Cultures of Participation: Arts, Digital Media and Cultural Institutions [1 ed.] 0367218380, 9780367218386

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Cultures of Participation

This book examines cultural participation from three different but interrelated perspectives: participatory art and aesthetics, participatory digital media and participatory cultural policies and institutions. Focussing on how ideals and practices relating to cultural participation express and (re)produce different “cultures of participation”, an interdisciplinary team of authors demonstrate how the areas of the arts, digital media and cultural policy and institutions are shaped by different but interrelated contextual backgrounds. Chapters offer a variety of perspectives and strategies for empirically identifying “cultures of participation” and their current transformations and tensions in various regional and national settings. This book will be of interest to academics and cultural leaders in the areas of museum studies, media and communications, arts, arts education, cultural studies, curatorial studies and digital studies. It will also be relevant for cultural workers, artists and policy makers interested in the participatory agenda in art, digital media and cultural institutions. Birgit Eriksson is Professor of cultural theory and analysis at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. Her current research focuses on participatory arts and culture, art and social communities, aesthetics and politics. She is the author or editor of eight books. Recent journal articles include “Forms and potential effects of citizen participation in European cultural centres” (co-au, 2018) and “Are we really there, and in contact? Staging firsthand witnesses of contemporary Danish warfare” (2017). Carsten Stage is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. His current research focuses on patient participation, affect and social media. Recent publications include the monographs The Language of Illness and Death on Social Media (Emerald, 2018, co-au), Networked Cancer (Palgrave, 2017) and Global Media, Biopolitics and Affect (Routledge, 2015, co-au) and the edited collection Affective Methodologies (Palgrave, 2015, co-ed). Bjarki Valtysson is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His current research is focussed on cultural participation, digital cultural policy and algorithmic platform societies. He is the author or editor of several books and articles. Recent publications include Media and the Mundane: Communication Across Media in Everyday Life (Nordicom 2016, co-ed), Technologies of Labour and the Politics of Contradiction (Palgrave 2018, co-ed) and Digital Cultural Policy: From Politics to Practice (Palgrave, 2020).

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

Ethnic Media in the Digital Age Edited by Sherry S. Yu and Matthew D. Matsaganis Narratives of Place in Literature and Film Edited by Steven Allen and Kirsten Møllegaard Unplugging Popular Culture Reconsidering Materiality, Analog Technology, and the Digital Native K. Shannon Howard Advertising in MENA Goes Digital Ilhem Allagui Gambling in Everyday Life Spaces, Moments and Products of Enjoyment Fiona Nicoll Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media Aspasia Stephanou Millennials and Media Ecology Culture, Pedagogy and Politics Edited by Anthony Cristiano and Ahmet Atay Media Cultures in Latin America Key Concepts and New Debates Edited by Anna Cristina Pertierra and Juan Francisco Salazar Cultures of Participation Arts, Digital Media and Cultural Institutions Edited by Birgit Eriksson, Carsten Stage and Bjarki Valtysson For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Cultural-and-Media-Studies/book-series/SE0304

Cultures of Participation Arts, Digital Media and Cultural Institutions

Edited by Birgit Eriksson, Carsten Stage and Bjarki Valtysson

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Birgit Eriksson, Carsten Stage and Bjarki Valtysson; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Birgit Eriksson, Carsten Stage and Bjarki Valtysson to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2019945321 ISBN: 978-0-367-21838-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-26645-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figures List of contributors 1 Introduction: Cultures of participation

vii viii 1

B I R G I T E R I KSSO N , CARSTE N STAGE AN D B JAR K I VALT YSSON

PART I

Participatory art and aesthetics 2 Performance, public (re)assembly and civic reenactment

11 13

S H A N N O N J ACKSO N

3 Autonomy and collectivity at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in Japan

30

G U N H I L D B ORGGRE E N AN D AN E MO N E P L ATZ

4 Cross-cultural collaboration: Modes of participation for co-creation of the urban public space

51

M I N N A VA L JA KKA

5 Art and local communities: Inclusion, interests and ownership in participatory art projects with embroiderers and billiard players

71

B I R G I T E R I KSSO N

PART II

Digital media and technology 6 VR – the culture of (non)participation? Reframing the participative edge of virtual reality A N N A N AC H E R

