Hyper-specific conversations, and chaotic collaborations

I've written before about some of the questions I'm exploring through the collaborative R&D project we're involved with, Venues of the Future (a project which explores the models that are needed to underpin effective hybrid artistic programmes).

I'm going to keep sharing small updates and snapshots of the conversations we're having as it feels like they could be useful, interesting, or inspiring to anyone else looking at cultural digital experience.

Recently we've been exploring different approaches to collaboration, agency, and audience reaction and engagement.

Here are a few of the things that we've found interesting...

Hyper-specific conversations

When exploring how to enable audiences to react and respond to content and experiences we've had lots of conversations about nuance and specificity.

Afterall, one of the joys of the internet is it enables communities to exist around hyper-niches.

Responding to individual pieces of content, through a limited (or less limited) range of pre-defined options (e.g. emojis or similar), is a fairly standard approach.

You see examples of this on every social media platform (whether that's Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Linkedin etc).

You also see comment sections filling up below articles on newspaper websites, or blogs, or below YouTube videos with lots of people having lots of different conversations.

It feels like there is a bit of a mess here. Neither of these approaches enables a particularly nuanced or specific conversation.

But there are also some examples of different approaches.

For example the way that Soundcloud handles comments (linking comments to a specific timestamp within an audio file), or how Medium enables annotations (which can be added to a particular word, sentence, or section of an article).

Both of these approaches immediately enable a much more specific conversation around particular aspects of 'the thing'.

And it is this specificity, and the resulting ability to have multiple simultaneous conversations about different aspects or elements of 'the same thing' that feels interesting and valuable.

Collaboration and chaos

Another affordance of digital is its ability to enable collaboration at scale.

It has been interesting to consider how this could be catalysed in an artistic context and we've been picking through projects like Party in a Shared Google Doc, initatives like the Royal Academy's #RAFridayDoodle, Reddit's 'collaborative social experiment' r/Place, and the 'democracy and disaster' of TwitchPlaysPokemon.

"As the hivemind slowly seemed to lose control, a religion was born. The absolute anarchy of tens of thousands of people entering commands simultaneously has created controlled chaos labeled as divine inspiration."

In these contexts it has been fascinating to explore agency and anarchy, and the level to which you need to design how the collaboration will work vs leaving room for the unexpected.

It seems a good rule of thumb that if the internet is involved and you achieve any level of scale, then there will almost always be a group of users who want to try to subvert your product or service.

The question is how do you deal with, encourage, or facilitate that intent.

Other things

Here are a few more bits and pieces that we've enjoyed or found interesting.

The Grannies, a documentary about people exploring the edges of the videogame Red Dead Redemption.

Songs for a Passerby, an immersive experience where the audience becomes part of the artwork.

Kid A Mnesia, Radiohead's attempt at an 'immersive exhibition thing'.

You can read more about the Venues of the Future project (in Dutch) on the Innovatie Labs website.

I'm always interested to hear about work in this area so please do share any cool, weird, interesting (or terrible!) examples that you come across.