Producing Liveness: The Trials of Moving Folk Clubs Online During the Global Pandemic

Benford, Steve; Mansfield, Paul; Spence, Jocelyn

Abstract

The global pandemic has driven musicians online. We report an ethnographic account of how two traditional folk clubs with little previous interest in digital platforms transitioned to online experiences. They followed very different approaches: one adapted their existing singaround format to video conferencing while the other evolved a weekly community-produced, pre-recorded show that could be watched together. However, despite their successes, participants ultimately remained unable to ‘sing in chorus’ due to network constraints. We draw on theories of liveness from performance studies to explain our findings, arguing that HCI might orientate itself to online liveness as being co-produced through rich participatory structures that dissolve traditional distinctions between live and recorded and performer and audience. We discuss how participants appropriated existing platforms to achieve this, but these in turn shaped their practices in unforeseen ways. We draw out implications for the design and deployment of future live performance platforms.

Citation

Benford, S., Mansfield, P., & Spence, J. (2021). Producing Liveness: The Trials of Moving Folk Clubs Online During the Global Pandemic. In CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445125

• Conference Name: 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Conference Location: Online Virtual Conference
• Start Date: May 8, 2021
• End Date: May 13, 2021
• Acceptance Date: Mar 15, 2021
• Publication Date: May 12, 2021
• Deposit Date: May 12, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: May 18, 2021
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Book Title: CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 9781450380966
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445125
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5397215
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445125