TransCoding – From `Highbrow Art' to Participatory Culture

Front matter

Barbara Lüneburg

TransCoding

FROM ‘HIGHBROW ART’

Contents

Preface | 7 l. TransCoding — From ‘Highbrow Art’ to Participatory Culture | 9

1. Introduction | 9 2. The Research Field | 18 3. The Team Interviewed by Torsten Flüh | 28

Il. From Lonely Genius to Community Creation — Whose Voice Matters? | 51

Preface

This monograph documents the artistic research project TransCoding — From ‘Highbrow Art’ to Participatory Culture (PEEK AR 259-G21), funded by the Austrian Science Fund. TransCoding engages with the topic of participatory culture, using social media in the context of artistic practice to involve an online audience in the making of a multimedia artwork.

In this study, I examine the social media strategies and artistic practices employed, introduce the voice of the project’s community, and present and discuss both the artworks that came into being and their genesis, while reflecting on scholarly and methodological considerations. I investigate the notion of authorship, authority and aesthetics in participatory art and digital culture in the context of the project, and the motivation to contribute via web 2.0. My team colleague sociologist Kai Ginkel and I debate discourses on qualitative methodologies in artistic research and ethnographic sociology, in an attempt to compare the construction of knowledge produced by the respective fields, and we investigate methodological inferences.

Artistic research, and with it the process of doing art and the artwork itself, are at the heart of this investigation. For that reason, I offer an augmented way of reading by providing a complementary website. Designed in a way that reflects the structure of this book, it presents annotated audio and video excerpts of TransCoding’s artworks, interview passages and community contributions. In addition, the website documents the connected artwork Slices of Life for violin, video and soundtrack and a playlist of different versions of the audiovisual installation Read me personalised for single community members of TransCoding (transcoding.info/english/book.html). Both have been created as part of the project and with the participation of community members. The book could be read as text alone, but in my opinion the reader will derive more and gain a more holistic experience from listening in parallel to the additional audio and visual media made available.

Parts of chapters 1 (‘Introduction’), 2 (‘The Research Field’), 4 (‘Theory of Participatory Culture’), 9 (‘A Potential for Change’) and 13 (‘Conclusion’) draw on my paper From ‘Highbrow Art’ to Participatory Culture — A Potential

8 | for Change (2017) at RUUKKU, Studies for Artistic Research, with the kind permission of the publisher.

The artwork and this monograph would not exist without TransCoding’s community. I would like to thank all our active and passive supporters; by name, I am grateful to Louis Aguirre, Victor Barceló, Julien Charest, Tamara Friebel, Gloria Guns, Anthony Green, Camilla Hoitenga, Olivia Kieffer, LIA, Feliz Anne Reyes Macahis, Katarina Michelitsch, Anahit Mughnetsyan, Alina Murzakhanova, Paul Norman, Heghine Ohanyan, Mikolaj Pociecha, Alexandra Radoulova, Hali Rey, Damian Stewart, Felix Christian Thiessen, Ricardo Mateus Tovar, Sabina Ulubeanu, Isabelle Vigier, Michael Wolters, Susanne Wosnitzka, and my students in the seminar ‘Undoing Gender’ from the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz and Karl Franzens University of Graz, who all contributed with voice, sound, image or word to the artworks Read me or Slices of Life.

© Link to the video documentation of Slices of Life: http://transcoding.info/english/book.html - PREFACE

I. TRANSCODING — FROM ‘HIGHBROW ART’ TO PARTICIPATORY CULTURE

1. INTRODUCTION

K-Pop artist PSY and gender theorist Judith Butler, contemporary art music and pop culture — how can these possibly be considered together? The artistic research project TransCoding — From ‘Highbrow Art’ to Participatory Culture has attempted to find an answer. TransCoding engaged with the topic of participatory culture by using social media in the context of artistic practice. My team and I encouraged participation and shared discourse in the new arts by actively involving an online audience in the making of a multimedia artwork. We hoped thus to make ‘highbrow’ art, that is, contemporary classical music and multimedia art, more accessible to a broader public.

