Wired magazine this month focuses on the emerging ”cut and paste” culture of sampling, homegrown branding, remixes, and other media mash-ups. Particularly interesting is a short essay by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson where he explores the creative power of combining and reconceiving other people’s work. It’s a practice he traces to William S. Burroughs, Picasso, Duchamp, Godard, and even his own writing.
Equally interesting is Gibson’s take on the participatory audience, or the new opportunities for everyone to take an active role in creating:
Today’s audience isn’t listening at all — it’s participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.
Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?). To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic. The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries.
As we struggle to sustain and build an audience for the arts, it might be worth wondering if there is such a thing as an audience anymore…at least as we like to define it.
Bart Giamatti, the late commissioner of baseball and president of Yale University, left us a small book called Take Time for Paradise. In it he describes the dynamic of a performance (in sports or in the arts): ”Power flows in a mysterious circuit from performer to spectator and back… While cheers or applause are the hoped-for outcome, silence or gasps are the most desired, for then the moment has occurred…and a unity rare and inspiring results.”
For years, we’ve been promoting the performing arts as an experience different-in-kind from film or television or recorded music BECAUSE ”the audience” is a participant rather than a receiver. In that sense, it has always been a misleading term. The question is, do audience members understand that? Or do we need some neologism to let them know how much they impact what happens in the theater or concert hall?