Producing Liveness: The Trials of Moving Folk Clubs Online During the Global Pandemic
This addresses the challenge of maintaining live performance experiences online for musicians and communities, though it is incremental in applying existing theories to new contexts.
The study examined how two traditional folk clubs transitioned to online formats during the pandemic, with one using video conferencing and the other pre-recorded shows, but both failed to enable chorus singing due to network constraints. It argues that HCI should view online liveness as co-produced through participatory structures that blur live/recorded and performer/audience distinctions.
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.