The following is a review of the net art piece, The Last Tag Show, orginally written for furtherfield.org.

The Last Tag Show, a live “net performance,” took place on Last.FM on April 14, 2007. Last.FM is a social networking site centered around tracking its users' music listening habits and creating a profile based on that data. As a user listens to music, the track title and artist name are sent to his/her profile and listed publicly, allowing the service to create connections between users and the musicians they listen to. Another notable aspect of the service is its reliance on user participation, through wikis, in the creation of artist profiles.

The Last Tag Show cleverly took advantage of Last.FM's technical structure to pull off a 24 hour performance. As the allotted time progressed, viewers saw tracks and artists appear in succession on Last.FM user profile lasttagshow's profile page. These were no ordinary songs however, the artists instead altered the metadata of audio tracks such that when they were uploaded to the Last.FM servers they appeared as a multi-character dialogue. The principal personages in the performance include “Moderator,” “Hannah,” “Voiceover,” “Instructor,” “Marck,” “Zita Vass,” and “Gregg,” with occasional guest stars like Thom Yorke. Since each of these characters take the role of a musician in Last.FM's data-centric view, each of them have a dedicated user-editable artist page, which The Last Tag Show took full advantage of by developing the identities of their subjects in these spaces. As such, Moderator, for example, existed beyond his archived snippets of speech, complete with a photograph and short biography.

Yet while this was a particularly clever subversion of Last.FM's intended use, judging by their own description of the piece, it seems that the artists failed to fully think through the conceptual implications of their performance. The very idea of a “net performance” is immediately suspect especially when in the context of a social network like Last.FM for whom archivization and aggregation takes precedence over the immediacy and ephemeral nature of live performance. So while inventive and whimsically guileful, The Last Tag Show as a performance was starkly out of place in an environment existing in the future as much as it looks to the past.

Yet, it is from this oversight that perhaps the most interesting aspect of the piece arises. After the performance was finished and the Show creators had moved on, their once purely diegetic characters began to take on a life of their own outside the confines of that single 24 hour period. It seems that there are a number of other Last.FM users who listen to tracks in which the artist is listed as “Voiceover” or “Papa” (another character in the Show) and a number of other names. As these other users consume their oddly labeled tracks, the artist profiles, which served as a stable signifier for the Show's players, began to change. Suddenly their “most listened to tracks” were not out-of-context snippets of dialogue, but what seemed to be...actual songs; and the very real possibility of users coming in and subtly changing Gregg's biography comes to mind.

Indeed, the fact that these fictional characters have the ability to continue to “live” - produce and be produced - long after their utility to the performance has ended, is what makes The Last Tag Show so interesting, and the limited period of its run-time so constricted. Where the creators began this piece as a “hack” of a social networking site, in the end it may turn out that they are the ones hacked - by their own creations.

Posted by Nathan at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just read an entry on Autonomy & Solidarity by Gary [last name not given], entitled "Holloway on Negri -- Going in the Wrong Direction or Mephistopheles: Not Saint Francis of Assisi". I read largely because of my growing interest in Italian autonomism, but I think a few of his points about the danger of using paradigms to describe cultural shifts have particular resonance in the tech and blogging worlds - or, really, the tech blogging world. So as much as I might like to address his critique of Empire, it won't be here.

One of Gary's central dissatisfactions with Hardt and Negri's Empire is their reliance on the idea of a paradigm shift, e.g. modernity to post-modernity, Fordism to post-Fordism, or discipline to control. He sees this reliance as a method that only serves to divorce cultural phenomena from real, potential revolutionary action. The reliance on paradigms does, indeed, lead one to imply fantastic/phantasmal periods of stasis in contrast with periods of movement; though I'd doubt that anyone employing such devices as seeing them as anything but relative.

As much as Gary witmesses this in this resurgence of positive autonomism, we can also see the over-use of dual paradigms in tech blogs, especially during the heat of "Web 2.0" speculation. This is not only because these writers genuinely believe that we have moved from "vertical to horizontal" orgainization (or "mountainous to flat" or anyother such shift). The rhetorics of the blogosphere have amplified the reliance on paradigm creation. In an environment where blog entry titles count for a majority of the content the declaration that one era/moment/product has died and another as taken its place is far more appealing than a declaration that things are far less simple than we would like to believe. It seemed that as soon as I began to read references to "Web 2.0" I also began to read calls for its systematic evisceration. The rhetoric of the blogosphere relies heavily on the constant creation of hyperbolic paradigm tectonics - largely as a result of its structurally implied politics as opposed to its individual actors.