Our main target group was an internet-literate young audience, mostly drawn from popular culture, who might not necessarily be considered the typical audience for classical contemporary multimedia performances. The blog at https://what-ifblog.net served as the central social media and content base, and also as a contact point for our community. Community members were directly involved in the genesis of TransCoding’s artworks via their creative contributions. TransCoding facilitated interactions between the participating members and the professional artist(s) through calls for entries channelled via the project’s social media hub.

In TransCoding, artistic research went beyond the investigation of the artistic process, and expanded into new contexts. By offering participatory culture via web 2.0 as part of our arts project, my team and I invited contributors to speak out, and to share a discourse about and exert influence on two major arts projects. We employed principles of participatory culture in the communication and creative process, thus redefining the (commonly hierarchic) relationship between artist and community as one of permeability and mutual influence. We applied findings and theories from media sociology and cultural science to

10 | an artistic process; we investigated their applicability and meaning in the arts, and their impact on the resulting artworks itself, on the community we had gathered, and on the role of the artist.

The Context

From February 2014 to February 2017, my team and I built and maintained a network of various social media channels around a main hub, the WordPress site what-ifblog.net. Here we presented our topics — multimedia art and contemporary art music, community participation and the creation of our show — under the categories ‘Art we love,’ “You, Us and the Project,’ and ‘Making of,’ respectively. In a fourth category we chose ‘Identity’ as our main topic for the content of the artwork and the blog (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1: The artistic topic of TransCoding was identity. In one of our first calls for entry we asked the community members about their ‘spring identity’. Image © Barbara Liineburg

TransCoding was for women and men, professional artists and home producers. The concept of identity offered a framework for the project that is universally

INTRODUCTION relevant and unites our otherwise diverse community members. All were invited to participate in the community through any (feasible) means of expression: music of all genres, poetry, prose, drawings, photos, videos, interviews, links or ideas. Our main target group was comprised of digital natives who were technically savvy, aged between twenty and thirty-five, and were interested in expressing themselves creatively while coming from popular culture. However, participants outside of the target group were equally welcome to join the community (Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2: Our community on the main hub http://what-ifblog. net. Within the first two years of TransCoding a network of almost 1200 people developed across our social media channels. Image © Barbara Lüneburg

The blog was our main contact point with our community, and afforded them the opportunity to participate in our project. Via calls for entries we encouraged our visitors to contribute images, sounds and texts that I incorporated in the artworks. Through our social media channels we invited them to interact and exert influence on the creation of the evolving artwork, and additionally

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12 | presented situations and material for community members to create their own artwork (whether or not it was closely related to TransCoding). We raised interest in participation in art as a way to express one’s identity and achieve personal empowerment, and we fostered a sense of community through belonging to a peer group participating in an arts project.

We gave our community members authority to shape our work and offered them a platform to meet and make their interest clear. As we invited contributors to exercise influence over the joint artwork, we looked at change as viewed through the power relationship between artist and community.

The Inspiration

Where did the idea for TransCoding come from? At least three major influences inspired the project. Many readers will remember Gangnam Style, the viral 2012 YouTube hit by the Korean pop artist PSY (http://bit.ly/2ud4afx). Only a few days after the release of Gangnam Style on YouTube, fans from all over the world had created covers and parodies, and launched remixes that replaced PSY’s Korean theme with their own life and identity. The young digital social media public, it seemed, was obsessed with Gangnam Style. Of course, in the background of this huge success, the South Korean label company behind his song, YG entertainment, had invested in it with a well-structured, well-prepared and fastidiously executed campaign. (Drum 2012) They were able to tap into an incredible potential for creativity and for communication among people from different cultures and countries on social media. Although it was clear that as a team working in new (classical) music we would never be able to campaign for our purposes in the same way as a pop label operating on an international scale, the phenomenon of Gangnam Style became one of my inspirations for the use of social media in TransCoding.

