Boogie Rights at SXSW

/part 2 of 2/

South by Southwest Interactive 2008, Austin Convention Center, Ballroom B, March 11, 5pm Central Daylight Time.

Hauntingly familiar, but unplaceable organ music* fills the hall; on the large screen to stage right, the audience, filing in to see a panel on scenarios for social media in 2025, finds this curious image:



Just left of the lectern, on a pedestal in the middle of the stage is a...hmm...a stainless steel container, which looks somewhat like a turn-of-the-20th-Century diving helmet. Steam or smoke seems to waft out through its cracks. In front of the container is a framed picture of the man on the screen, only much older and carrying the countenance of hard-earned wisdom.



The Ballroom is full now; people are sitting along the walls and between rows of seats. The music fades, and a man--in Priest's garb?--addresses the audience, “Please be seated…”

And so began our South by Southwest Interactive presentation—a eulogy for one Eddie Adams, a.k.a Dirk Diggler, the protagonist in P.T. Anderson’s 1997 epic film Boogie Nights. For the next 20 minutes, we told the life-story of Eddie Adams through reflections and recollections of his Priest (Stuart Candy), his Lawyer (Jake Dunagan), and through his friend, lover, and co-star Rollergirl (played by the extraordinary Sandy “The War of Desire and Technology” Stone—thanks Sandy!).

Text of Rollergirl and the Lawyer's eulogies can be read here: MyDigglerEulogy.doc


About the scenario and experience

Scenarios are coherent stories about possible futures, but the context in which these stories are to be presented and received exerts a considerable influence on the content of the scenario and the representational strategies we choose. A contracted report to the Board of Directors of a Fortune 500 company creates a different landscape of possibility than a 15-minute presentation to a media-savvy festival audience. However, knowing the situational conventions of diverse contexts allows us to “play” with those conventions for maximum pedagogical utility. For the SXSW Interactive event, we felt like we could (and should) use the opportunity to experiment with affective forecasting, provocative performance art, and future-shock therapy.

The givens:
-the room: Ballroom B, capacity 300+
-day and time: March 11, 5pm (the last panel of the conference)
-the audience: SXSWers—media and technology oriented, well-educated, demographically skewing male and in the 25-40yr old age range.
-length of panel: 1 hour, to be divided by 4 panelists, so 12-15 minutes per presentation.

The variables:
-the generic scenario. Choice: top-down totalitarian control.
-the specific scenario. Choice: an Intellectual property-led media oligopoly.
-generic presentation format. Choice: a participatory, experiential scenario based around an event appropriate to and indicative of the world we envisioned for 2025.
-specific presentation content: Choice: A funeral service for Eddie Adams/Dirk Diggler, with several eulogies in his honor.

Why Dirk Diggler?

The world of 2025 we had created was rich with productive tensions. It was a world ruled by entertainment and media companies, yet it locked-down content and expression—creating the ultimate permission culture. Everyone would be affected by this system—and the impact on social networks and media would be profound. We imagined the course of creativity in this world, especially for people who were supposed to make a living in the aesthetic economy. How would designers, musicians, filmmakers, writers, actors, and others navigate a world in which their creative output was centrally controlled? How would content be produced and distributed over communication networks? Who were the winners and losers?

We were confident on the general shape of the scenario, but we were struggling to find the most fruitful “tip of the iceberg” to evoke this world. So, Stuart suggested we turn to a classic Edward De Bono technique and choose a word at random to kick-start some lateral thinking. The first word that appeared was “lecher.” Now, neither Stuart or I would likely describe pornography as a necessarily lecherous endeavor, but certain conditioned responses made the cognitive bridge to the concept seemingly unavoidable.

Some of the most egregious abuses of IP (from our perspective) involve the increasing shrinkage of the public commons and the commodification of cultural knowledge and life itself. If the scope of control were extended to its most extreme, what else could be owned? Within a few seconds, we connected the top-down creative governance to pornography to one of the most famous names in porn—Dirk Diggler—to the alienation and ownership of Dirk’s most special gift. It basically wrote itself from there.



Why a Eulogy?

Knowing the space and layout of the facility where the event is to take place is a fundamental, but often under-appreciated, part of designing experience. We knew that we would have hundreds of audience members, sitting in rows, looking forward at a stage. With other presentations to follow, and limited time, we knew we couldn’t arrange or re-arrange the room too drastically. So Stuart and I began to brainstorm contexts in which people would be so situated, but somehow still directly involved in the proceedings. It adds to the impact of the experience, in our view, if the audience is somehow implicated in the performance. For example, in one of our Hawaii 2050 futures, audience members were cast as climate refugees, fresh off the boat from inundated Micronesian islands, and in the process of being forced into the citizen-soldier military of the Democratic Kingdom of Hawaii.

Two ideas began to hold out the most promise: an awards ceremony and a funeral service. The awards ceremony was inspired by scenes in Boogie Nights where Dirk receives several awards as the industry’s top actor. We thought about Dirk returning for a lifetime achievement award, and through the ceremony we could tell the story of how his image and publicity rights were sold and later abused, the court battles lost, and the power of media giants in conditioning our everyday lives.

Having suffered a recent loss in my family (to be unfortunately repeated in the subsequent weeks for both Stuart and me) I was intrigued by the process of narrativizing a life and the affective registers associated with a funeral service. And, as a funeral is an event which almost everyone has experienced at some point in their life, it gave us a formal structure and set of shared conventions in which to hang the performance.

As we fleshed it out, the funeral/eulogy experience seemed to hit all the right marks. It would immediately signal to the audience that a different kind of attention was required for this panel. It would put them in “up-time” as our colleague Matt Jensen likes to call it. Secondly, there was the right mixture (for our sensibilities) of absurdity and provocation in the concept of eulogizing a fictional porn star. The ready-made backstory helped us craft a narrative trajectory in which we could uncover the processes and choices that led to the “Dream Society” of 2025, and personalize the stakes involved for individuals and collectivities as well. Finally, we designed the scene to be humorous and fun, but even the parody of the sacred allowed us to show the profanity that over-reaching intellectual property laws could have on expression and basic freedoms.



This format also gave us clear genre conventions around which to imagine and design artifacts and images. We knew we would have a funeral announcement (see previous post, which we distributed around the festival in the days leading up to the panel), a slideshow with images from key moments in Eddie/Dirk’s life, and other items such as protest signs from Eddie’s trials, a ‘Che Guevara’-like icon shot of Eddie, and movie posters from his career, post Boogie Nights.**

Long, Strange Trip

We did not want to waste a great opportunity to push ourselves in new experimental directions, to make an alternative future for 2025 come alive in a meaningful way, and to create a memorable experience for the SXSW audience. In this I think we succeeded. We also had a great time at the festival, and contributed the best we could to keeping Austin weird.


*"Living Thing" by Electric Light Orchestra, transformed into a funeral dirge by John Maus. Thanks John.

**Samples seen in this post. Thanks to designers Melissa Jordan and her team at PinkerGreen Design or their spot-on designs and our fellow asylum inmates-- designers Eliot Frick and Matt Jensen, for their willingness to contribute intellectually and creatively to this absurd concept.

Labels: artifacts from the future, experiential scenarios, future-shock therapy, Sandy Stone, sxsw