Producing Liveness: The Trials of Moving Folk Clubs Online During the Global Pandemic

TL;DR

This paper ethnographically examines how two traditional folk clubs transitioned online during the pandemic, highlighting challenges in achieving true online liveness and proposing participatory design insights for future live performance platforms.

Contribution

It provides a comparative ethnographic analysis of online folk club adaptations and introduces a theoretical framework for understanding online liveness in performance contexts.

Findings

Participants couldn't sing in chorus due to network constraints.

Different online formats influenced participant engagement and practices.

Rich participatory structures can co-produce online liveness.

Abstract

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.