At the same time, I taught seminars on film music, audio branding and media theory at media universities in Germany and Austria. My students were tech-oriented young people whose creative background was popular culture. Their thinking and creative activity was quite different from mine with my artistic practice originating in classical and contemporary art music. In seminars we explored with interest our different worlds and had critical discussions on Luigi Nono and K-Pop, Henry Purcell and social media, or audiovisual installations and electronic avant-garde pop music. I loved the music they made from what I offered them and I realised that I could actually lure people into contemporary art music just by introducing them to it and sharing my knowledge, enthusiasm and passion for it. In their works an intriguing mix of popular music and contemporary art music emerged and my students started to adopt new artistic perspectives. I too began to think in

INTRODUCTION new ways. The reciprocal interaction between me and my students changed my approach not only to my own domain, but also to the field they came from, popular culture. We mutually influenced each other’s artistic practice. Those students were my model when I thought about the target audience for TransCoding — From ‘Highbrow Art’ to Participatory Culture.

Last but not least, I was inspired by philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler. One day in spring 2013, I was doing research for a performance set-up for the artworks of TransCoding. When I was randomly sifting through YouTube videos, I found a short interview with Judith Butler in which she talked about the notion of gender performativity. She explained what it means if we say ‘gender is performative’:

“for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman. ... We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it’s a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start. ... It’s my view that gender is culturally formed, but it is also a domain of agency or freedom.” (Butler,

Judith Butler: Your Behavior Creates Your Gender 2011)

If we refused to perform the gender script that is handed to us by society, we could instead perform a different, self-chosen script; ideally, we would decide on our gender (on a daily basis) and pick the life that suits us best.

This notion of free choice sparked the idea of creating a multimedia show with a series of short movements of three to four minutes — similar to the format of a pop show — traversing a whole palette of musical possibilities: from classical music to pop music, from pop music to the new music avant-garde, or perhaps from new music to metal. Each song would feature a different story and a different kind of identity. I had found my topic for TransCoding and concomitantly for the future multimedia show Slices of Life that became one of the participative artworks developed within the project.

The Community

‘Identity’ seemed to me ideal for TransCoding, since it was necessary to find a subject that people coming from 130 different countries (according to the 2017 WordPress statistics) would care about enough to start communicating and interacting with us online; we needed something that would touch them emotionally, and that was connected to their individual life, something that triggered their wishes or visions. We didn’t treat ‘identity’ as a scholarly

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14 | paradigm to be investigated but rather as a means to spark off the phantasy of our diverse community members and to unite individuals from different cultural backgrounds in art. Each community member, whether male or female, religious or atheistic, from East, West, North or South, young or old, could contribute from their life, culture and social context. Each song, each story, each image and each sound in the context of our project would stand for differently ‘performed’ identities.

“What if? a participatory arts project about identity a question e a creative endeavour e a research project e a community

We are an international team of artists, musicians and programmers building an online/

offline community through which we are exploring the concept of identity.

We are looking for your input while developing two different artworks, both dealing with

our topic:

. An audiovisual installation that features texts, recordings, music and images from the community and from us.

. A multimedia show for violin, electronics and video that merges community contributions with our approach to art.

In the section ‘You, Us and the Project you will gain insight into our thoughts and we hope for your comments and inspiration.

Contribute: How can you participate?

If you like to make music, if you take pictures wherever you go, if you love to write or design, if you are a camera freak or an all-night creative programmer, or if you are just interested in personal freedom of choice, then What if? is for you.

Send us ideas, links, photos, music, films, texts, interviews that pick up on our topic: commercials you love, ads you hate, quotes that inspire you and links to art works you have found or you have maybe made yourself. We would love to hear from you.

These are some of our current questions to get you inspired:

What if we could live our lives regardless of the expectations of society, family, friends or colleagues?

What if our body, our gender wasn’t our limit?

What if we took the freedom to be who we want to be, and how can we express this in our art?

What if? is limited. It will exist for three years. We started on 1st of February 2014 and will finish the project in 2017. During that time, we will continuously work on the blog. We will throw ideas at you and wait for your comments and replies.” (Liineburg, What-ifblog.net | About 2014)