[microsound] placard#7: 95 days non-stop streaming headphone festival [8 may - 11 august]

[derek holzer <derek@xxxxxxx>]

Passing some info from a friend on... Could be interesting for 
audio/video/streaming peeps on this list.... looks like there's plenty 
of slots left.

d.
-----------------------

http://placard7.ath.cx/


About the festival

This is now the 7th edition of placard. Placard is a headphone concert 
festival, playing with concentration, intimacy, time warp, and 
teleportation. It goes on for 95 days non stop, in different cities. It 
functions under a mode of open program, open for headphone rooms to 
create performance spaces where performers are welcomed to perform. Both 
the headphone-room 'owner' and the performers use the inscription site 
to self organize the global program. The placard 'owner' receives in his 
room performers who have submitted a inscription via the site, and 
streams the shows to the other headphone-rooms either passive listeners 
or waiting to perform . The site is designed to simplify communication 
in-between the performers and the organizers, using automatic emails 
notifying of incoming inscriptions, accepted, deplaced or refused 
performances ; also notifying performers of the creation of 
headphone-rooms in their city.

Just to give a short history of placard ---

Placard started off in 1998 in a small room, going on for 72 hours non 
stop, with mainly local musicians relaying themselves doing shows for 
headphones. The idea came out of being some kind of peepshow of a workshop.

Placard then moved to Vienna during the second phonotaktik festival in 
april 1999, this version was publicly streamed, still from a private 
apartment, many artists of the festival came to play in the apartment at 
strange hours ... This version, being outside of paris, and using a 
public stream made contacts & will to have different headphone rooms in 
different cities playing for a common program.

Placard #3 was based in paris, but Lisbon, Brussels & Vienna 
participated via stream. Placard #3 was also the first test of having 
artist themselves decide when to play through an inscription website ; 
bringing out the idea of an 'open stage', and starting of the game of 
taking strategic hours to perform & anonymous nick names for 
multi-inscriptions.

In the mean time the Paris placard festival was growing , for Placard #4 
we had to open 2 different performance rooms, one more open to 
send/receive streams, the second for mainly video performances. Vienna 
opened a room for 72 hours receiving the Paris stream, and playing a few 
shows. Many artists came from outside of paris, the festival became a 
nonchalant meeting point for mainly french electronic artists.

With Placard #5 the next year, we achieved to have two functional 72 
hour headphone festivals going on at the same time in-between Tokyo and 
Paris, with a two way stream system ; one performance room in Paris was 
streamed to Tokyo, while the main performance room was visioned in 
Paris. This attempt was the first to really achieve a link in between 
physical spaces, communication via video-conference and irc chat went on 
in-between the audience of both placards ; curiosity of being on two 
ends of a line in the same partying state made the 'tokyo-room' in paris 
just a step into tokyo - personally I think the funniest experience was 
to be chatting in the first hours of the festival with Noriko Tujiko who 
was the only person to physically attend both placards, then seeing her 
pop in Paris at the end ; it didn't seem to make any difference, as if 
she did actually just come through the computer screen.

After all that, with a few different cities ready to participate, and 
experiences of difficulties deciding on appropriate dates ; we decided 
to test out a three month non-stop festival last year. This made it 
possible for organizers to choose their own perfect date ; it was also 
bringing the organizer at the same level as the musician (most often, 
the organizer is actually a musician anyhow...) having a new game - 
'placard spotting'. The organizer uses the inscription website to create 
a time slot in the 95 day program, once this is done, performers 
register themselves in open time-slots. Last year quite a few cities 
participated : Tokyo - Hannover - Grenoble - Barcelona - Strasbourg - 
Lyon - Bordeaux - Neufchatel - Leipzig - Hamburg - Marseille - Brussels 
- Mulhouse - New York - London - Melbourne and Paris.

All placards were quite different, many in private apartments, some in 
gardens, some in venues at the same time as another event as a strange 
chill-out. What came out of this was quite various, it gave a 
possibility for local scenes to perform semi-virtually in quite a few 
other cities. It really brought out the artist/organizer factor, making 
it easy for any artist to become his own festival organizer ; providing 
he knows or learns how to stream audio , and set up a web-cam to send to 
the central stream server (merci no-music - ic@merlan).It brought out 
also the public/organizer relation, the organizer being sometimes just 
part of the public, becoming organizer thanks to the simplicity of 
organization...

In a few cases placard became a side festival to other big festivals (as 
sonar in barcelona) providing a much more quiet atmosphere, giving a 
break to many artists and listeners lost in the hot crowds of summer 
festivals ; gave them time to talk and real moments to listen to shows 
comfortably. In Tokyo yoyo & the slidelab crew became professional 
making the best looking 72hr placard, with headphones hanging from above 
; London brought out the idea of 'bring your own headphones' with 
success. You are welcome to visit the photo archives.

Last year was a test. Many of the organizers and the performers fell 
upon the internet site and the chat, either through oral communication 
or just by chance. Many passed by on the chat to try to figure out how 
to get things together, then got convinced of the simplicity to set up a 
room. As it is 'as you want' some had 8,12,24,48 hour slots, a few did 
the 72 all depends on the place you find to open a room and the will & 
resistance of the crew. This test made us want to try once more & 
reconstruct the site to make it more user-friendly , simplyfing most of 
the inscription parts & adding a connection to the irc chat for live 
faq. The festival will start off the 8th of May at 14:00 GMT+1 in 
Poitiers France and finish the 11th of august at 14:00 GMT+1. Please 
feel free to open up your own placard!!!

--
derek holzer ::: http://www.umatic.nl
---Oblique Strategy # 203:
"When is it for?
Who is it for?"

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: microsound-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: microsound-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
website: http://www.microsound.org