91

93

vi

Contents

7 Photo-sharing as participatory surveillance

110

C L A R E S O U TH E RTO N , MAJA SO N N E DAMKJÆR AND ANDERS A L B R E C H TS LUN D

8 Medialities of participation in sound art

129

VA D I M K E Y LIN

9 The participatory patient: Exploring the platformed multivalence and public value of cancer storytelling on social media

147

CA RS TE N S TAGE

PART III

Cultural policy and institutions

165

10 The “problem” of participation in cultural policy

167

L E I L A J A N C OVICH A N D DAVID STE VE N SO N

11 Public participation and agency in art museums

185

E M I L I E S I TZ IA

12 Re-ordering and re-performing: Re-placing cultural participation and re-viewing wellbeing measures

201

S U SA N O M A N

13 Diving into the archive: Google Cultural Institute and the cultural politics of participation

220

B J A R K I VA LT YSSO N

Index

236

Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2

4.3 4.4 12.1

12.2

Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley (2017) Aaron Landsman, City Council Meeting, NYC, 2013 Paul Ramírez Jonas, Public Trust (2010) Emma Malig, Atlas Lamenti, 2018 Kōryū Shrine, Chūjō village, Niigata Prefecture, August 2018 Former ski house in Sekiasa village, Niigata Prefecture, August 2018 View of Kōichi Sakai, The Green Room Project 2018, August 2018 Forms of participatory agency in the MG Festival in Jakarta The varying interrelatedness of three main variables of participation and collaboration enacted through an artwork or an intervention One form of participation enacted through an artwork Unplanned forms of participation by residents A recreation of question 1, from the four questions in the Office for National Statistics’ Measuring National Wellbeing Debate questionnaire A re-ordering of priorities in the Measuring National Wellbeing Debate Questionnaires

16 24 26 39 40 43 44 59

61 62 63

207 208

Contributors

Anders Albrechtslund is Associate Professor in Information Studies and Director of Center for Surveillance Studies, Aarhus University. Gunhild Borggreen is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Maja Sonne Damkjaer is Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. Birgit Eriksson is Professor of cultural theory and analysis, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, [email protected] Shannon Jackson is Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts and Design at UC Berkeley, where she is also the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of rhetoric and of theater, dance and performance studies. Leila Jancovich, Associate Professor in cultural policy and participation, University of Leeds. Vadim Keylin is PhD Fellow at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. Anna Nacher is Associate Professor at Institute of Audiovisual Arts, Department of Management and Social Communication, Jagiellonian University. Susan Oman is an AHRC creative economy engagement fellow looking at data, diversity and inequality in the Sheffield Methods Institute, University of Sheffield. She was recently awarded an honorary fellowship to the Institute of Cultural Practices at University of Manchester. Anemone Platz is Associate Professor in Japan studies at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University. Emilie Sitzia holds a special chair at the University of Amsterdam and is an associate professor of cultural education in the Department of Art and Literature at the University of Maastricht. She is the director of the Master of Arts and Heritage programme at UM.

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Clare Southerton is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Vitalities Lab, Social Policy Research Centre and Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW Sydney. Carsten Stage ([email protected]) is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. David Stevenson, Head of Media, Communication and Performing Arts, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. Minna Valjakka is Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Bjarki Valtysson is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen.

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Introduction Cultures of participation Birgit Eriksson, Carsten Stage and Bjarki Valtysson

Over the last two decades, the ideal of transforming citizens, audiences and users into more active participants has become prevalent across a range of cultural sectors and spheres. In terms of policy, citizen participation and engagement are regarded as key components of democratic societies; and such policies are currently being practiced and put to work in artistic production, in various digital media spaces, and in cultural institutions. The concept of cultural participation is thus high on the agenda in cultural and media research and among artists, cultural workers and policy makers. But what are the characteristics of cultural participation, and how do they appear in different cultures of participation? The concept of participation is often taken as given and coloured with diffuse positive associations. The notion of participation seems intuitively to be something we want more of – a point which has, however, been convincingly challenged by a wave of more critical research on the intricate links between supporting participation and, e.g., monetizing user data on social media and legitimizing welfare cutbacks and socioeconomic instrumentalization of the arts. This book provides a new take by focussing on how the ideals and practices related to cultural participation express and (re)produce different cultures of participation. This basically implies that we begin with the premise that participation is enacted and practiced through very different and even conflicting contextualizations which depend a great deal on their social, technological and disciplinary settings. In order to provide a multifaceted (but still focussed) take on the subject, an interdisciplinary team of authors examines cultural participation from three different but interrelated perspectives: art and aesthetics, digital media and cultural policy and institutions. Combining these often disconnected disciplinary and empirical fields, the book provides a nuanced and critical overview of how various cultures of participation are currently taking shape in various cultural and regional contexts. By taking the concept of cultures of participation as our point of departure, we wish to stress three important points. First, the three fields covered by the book – arts, digital media and cultural institutions – are

