Future Festivals

Exploring online and hybrid festival opportunities

Live streaming has been possible for years but has only entered the mainstream as the creative industries have desperately sought ways of coping with the impact of the global pandemic. Lockdown has seen a frenzy of experimentation from major players such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, to smaller venues and festivals, down to local open mic sessions, folk clubs and dance classes that have taken to Zoom. While demonstrating demand, these initiatives have also revealed significant challenges from the need to deliver a more social audience experience, to the complexities of ticketing and rights, to the question of what will happen as life returns to a ‘new normal’. 

This project will explore technology support for the co-production of blended (physical-online) festival experiences by performers, producers and volunteers as well as local and remote audiences. Based on previous research which used platforms to deliver VOxjam, a new VR/360 platform will be developed – built alongside and interacting with the Streampark web platform – aiming to deliver more social, placeful and accessible blended festivals.

Project Team: Paul Tennent, Sarah Martindale, Adrian Hazzard, Pepita Barnard, Patrick Brundell, Edgar Bodiaj

Partners: Joel Hall (Streampark), Mike Green (Oxfam) and Lisa Brook (Live Cinema)

Introduction blog, mid blog, extension blog, final blog

Start date: May 2021 (18 months) * project extension until May 2023

This project sits within Horizon’s Co-Production Campaign

Co-Production Campaign blogsite

Computerphile ” Metaverse is 30 years old” Paul Tennant et al talk about Bubbles and how it fits with the current state of VR

Paper “Infrastructures for virtual volunteering at online music festivals”, Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction, vol 7 issue CSCW1, April 2023, article number 65

Paper ” The Trials of Moving Folk Clubs Online During the Global Pandemic”