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.