DIY Ethos Research Articles

Music, Art Installations and Haptic Technology

This paper presents some directions on the design, development and creative use of haptic systems for musical composition, performance and digital art creation. This research has been conducted both from an artistic and a technical point of view and its ambition, over the last decade, apart from the artistic outcome, was to introduce the field of haptics to artistic communities based on an open, do it yourself—DIY ethos. The five directions presented here are not in any sense exhaustive and are based principally on a series of collaborative works and more personal open-ended explorations with the medium of haptics and, more specifically, force-feedback interaction. They will be highlighted along with information about the interaction models and their application to artistic works created by the author and other colleagues. Those directions are (i) Haptic Algorithms and Systems; (ii) Performers Intercoupling; (iii) Haptic Interfaces as Part of the Artistic Practice; (iv) Electromechanical Sound Generation; and (v) Media Art and Art Installations. The interdisciplinary field of musical haptics still has a relatively minor position in the sound and music computing research agendas and, more importantly, its artistic dimension is very rarely discussed. The findings of this research aim to indicate and clarify potential research pathways and offer some results on the use of haptics and force-feedback systems in an artistic context.

‘I am a Punk, I Don’t Give a Damn!’ Chez Narcisse: A Rural Place of Resistance

Chez Narcisse is a bar located on the threshold of the southern Vosges, in the east of France, that has been run by the same family for over 120 years. Its particularity lies in the fact that since the mid 1980s, it has included a concert hall in the garden behind the bar, which punk bands use to play. This place brings together a bar that is anchored in the daily life of the village and these festive events, which always take place on Sunday evenings. Chez Narcisse thus appears as a ‘double’ space that emphasizes the search for independence and culture in a rural environment. An ethnographic research carried out in this place since January 2017 highlights how the DIY ethos is as much a way of doing things as a purpose. The punk ethos of DIY is claimed by the owners, volunteers, musicians and stakeholders of Chez Narcisse in order to build its identity as an ‘alternative’ place well known in the contemporary French punk scene. By taking up James C. Scott’s work, the aim is to understand how Chez Narcisse is a social site of resistance and the role that DIY plays in it. To do this, I will first present the construction of this alternative place which articulates both a local and rural level and a global one (the concerts and the venue attract punks from all over France). A performance upstage testifies to a veiled but very present resistance, based on a family imaginary. The second part aims at highlighting the daily forms of resistance at Chez Narcisse expressed through the use of DIY. Thus, this place would be less ‘punk’ through programmed music than through the use of DIY as a value to defend and a project to share.

DIY or die? A typology of DIY careers in the Portuguese independent music scenes

This article addresses the DIY career building strategies in the Portuguese independent music scenes. Is it anchored on the reading of DIY careers as a pattern of promoting employability, in a context marked by major transformations in the music industries and the precarization of professional trajectories. Drawing from interviews with 71 individuals involved in the production and mediation of Portuguese independent music, we seek to understand how these actors build their DIY careers considering their different positions within the music scenes, the strategies used to negotiate their careers, and the way DIY is present. For this, we conduct a typological reading of these careers to identify different career profiles. Based on a mixed-methods approach, we identify five distinct career profiles: ‘catch-all musicians’, ‘non-stop musicians’, ‘mediator musicians’, ‘author musicians’, and ‘mediators’. In their differences, these trajectories are marked by DIY ethos and praxis, from their beginnings to the present day.

Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace, by William Robin

<i>Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace</i>, by William Robin

A new ethos for science? Exploring emerging DIY science “qualities”

This paper investigates the issue of quality in the context of DIY science, a consolidating ensemble of social practices progressively gaining attention also in academia and policy. Although rarely from official institutions and with formal affiliations, DIY science practitioners often perform scientific activity aimed at the solution of incumbent problems. What becomes of scientific quality in the DIY milieu?Departing from a Post Normal Science framework, we make the case of the DIY science community as an “extended peer community” performing practices of "extended peer review". Three real cases of DIY science suggest a preliminary set of quality dimensions intrinsic to the DIY practice. Subsequently, through a purposefully designed interview study with members of different DIY communities, we look further into these quality dimensions (or “qualities”) and propose a possible “DIY ethos” embedding elements of agency, care, ‘tempo’, integrity and openness.DIY science practitioners are not necessarily concerned with quality assessments, but are rather engaged in the production of ‘extended facts’ that can be regarded in themselves as quality commitments, i.e. by acting, tinkering and hacking in the matters that are of their care and concern.We conclude by discussing that DIY science can also constitute a real case example to contrast currently existing tensions about the issue of quality in mainstream science.