Yet beyond merely creating a more palatable cognitive landscape, perhaps the proliferation of paradigmatic tectonics also has a beneficial effect. When players are operating within a context driven by paradigms - such as the tech blogosphere or, apparently, contemporary autonomism - they are operating within the neat framework provided to them. When the cultural trajectory is painted in such clean theoretical lines, this may encourage experimentation that might otherwise not be taken by realists. A good example of this in the tech world is perhaps Attention Trust, about whom I've written before. AT - to grossly over-simplify - is operating under the understanding that we will soon be shifting from a world of feral online identity to one of a cultivated and individually controlled identity. In anticipation of this paradigmatic shift what they have come up with is a tool that allows every individual to track their every web-movement - recognizing the value in these ebbs and flows. Without the aid of paradigmatic shifts as a guide for development, they might not be experimenting in this area; we might as easily say that without the paradigm of the shift from a state of nature to a regulated social existence to spur intellectual experimentation, political philosophy would find itself in less of an advanced state.

So, while I do indeed see the danger in reliance on paradigms to describe ongoing cultural tectonics, it is also important to recognize paradigm creation as a necessary vehicle for cultural and intellectual experimentation toward the goal of larger change.

Posted by Nathan at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

EMI announced today that they will begin selling non-DRM MP3s in the iTunes store, starting this May. This is a step forward that as recently as two days ago I was claiming would take six months or more. I see this as an admission that centralized control (as exemplified by DRM) is no longer necessarily the best route for industry to take. DRM is insisted upon by the major record labels as a tool to prevent what they see as inappropriate uses of recorded works - sharing over P2P networks, multiple copies, recontextualization, etc. Yet the cultural perception of a recorded work changed when suddenly these works became non-scarce and increasingly ingrained into an experience of social interaction.

I don't mean to down play the economic shift that occurs when the cost of distribution and promotion plummeted, undercutting what the major record labels had grounded their business models on. This alters how any player in the industry has to interact within it, but not enough attention is focused on how digitization tweaked the interactive experience of recorded works in such a way that is completely in accordance with wider cultural, subjective, and economic shifts in a post-Fordist world.

The move to digitization in the music industry, and the correlative decrease in scarcity that comes with the ability to quickly and efficiently copy a digital file, can be read as a shift in importance from poiesis to praxis in the music industry along the terms that Virno describes in A Grammar of the Multitude. The production of the recorded work as a physical commodity (poiesis) is no longer holds the central role for a song that it once did. Increasingly - and for some artists, almost completely - the purpose of the recorded work is an affective one, a form of praxis designed to lure the listener into the experience of the music/musician.

In an interview with Virno, Branden W. Joseph poses John Cage as a comparison the Virno's use of Glenn Gould in the role of the musician as commodity-producing laborer. This is a particularly limpid comparison because Cage relies so heavily on what Virno refers to as virtuosity - direct affective production. A John Cage recording is far from a commodity in the sense of a Glenn Gould recording - it exists merely as an affective and often incomplete surrogate for the creator himself. It takes the role of praxis-at-a-distance, rather than the poiesis embodied by Gould, who refused to perform live. This is not happening solely in music, economies are increasingly reliant on affective labor and virtuosity rather than the physical production of commodities. In truth, as a profession, musical production was an entirely affective one until recording devices became prevalent - introducing scarcity and poiesis over praxis.

EMI is acknowledging that the freedom to copy, share, and recontextualize has pushed the music industry into affective production. Allowing a digital file this freedom de-commoditizes what really hasn't been a commodity for years. The entities that focus on the production of the experience over the production of the commodity will ultimately be the ones that survive these steps into a post-Fordist world.

Disclosure: I work for Lime Wire, a company increasingly involved in this space. What I write here has absolutely no official relationship with the company and should not be attributed to anyone but me, independent of my other associations.

Posted by Nathan at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)