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shaped by different but interrelated contextual backgrounds in terms of theorizing and analysing participation. In other words, they themselves constitute different and potentially conflictual cultures of participation with particular traditions, conceptual developments and methodologies when it comes to addressing participatory practices. By shedding light on the way in which cultural participation shapes and is shaped by various cultures of participation, the book provides a more contextualized understanding of how participation is used across disciplines and academic fields. Second, but of course in related fashion, the three fields also offer different strategies or focus points in terms of empirically identifying cultures of participation, including their current transformations in various regional and national settings. For instance, what counts as participation in aesthetics might not be viewed in the same way in a digital studies context. In the book, we approach these disciplinary differences by analysing the potentials and tensions of cultural participation in various forms of empirical material linked to art and aesthetics, digital media and cultural policies and institutions. Third, the combination of these different disciplinary and empirical cultures of participation in the same book demonstrates how the concept of cultural participation translates directly or indirectly into concrete practices initiated by artists, cultural workers, cultural institutions, technology and citizens. In this way, cultures of participation are not only explored in the book by looking at disciplines as cultures or through an awareness of how disciplines or academic areas come to identify particular practices as participatory. The chapters also take a more inductive empirical interest in the various cultural practices through which participation is currently developed and transformed outside strictly disciplinary logics. Taking cultures of participation as our point of departure will therefore hopefully provide us with an interdisciplinary interface at which conceptual, analytical and empirical differences and links can become clearer.1

Theme 1: Arts and aesthetics A 200-year tradition in aesthetics understands the relation between art and intersubjectivity as a matter of participating in an abstract and imagined community. However, in the last 50 years this tradition has been criticized for its focus on a reflective judgement, elevated above the body and the social/material contexts of the aesthetic experience. In contemporary aesthetics and cultural studies, the relation between art and community is often understood in more concrete terms involving body, affect, power, materiality and time- and site-specific context. This orientation towards more concrete and tangible communities has been reinforced since the social turn in art and aesthetics in the 1990s. In contemporary art there is strong interest in participatory art practices that both transform the role

Introduction

3

of the recipient and engage art more directly in society. In the first theme the chapters focus on modes of discursive and/or embodied participation in art practices, in temporary publics and more stable communities and in social, material and political life. In aesthetic theory, two ways of conceptualizing this link have been dominant. One has focussed on art’s ability to create micro-utopian communities and another on the ability to question already given identities and communities. But in between these two, a variety of participatory art practices unfold in more complex cultures of participation. The theme begins with the chapter entitled “Performance, public (re) assembly and civic reenactment”, in which Shannon Jackson explores the concepts of performance, public assembly and civic reenactment in order to see how they can inspire our thinking about 21st-century cultures of participation. She links two broad and often overlapping scholarly arenas of interdisciplinary arts and social justice. The first is an inter-arts conversation on what it means to engage in performance within and across visual arts, installation, film and new media – an arena in which the turn to performance is often synonymous with the turn to participation. The second research arena involves a focus on issues of social justice and the public good, and especially on the role of the arts in activating urgent political and economic issues of inequality and social justice – political contexts give the theme of participation a different kind of urgency. These two research domains are linked in Jackson’s essay, which starts with a meditation on performance as an inter-art topic and then moves into the various resonances of public (re)assembly, especially its social and political character. Using the artistic and social work of Aaron Landsman and Paul Ramirez Jonas in particular as a touchstone, Jackson combines the trajectories mentioned in her reflections on the ubiquitous 21st-century process of civic reenactment as a structure for socially engaged, participatory art practice. Considering what happens when civic processes are reenacted, i.e., publicly reassembled, she discusses the relationship between aesthetic reenactments and the other technological and policy domains at work in contemporary participatory culture. In their co-authored chapter, “Autonomy and collectivity at the EchigoTsumari Art Triennale in Japan”, Gunhild Borggreen and Anemone Platz offer an analysis of different types of autonomy and modes of participation in the contemporary Japanese art scene. They provide an overview of the theoretical discussions of aesthetic autonomy and the autonomy of art in the history of Western art and recount the ways in which concepts of artistic autonomy have been adapted and applied in the formation of modern art in Japan. Furthermore, they delve into some relevant trends in the contemporary field of regional art projects (chiiki āto) and reflect on the meaning of art projects as part of the post-growth conditions of Japanese society. The main part of the chapter focusses on fieldwork at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2018, founded by Fram Kitagawa as

