everything that was no longer there: unexpected encounters, the touch of skin or the certainty of a steady income. You may let your tears flow for the passage of time and long lost loved ones. In this online resort we dwell on the passage of everything. Memento Mori is a live constructed theatrical and virtual meeting place, a cross-over between performance, dance, music, poetry and web-art. An immersive ritual as a tribute to the transience of mankind.

The play was constructed 100% live, attended by a few physical guests, but mostly made for and watched through Zoom by an online audience. The on-site guests watched the same live recording on big screens, but were also privy to the construction of the visuals through the green-screened, green-clad performers. Luckily, the virtual audience also got glimpses of the making-of through little technical or performative mishaps, emphasising the live-ness of this theatre that might otherwise be mistaken for a slick tv-production.

“At Memento Mori the virtual audience is on the front-row.”

NRC

Credits

  • Concept by: Nineties Productions
  • Performance by: Yannick Noomen, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, Maya Mertens, Marius Mensink, Christiaan Verbeek 
  • Co-direction by: Anne Maike Mertens, Floor Houwink ten Cate
  • Costume design by: Esmée Thomassen
  • Scenography and light by: Julian Maiwald
  • Choreography by: Josephine van Rheenen 
  • Technical production by: Floris Vermist
  • Video design by: Karl Klomp 
  • Sound tech by: Sam Jones, Rinse de Jong
  • Production by: Minjon Olgers, Sam Kosterman