The felt value of reading zines

This article explores the meaning and materiality of contemporary zines. As do-it-yourself and profit-resistant publications seeing a sustained resurgence, zines are an interesting and valuable case within the cultural sociology of reading. Based on a thematic analysis of 73 zines collected from a 2019 zine fair, and qualitative interviews with 16 zine readers, in this article we consider the ‘felt value’ (Simmel 2005 [1916]) of zines. We explore how contemporary zines—via their content and form—intimately speak to both the weight and frivolity of life, how they intensively grapple with questions about relationships and ways of living, and what this means for how meaning is made material(ly) in the form. Conceptually, we bring together Thumala Olave’s (2017, 2020) work on affect and reading with Alexander’s (2008a, b) work on iconicity and immersion and Bennett’s (2018a, b) work on the significance and diversification of DIY projects in contemporary cultural practice. We identify four iconic properties of the contemporary form: a DIY ethos and aesthetic, anti-mainstream positioning, an intimacy, and an intensity. These iconic properties offer insight into how reading zines is made meaningful through the iconicity and immersive materiality of the analogue zine form.

UK and Ireland Zine Librarians: doing it ourselves

UK and Ireland Zine Librarians began as a small JiscMail list created to share resources, skills, and advice for all zine librarians regardless of professional status or job title. While our US counterparts had already made great strides regarding acquisitions, cataloguing, and copyright guidance, UK and Irish zine libraries were still grappling with some of the more basic elements and finding ways to adapt these ideas to our own collections. How can institutional librarians and DIY community grassroots collections learn from each other? And can we establish a best practice of zine librarianship while remaining true to the DIY ethos of zines?

Design it yourself? Punk’s division of labour

Abstract Punk’s do-it-yourself call to arms led to a widespread adoption of the rhetoric, if not always the practice, of independence from traditional means of production – although it should be acknowledged that do-it-yourself ideals go back a lot further than the punk explosion of the 1970s, from traditional folk music through to the bottleneck rural blues players of the 1930s and 1940s, the 1950s UK skiffle boom and early 1960s US garage bands. The punks may have articulated the do-it-yourself vision most clearly, turning it into a mantra, but they were inheriting a tradition that was established many years earlier. During the early period of punk’s development in the United Kingdom, a distinct division of labour can be seen in the impact of an ‘anyone can do it’ DIY ethos on a range of activities. These range from live performance to the creation and manufacture of punk artefacts (clothes, posters, flyers, fanzines, records). While some of these areas offered new opportunities for amateur producers, within more technical areas of manufacturing, including the physical production of records, do-it-yourself could only have a nominal impact. Many punk groups did not have access to sound recording technologies, and even if they did, they would have to hand over the cutting and pressing of vinyl to a professional outfit. There was certainly a widespread and outspoken desire to take artistic control away from mainstream sources, but in reality the full ownership of the means of production was at best a naive ambition. Similarly, sleeve artwork could be created by untrained designers, but print reproduction was often left to the services of a professional print studio – doing-it-yourself had obvious limitations when it came to large-scale production and distribution.

Design it Yourself? Punk’s Division of Labour

Punk’s do-it-yourself call to arms led to a widespread adoption of the rhetoric, if not always the practice, of independence from traditional means of production. During the early period of punk’s development in the United Kingdom, a distinct division of labour can be seen in the impact of an ‘anyone can do it’ DIY ethos on a range of activities. These range from live performance to the creation and manufacture of punk artifacts (clothes, posters, flyers, fanzines, records). While some of these areas offered new opportunities for amateur producers, within more technical areas of manufacturing, including the physical production of records, do-it-yourself could only have a nominal impact. Many punk groups did not have access to sound recording technologies, and even of they did, they would have to hand over the cutting and pressing of vinyl to a professional outfit. There was certainly a widespread and outspoken desire to take artistic control away from mainstream sources, but in reality the ownership of the means of production was at best a naive ambition. Similarly, sleeve artwork could be created by untrained designers, but print reproduction was often left to the services of a professional print studio – doing-it-yourself had obvious limitations when it came to large-scale production and distribution.

Henry Lives! Learning from Lawson Fandom

In an age when many fan activities are undertaken via online networks, devotees of long-dead Australian author Henry Lawson are predominantly bound by face-to-face participation in shared commemorative events. Traditionally seen by fans and readers as 'the Mate of Australia', Lawson is a figure who has inspired a constellation of transformative fan practices ranging from impersonation to extreme outback pilgrimages. Based on interviews with fans and participant observation, this article will show Henry Lawson Society events are intrinsically interactive, encouraging all members to participate in a variety of modes, through visual art, music, poetry and theatre. I argue that Henry Lawson fans are productive rather than critical, circulating their homages within a well-defined community of interest. I argue that Henry Lawson fans re-deploy texts in creative ways in order to make sense of their own social experience. Through a study the fan activities of passionate amateurs - such as Henry Lawson Literary and Memorial Society members - 'nonauthorised' ways of interpreting texts may be discerned, providing alternatives to the 'suspicious reading' of critics.

