The Great Streaming Space-Time Warp Is Here
New headlines about the duration of COVID’s impact on the live part of the music industry have been flying in the last week. When I saw the reporting that we likely won’t be gathering in venues until 2021, my first thought was “Damn, that’s gonna be a lot of streams”. If you’ve been on social medial lately, or if you’ve just seen the news you have likely observed absolute glut of online live performances by musicians and DJ’s. As someone who works in the industry this was expected but the intensity of the proliferation has been overwhelming to say the least. When it comes to how how society and business engages with technology, music has often been considered a “fruit fly industry” — an early indicator of transversal trends. And already we’ve seen private and government stakeholders (as matching partners) here in Canada making early investments in this pandemic time trend. That having been said, I think it’s important to consider the deeper implications of what’s happened to live music in terms of streaming as we consider what is happening to society at large as this time of social distancing stretches forward.
First I want to establish right from the jump that this is no ivory tower evaluation — I too have a stream; and have for a while. When I went to the UK in 2017 to get my masters at The Bartlett I was also taking a hiatus from being the creative director of a very successful DIY club night called TIMEKODE. Since 2005 we have been bringing people together monthly in Ottawa to connect the dots across the musics of the African diaspora on two turntables, and to dance. Not only is it my creative practice and community, but it’s also a bit of a live laboratory where we can experience and participate in the evolution of local culture and the impacts of global trends first hand and longitudinally.
As coming back to Canada became more of a reality, my mind began working on the next evolution of the enterprise. For more reasons than I will list in this article — including things I saw DJing around London, and a healthy love of the work of Manuel Castels — I recognised that it was streaming and video production. We launched TIMEKODE.TV in 2018 and have streamed a wide range of live performances and DJ nights, as well as other content. So when the pandemic hit we were not rushing to figure out livestreaming — we were already in the mix so to speak. All of that having been said, when we set up our inaugural pandemic stream in early March we weren’t sure what to expect. Despite having a literally captive audience, as our local CBC asked me, can a hot and sweaty dance party work in a new era of social distancing? Or another way to ask it — can a fundamentally spatial activity like a dance party happen in a transpatial way? If so how?
Well, that night it seemed like the answer was yes. What we experienced was surprising. It was not just there were a lot of people online checking it out, but it was how they were engaging. Personal Zoom dance parties, a nonstop chat, a palpable vibe. People seemed to be as excited by the music as by the sense that we were all together. It was a different kind of co-presence. I felt it again at a smaller scale when moderating the streams we’ve continued to run in our #COMMUNITYSPREAD series, and at a much larger scale in other streams I’ve participated in as a spectator— most recently and enjoyably the DJ Premier vs RZA battle (S/O to the whole Wu-Tang Clan for donating to the Ottawa Food Bank!!).
Though TIMEKODE is worlds away from popularity of DJ Premier or D-Nice on social media, what seems commonly important about these experiences is that they happen contemporaneously. In a world where the experience of sharing space —our first and most common form of community building — has been interrupted so dramatically, sharing time and experiencing things synchronously, even at a great distance, has abruptly become a proxy.
It’s a sneaky inversion; we used to manage being social by being in / travelling to different places and participating in patterns of copresence associated with different social activities — working, learning, shopping, dancing, etc. — in coupled and corresponding patterns of land use. That’s the space-society relationship. In contrast, because of this virus now we mostly occupy one place which has to accommodate as many social activities / land uses as possible, but using technology to coordinate time as the means to manage essential copresence. We were already moving along this trajectory as a society, but we’re experiencing the difference between moving and being evicted. How long can we do society with time + tech as the only tools for bringing us together? How long can economies run untethered to space?
In Ill Fares The Land Tony Judt said that “globally enabled real-time communication does not translate into community. Space matters. It embodies the possibility of politics”. I think it does the same for culture. For all the things that a hot Instagram/YouTube / Twitch / Periscope (why don’t more people use Periscope? Serious question.) Live can be, it can never embody the possibility of a room full of bodies committed to a place made for that activity — whatever that activity is — together. This sentiment extends to the current remote work culture that has conveniently emerged. “Zoom fatigue” was not a searchable term 3 months ago. This is not to diminish the power of personal broadcasting; it’s how we’re keeping things together in this moment. But a schedule and a smartphone do not make a society, a terms of use is no social contract, and a social network is not the streets. Especially when everybody doesn’t have access.
But the trend lines are entrenched. These times are forming habits that no vaccine will erase. Digital real-time access to things that traditionally happened exclusively in situ — like cultural performances — will grow. So will technologies for presenting them. There are already a host of new applications focused on more dynamic technologically enabled co-presence and as AR advances, it’s intriguing to consider how this period of time will inform its development. Conversely in urban planning I have found a lack of imagination when considering the spatial impacts of the digital world. When organising consultations for Ottawa’s Official Plan my team was the only group to explicitly focus on the implications of the online world and to prioritise streaming our consultations as well as hosting them IRL. As we re-spatialize society post-pandemic it will be more important than ever for decision makers to be ever more thoughtful about space’s role and impact on all that we do, while integrating the lessons we’re learning about the delights and limits of transpatial synchronism and technological accessibility from this pandemic space-time warp.