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a means of community (re-)building (machizukuri) and contextualizes it within notions of the postautonomous. Borggreen and Platz analyse two specific art projects featured at the art triennale: Atlas Lamenti by Chilean-French artist Emma Malig, and Green Room Project 2018 by Japanese artist Kōichi Sakai. They show how these two art projects foster different kinds of negotiation of artistic and political autonomy involving the artist, the art organization behind the festival and volunteers from the local neighbourhood associations of the villages involved. They conclude that many types of autonomy and involvement are at stake in the complex structure of art projects at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, arguing for the existence of a postautonomous state in this type of art project. In “Cross-cultural collaboration: Modes of participation for co-creation of the urban public space”, Minna Valjakka engages in the shifting forms of participatory agency and strategies that are emerging from street art scenes worldwide. A case in point is the Micro Galleries initiative, a nonprofit art endeavour that has been presenting street art, participatory art, installation art and digital art since 2013. With a close analysis of the Micro Galleries Festival in Jakarta in 2017, Valjakka examines how locally embedded, cross-cultural street art events in the urban public space underline new methodological and theoretical challenges for the existing discourses and paradigms of participation in art. The Micro Galleries Festival reclaimed the urban public space through simultaneous activities in everyday living environments and multidisciplinary co-creations between organizers, collaborators, artists both on-site and off-site, volunteers, residents and visitors. This highlights not only the intricate modalities and positionalities of participation which emerge from (un)planned collaborations and unexpected incidents but also a need to investigate them. Valjakka’s study is based on a longitudinal and interdisciplinary research approach and is inspired primarily by Irit Rogoff’s and Sruti Bala’s calls for a broader and a more detailed theorization of participation, extending it into the realms of visual culture and non-participation. Even in the face of contradictions and challenges, these kinds of multimethod crosscultural street art interventions hold the potential to expand the modes of participation beyond contemporary art into the spatio-aesthetic and sociopolitical conventions of the urban public space. In the next chapter, “Art and local communities: Inclusion, interests and ownership in participatory art projects with embroiderers and billiard players”, Birgit Eriksson explores the right to participate equally in art and culture. Even though this has been a universal right since the mid20th century, many people still do not participate in the arts. Artists, art institutions and cultural policies are attempting to change this through an increased focus on “citizen participation”, entailing new challenges and potentials. Building on a democratic understanding of participation, Eriksson examines two dilemmas encountered by cultural institutions trying to engage a wider and more diverse population in arts and culture:

Introduction

5

(1) some people are not interested in what art institutions have to offer; and (2) there is an inevitable paradox at stake when artists and art institutions try to design participation by other people. These two dilemmas echo challenges of participation that have been identified in contemporary development studies and aesthetic theory – and are closely linked to unequal power and to heterogeneous interests and valuation criteria. By tracing these inequalities and heterogeneities, Eriksson studies how these dilemmas are dealt with in two participatory artistic projects involving members of an embroidery club in Sant Llorenç de Cerdans, a small village in the Spanish Pyrenees, and the inhabitants of Hørve, a small village in Denmark. Based on an analysis of these two cases, she discusses how participatory art projects can connect to the interests of inhabitants in rural areas, reevaluate the artistic and social aspects of cultural participation and redistribute the right to invite, include and empower others.