Liberty Icons: Linguistic and Multimodal Notes on the Cultural Roots of Digital Technologies

Since the famous 1984 Apple Television Ad , personal computers and the Internet have become icons of popular culture that embody libertarian values. Indeed, they have been described as the necessary tools for the empowerment of the individual and the realization of a peer-to-peer decentralized democracy. This libertarian representation has become a frame, perceived as universal and celebrated all over the world, on a daily basis, through the creation of user-generated contents. I believe that both personal computers and the Internet are American cultural products not only because of the very peculiar historical blending out of which they originate – a mixture of Cold War industrial research culture, US counterculture and DIY ethos (Turner 2006) – but, mainly, because of the founding concept that they are associated with, i.e. freedom. Adopting a functional linguistic/multimodal perspective, my article will explore the conceptual/semantic mapping of digital discourse through the analysis of a corpus of texts that goes from 1984 Apple Ad to Hillary Clinton’s Internet Freedom Speech in order to show how the current mainframe global discourse on digital technologies is permeated with a concept of freedom that combines the US founding rhetoric of liberty together with cybernetics, gnosticism and psychedelic narrations.

11th Time-Based Art Festival

Portland, Oregon September 12-22, 2013 The Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) in Portland, Oregon, is explicit about its focus: this is a festival about time. TBA occurs annually. TBA is ten days long. TBA presents scores of performances and events. TBA is preoccupied with interpreting history and invested its imagining future. For anyone interested in bold new work occurring in theater, dance, performance, video, film, sound, installation, and a host of other category-defying arts, presence at this annual celebration and exploration is strongly encouraged. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The festival began in 2003, partly inspired by other performing arts festivals occurring around world. Since 1995, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) and TBA founder Kristy Edmunds had been curating itinerant programs of local and international artists at empty warehouses and other diverse sites throughout city. This open and experimental spirit is still present throughout festival, with events occurring at established institutions and makeshift venues, as well as public and virtual spaces. Now in its eleventh year, TBA, presented by PICA, continues to bring a world-class cast of performers and artists to this city known for its DIY ethos and civic-minded populace. In her second year as artistic director, Angela Mattox assembled artists from South America, North Africa, Europe, and across United States, including many from Portland. Festival programming spanned all hours a day, with daytime workshops, lectures, panels, and visual art exhibitions, evening performances, and late-night events and parties at festival's home base (called the Works), which occupied an enormous warehouse this year. Free from constraints of a unifying theme, festival allowed work itself to reveal common and conflicting concerns of moment. One standout performance was Argentinian writer/director Lola Arias's documentary theater piece, El ano en que naci The Year I Was Born, 2012). Arias is establishing an international reputation for her approach to experimental theater about collective trauma and national history. For El ano en que naci, Arias put out a call for performers actors, musicians, and others in Chile who had been born during Pinochet dictatorship (1973-90). Arias selected eleven whose personal stories of growing up during Pinochet regime provide a spectrum of experiences: some are children of left-wing activists who disappeared during regime, while others are children of government and military officials. Arias then fashioned this material into a play, performed by selected eleven artists each telling their own stories. Through a series of overlapping vignettes, they perform their own lives, each other's lives, and lives of their parents. The high-energy play deploys an array of representational strategies that includes family letters, photographs, and toy soldiers magnified via overhead projectors; chalk-drawn maps on floor; live video feeds; electric guitar choruses; and more. All of these activities make visible struggles of a generation processing pain, grief, tension, and confusion of its time. Another festival highlight was Moroccan choreographer Bouehra Ouizguen's new piece Ha! Inspired by writings of Sufi mystic Rumi, Ha! relies as much on sound produced by performers as it does on their movements. The performance begins in darkness, with Ouizguen and her three collaborators, a trio of Moroccan cabaret singers, emitting a series of rhythmic ha sounds. The lights brighten to reveal performers, their black-clad bodies and white headscarves bobbing energetically in time with their chants. The volume of chant and intensity of movements increase until energy dissipates and performers, red-faced and sweaty, grunt their way toward back of stage. The remainder of performance involves more subdued patterns of shape and sound created by interactions of four women onstage. …

Indymedia and The New Net News

Indymedia and The New Net News