That Southern hospitality – A SXSW experience

Written by

In March I headed out to the Wild West of Austin, TX to gather inspiration at renowned interactive conference South By Southwest (aka SXSW) and returned with a Stetson full of interesting ideas for the development of New Media Days 2010.

In case you haven’t heard SXSW is one of the world’s most fascinating festivals on technology, film and music and unfolds across ten days. Let me tell you it’s intense!

All of downtown Austin is included and the city, sizzling with energy and hospitality, gradually becomes the setting for various subcultures: First the techies and nerds arrive armed with iPhones and statement T-shirts, to be followed by the movie geeks alongside A-list film celebrities, and finally the musicians take over town with their big tattoos and even bigger sunglasses.

With it’s tribal tendencies and temporary community structure, SXSW is as close to cultism as Burning Man and for an overwhelmed first timer like me it takes a while to crack the cultural code, cut through the esotericism and learn from the veterans. Insomnia, adaptation and endurance are keys to survival, but once you’re in, you never want to leave!

SXSW is (perhaps too) big and with 881,400 gross square feet of conference space and a programme of around 20 parallel tracks it’s all about choices! I’d like to share three great choices I made:

SOMETHING IS WRONG!
Jaron Lanier is one of the pioneers of virtual reality, a computer scientist, a visual artist, a composer and an author. Not only is he a peculiar mix of different disciplines, his stage presence is also quirky, unique – and very convincing.

At SXSW he opened with a tune on a homemade woodwind instrument and then turned his ‘no slides, no script’ presentation into a harsh critique on our ways of using technology today.

Lanier sees the organization of “the web” as a repetition of the Hollywood studio system with few, monopolistic players making money by opening and closing gates between people. He also raises a concern for the youth growing up with documenting everything on Facebook, his point beeing that ”in order to grow up you have to do some strategic forgetting of yourself.”

A WEB ENTERTAINER TAKES IT AWAY
One of the more curious elements of SXSW was the charismatic online performance artist, composer and humorist Ze Frank. He is a playful innovator on the internet and his projects have a quiet charm to them. I was very inspired by the way he creates personal reflection by using existing internet services in creative ways.

Among other entertaining things Ze Frank borrowed a 25–year-old woman’s Facebook account for a week but I was especially moved by his project “Chillout Song”: Ze Frank received an email from a woman named Laura, who had recently moved to a new city for a new job. She was overwhelmed with anxiety and asked him to write her a song to help her calm (the f***) down. With a little help from his online friends he responded with this ‘audio hug’

For a brief summary of his SXSW talk, you should check out this video.

VIRTUAL WORLD, NEW REALITY
In the end I managed to sneak into some of the film screenings, and one movie in particular blew me away: Life 2.0 – a documentary following a group of four people whose lives a dramatically transformed by 3D virtual community Second Life.

With a hypnotizing cinematography and an slow paced suspense to it, Life 2.0 tells the stories of a 30-year-old man living the life of 11-year-old girl Ayya in Second Life, the virtual lovers Blunty and Amie that are married to someone else IRL, and finally of Asri, an African-American businesswoman who’s virtual business is being illegally copied, which forces her to sue the responsible person IRL.

More than an examination of a technology, the film is an intimate, poetic drama about people who look to a virtual world in search of something they are missing IRL. Second Life might be old news for most of us however this take on virtual reality is original.

Size and geography aside, New Media Days and SXSW share an interest in discussing and showcasing how human shapes technology and vice versa, so you might wanna look out for a bit of that Southern SXSW touch in our 2010 programme!

2 Responses to “That Southern hospitality – A SXSW experience”

Leave a Reply