Theme 2: Digital media and technology The second theme of the book highlights the role and importance of digital media as a new and central arena for practising and academically discussing cultural participation. Historically speaking, the arrival of new media technologies has often stimulated cultural fantasies of more intense forms of engagement or inclusion of (previously excluded) voices and producers. In his famous essay on technological reproduction (1935), Walter Benjamin argued that new media technologies of that time would facilitate a shift towards citizen participation by allowing the general public to write and be published in newspapers or appear on photos or in films. With the rise of the internet – and especially social media platforms based on user-generated content – the fantasy of the participatory citizen supported by the affordances of rising media technologies was once again activated and linked to high hopes of creating more diverse, democratic and engaged public spheres. Early internet scholars discussed this medium in terms of citizen engagement and empowerment, frequently using hybrid terms such as prosumers, producers, interactive audience, creative audience and productive enthusiasts. But more recent work in the field has acknowledged that digitized participatory cultures cannot be separated from their technological infrastructures and platforms, which always facilitate certain forms of participation while blocking others. It has also stressed the fact that social media create invisible forms of participation by default, with users being forced to contribute to the accumulation of data used to shape future communication with strategic or economic goals. Instead of celebrating participative read/write cultures and making-and-doing cultures, these voices emphasize elements such as data mining, surveillance, privacy breaches, digital labour and excessive communication without communicability. The chapters dealing with this theme engage in these discussions by critically exploring how

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digital media afford and shape particular forms of user participation but also how existing cultural practices are altered through mediatization and digitization processes. In her chapter “VR – the culture of (non)participation? Reframing the participative edge of virtual reality”, Anna Nacher reframes the concept of virtual reality (VR) from the perspective of spectators’ participation in order to acknowledge various modes of computational agencies more effectively. VR has been embraced recently by the entertainment industry, journalism and mainstream cinema; and with a view to mapping the possibilities and challenges of virtual reality as a meaningful participatory culture adequately, Nacher interrogates the ideological allure of current modes of VR. Nacher’s chapter argues in general for the need for a more robust critical theory of VR, seizing the opportunity to address shared human-machine agencies, typical of the systemic image of which virtual reality is one prominent example. Through the analysis of particular artworks, Nacher shows how the overlapping realities of human and algorithmic agencies call for a new understanding of cultural participation. The chapter “Photo-sharing as participatory surveillance” is co-authored by Clare Southerton, Maja Sonne Damkjær and Anders Albrechtslund, who explore emerging practices of sorting, sharing and storing digital photos in everyday family life. The purpose is to investigate what motivates the use of digital technologies in families and to examine how parents describe and perceive their digital practices. The chapter draws on empirical data from in-depth interviews with 17 Danish families over six months in 2017, focussing on the changing affordances of family photographs. The study shows that both parents and children use their digital devices, particularly smartphones, as cameras to document their lives and to share photos with others. However, the interviews also show that parents feel uncertain about the future of their photos, owing to concerns about the potential uses and misuses of their images and how these images can be preserved. The authors therefore argue that the tensions and negotiations arising due to the use of digital technologies by families can be seen as part of the increase in participatory surveillance culture. In “Medialities of participation in sound art”, Vadim Keylin bridges an interest in sound art with media-specific forms of audience participation. The chapter argues that audience participation is a strong thread running through a good deal of sound art practice all the way back to its beginnings in the 1950s and 60s, yet remains underexplored in sound art discourse. At the same time, Keylin argues, the kind of participation inherent to sound art diverges significantly from the ideas of participatory art and relational aesthetics which dominate the contemporary art discourse. Sound art emphasizes the corporeal and cultural aspects of its medium, so the participatory processes it invokes are also media specific

Introduction

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and inextricable from the material and structural aspects of such artwork. In his chapter, Keylin thus investigates the connection between mediality and participation in sound art, discussing the kinds of interactions that are made possible by sound artworks and mechanisms by which these interactions are facilitated and communicated to the participants. To do this, Keylin applies the concept of affordance to a select number of artworks that are categorized into three environment types (local, networked and augmented) and argues that the participatory affordances of sound artworks situated in each environment type exhibit certain similarities, showing how material and structural aspects of such artwork facilitate, affect and are affected by participatory processes. Carsten Stage’s chapter, “The participatory patient: Exploring the platformed multivalence and public value of cancer storytelling on social media”, focusses on and discusses cancer patients’ social media practices as a particular type of patient participation through an analysis of the cancer storytelling project of the Swedish-Brazilian patient Fabian Bolin (born 1987). In the article Bolin’s project is framed theoretically by Stage through the concept of the participatory patient, which involves a certain type of patient behaviour characterized by an increased desire for visibility, by a noncompliant attitude towards being treated purely as a medical object and by having a fantasy of knowledge as power – the idea that knowing and continuously researching your body will also guarantee subjective agency and your ability to act in relation to illness in constructive ways. The participatory patient of today is thus also often a patient who is able and willing to engage with his or her own biology through digital health resources on the internet and social media, including patient forums, the websites of medical organizations, medical apps, patient blogs and profiles and citizen-led crowdfunding for treatment or research. The chapter outlines the multiple forms of value produced by Bolin’s storytelling project, where marketplaces and safe spaces for peer support seem to merge through participatory patient practices. But it also presents the potential clashes between this platformed multivalence and public values like transparency, equal treatment and privacy.

Theme 3: Cultural policy and cultural institutions The last theme of this book looks at different ways in which cultural policy and cultural institutions relate to cultural participation, thereby affecting and producing cultures of participation. Discursively, there is no doubt that cultural participation is central to cultural policies. This can be seen on all levels of cultural policy: municipalities, cities, nation states or supra-state bodies and organizations like the EU, the Council of Europe or UNESCO. In these settings, cultural participation is frequently looked upon as a natural outcome of policy processes and usually regarded in a positive light. Indeed, it is quite hard to find cultural policy documents

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that warn about the negative effects and outcomes of cultural participation. Cultural institutions are important parts of realizing cultural policy. They are amongst the key actors that translate policy into practice. Evidently, there is a huge difference between cultural institutions in terms of power and prestige, in terms of form and in terms of how they are staged within the larger field of regional, national and international fields of cultural production and consumption. However, what they have in common is a sense of organizational form and authority. These are automatically embedded in a given cultural policy which sets the stage on which cultural institutions can perform. The chapters in this theme focus in different ways on how cultural policy and cultural institutions facilitate cultural participation. They do this through different lenses and different conceptual takes and by considering different institutional settings. What they have in common, however, is a certain degree of scepticism regarding how cultural policy tends to promote empowering, emancipative discourses that are automatically associated with cultural participation, and how cultural institutions form these in their own specific contexts. The chapters therefore share a critical attitude towards the application of cultural participation, when it is further embedded within cultural policy and in the circumstances in which cultural institutions operate. The theme starts with Leila Jancovich’s and David Stevenson’s contribution, “The ‘problem’ of participation in cultural policy”. According to them, the need to increase recorded rates of cultural participation has become a recurring trope within cultural policy discourse, despite evidence that demonstrates the breadth of people’s everyday participation across a range of cultural and creative practices. This chapter therefore challenges the very the notion of “non-participation” as a “problem” and instead questions the legitimacy of taste hierarchies on which established cultural policy is founded. Adopting a historical approach, the chapter identifies when and how certain forms of cultural participation in the UK were rendered problematic. It argues that rather than being a problem to be solved, the continuing existence of so-called cultural non-participation is in fact central to maintaining the status quo and affirming power relationships which are taken for granted within cultural policy. Drawing on institutional theory, the chapter goes on to examine how the discursive logics of the arts provides the origins of the discursive subject identity of today’s cultural non-participant and imposes constraints on opportunities for alternative policy actions. It also shows that the concept of participation in cultural policy is not about power and decision making (which is how it would be regarded in political science) but is instead a more transactional concept centred on the invitation to take part in activities that others have decided are of universal value. The chapter concludes that this has implications in terms of who has a legitimate right to speak within the field of cultural

Introduction

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policy, which can only begin to be addressed by abandoning the idea that anyone is a cultural non-participant. Emilie Sitzia’s chapter, “Public participation and agency in art museums”, focusses on the field of art museums. The chapter argues that the term participation now covers a range of public, institutional and artistic practices ranging from attendance to contribution, collaboration, interpretation and co-creation of artworks. This disparity in the use of the term often leads to problems of communication and expectation within art institutions themselves and between art museums and their funding bodies, the public and the artists involved. Indeed, participation in art museums is complicated by tensions between the autonomy of the arts and the social engagement of the artist and the institution concerned. In this chapter, Sitzia builds on former works which focussed on an updated scale of participation specifically adapted to the art museum and takes these further to analyse how participatory practices in art build diverse forms of public agency. The chapter first investigates what public agency is in the context of the art museum and how it relates to key concepts such as empowerment, ownership, knowledge creation and learning. It then presents the kind of agency that is created, allowed and acceptable in art museums, as well as taking a close look at the relationship between various forms of participatory practices in art museums and agency, focussing on three key types of participatory practice: meaning making, co-creation of artworks or events and participatory collection management activities. For each of these three practices Sitzia investigates, on theoretical grounds, the level of agency, the output and the educational framework involved. Investigating participation through agency, this chapter contributes to theoretical debates about the role and impact of participation in the arts. Susan Oman’s contribution, “Re-ordering and re-performing: Re-placing cultural participation and re-viewing wellbeing measures”, reflects on empirical findings to present methodological developments that have emerged from research investigating the wellbeing agenda and cultural policy. According to Oman, research evaluating the impact of cultural participation tends to approach participants and ask how a given dose of culture (such as a community arts programme or a particular performance) may have improved their wellbeing. This has been criticized for lacking robustness. This chapter attempts to reveal what happens when you re-order the relationship between research site and variable and instead use a large-scale qualitative data set collected about wellbeing to ask questions of culture. Oman therefore re-performs the UK’s national wellbeing debate, enabling her to listen to everyday responses about what matters to people, comparing them to headline reports. Drawing from Butler’s recent developments of performativity as re-performance, a mode in which dysfunction can be revealed, the chapter applies this to a methodology of uncovering. The chapter outlines findings from secondary

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analysis of ONS (Office for National Statistics) qualitative survey data, together with group discussions, reproducing methodologies of the ONS. It reveals aspects of the value and values that wellbeing, cultural and policy research obscures, and it reflects on how cultural participation might be re-placed in conceptions of wellbeing for policy. The chapter concludes that knowledge of participation and wellbeing is not a neutral representation of either; and that in disrupting and reordering knowledge practices, the relationship between cultural participation and wellbeing measurement can be located in a way that considers how the good life is lived in greater detail. The final chapter in the book looks at the cultural politics of Google and how these are revealed in the Google Cultural Institute. Bjarki Valtysson’s contribution, “Diving into the archive: Google Cultural Institute and the cultural politics of participation”, therefore discusses how Google frames users’ cultural participation in the Google Cultural Institute and how the cultural politics of the archive revoke discussions on cultural participation within the field of cultural policy. The digital archive contains logics and cultural policy discourses that emphasize creativity, user engagement and user interaction. Seen from this perspective, digital archives potentially turn users into active participants and co-creators. However, cultural participation in digital archives leaves lasting traces of data. This chapter carefully considers how the Google Cultural Institute discursively frames its collaboration with established museums and cultural institutions, which kind of participative potentials the archive offers to users and what price users pay for interacting with the archive. In order to do this, the chapter applies a platform analysis of selected projects facilitated by the Google Cultural Institute and how these are encapsulated in the wider frameworks of Google’s cultural politics. This entails focussing on Google’s privacy policy and terms of service and how these outline the cooperation between Google, established cultural institutions and users. Together, the 12 chapters explore how the ideals and practices related to cultural participation take shape in and are shaped by diverse disciplinary and empirical cultures of participation. Combining theoretical and methodological interventions, as well as case studies from a variety of cultural, regional and disciplinary contexts, we hope that the book will be of interest to academics, cultural leaders and cultural workers in the areas of museum studies, media and communications, the arts, arts education, cultural studies, curatorial studies and digital studies – and that it can inform future research and work on participation in all of the three fields: arts, digital media and cultural institutions.

Note 1 The book builds upon the interdisciplinary research and conferences in Take Part – research network on cultural participation, funded by The Danish Council for Independent Research.

Part I

Participatory art and aesthetics

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Performance, public (re)assembly and civic reenactment Shannon Jackson

This title – Performance, Public (Re)Assembly and Civic Reenactment – sounds a range of keywords that might be reassembled in various ways. Performance. Public. Assembly. Civic. Reenactment. One might experiment with different ways of deciding which adjectives modify which nouns. My hope in this essay is to reflect on concepts of Public Assembly and Civic Reenactment and see what they have to contribute to Cultures of Participation. Such an interest comes from a range of sources – from an earlier artistic life in the performing arts, from my experience as an employee at U.S. public institutions, from my ongoing interest in the relation between aesthetics and politics and much more. In what follows, I seek to link two broad scholarly arenas: The first is what might be called an “inter-arts” conversation on what it means to engage performance within and across visual arts, installation, film and new media; in such expanded art contexts, the turn to “performance” is often synonymous with the turn to participation (Bourriaud 2002; Fischer-Lichte 2008; Parker & Sedgewick 1995).1 The second research arena is a focus on issues of social justice and the public good, especially on the role of the arts in activating urgent political and economic issues of inequality and social justice. Such political contexts give the theme of participation a different kind of urgency. Certainly that interest is animated by the fact that I work at UC Berkeley, a publicly defunded university with an historic activist history. To work at such an institution requires a constant effort to activate the arts, design, culture and creativity for the public good. As other contributions to this collection make clear, such social and political questions are of course urgent for a range of regions and nations outside of the United States as citizens grapple with the changing understandings of what it means to “participate” in sectors whose “public” characters are under re-definition. These two research domains – interdisciplinary arts and social justice – often overlap and will do so in the following three-part essay. I will start with a meditation on performance as an inter-art topic and then move into public (re)assembly, especially its social and political character. From there, I will endeavor to join both trajectories in some final

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reflections on civic reenactment as a structure for socially engaged, participatory art practice. While the language of participation provides a through line throughout the essay – and this collection – the analysis of its “culture” differs depending upon the political stakes and formal parameters of each context. An emphasis on performance allows us to foreground aesthetic process as well as the world-making power of participation; moreover, those made worlds – public, private, civic and intimate – depend upon the productive power of repetition to come into being; they depend upon assembly and our willingness to reassemble each day.

Performance As a scholar of performance I am part of a large group of scholars who think continually about bodies, language, spectacle, sound, time and space in ever new combinations. That context has become newly energized and estranged by performance experiments that are sited, not only in theaters but also in visual art galleries, biennials, museums, installations, plazas, parks, community centres and other site-specific locations. As those contexts have proliferated, there is tremendous variance in how such practices are produced and received. Former sculptors have different assumptions of what it means to mobilize bodies, language, spectacle, sound, time and space than do theater practitioners. Painters differ from choreographers in their approach to time. Meanwhile, the curators and producers of all of these forms have learned new skill sets in order to support hybrid experiments – aesthetically, institutionally, politically. As one vehicle for framing these conversations, my collaborator Paula Marincola and I created a large site of interdisciplinary keywords, commissioning short texts from curators, artists and critics from across visual art, theatrical, choreographic and performance artforms: In Terms of Performance (Jackson & Marincola 2016). While performance is the mega-keyword, we broke down its associations into about thirty other keywords: including terms such as action, character, live, duration, score, and yes, participation. Our goal was to create an open glossary, one with reflections that were not definitive but invitational, prompting more reflections about the connections and disconnections amongst art practices across painting, installation, theatre, dance, sculpture, video and media art. Different types of artists and critics might find that their ideas of classic terms such as composition or narrative might strongly diverge. So too more contemporary terms such as performativity or reenactment are differently loaded for differently positioned artists, writers, curators and audience members. The site launched at Tate Modern in London, and, since then, has been part of courses and public programming at a range of institutions. In the spring of 2018, it received a new assembly at the Brooklyn Academy of Music when BAM’s curators and

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archivists created a gallery exhibition that promotes both offline and online exchange around the terms. Placed adjacent to the opera lobby, this exhibition-educational-engagement platform was a quasi-participatory form and activated in extended participatory events by a variety of artists – Sharon Hayes, Malik Gaines and more. Most importantly for this essay, a varied aesthetic understanding of performance promotes a varied understanding of participatory cultures; participatory aesthetics change with shifts in time, score, spectacle and other parameter of enactment.

Public (re)assembly In shifting to a new phrase – “public (re)assembly” – we have an opportunity to broach issues of art, participation, social justice and public-ness with renewed emphasis. As noted earlier, my own thinking about this combination is influenced by my location at a publicly defunded institution of higher education – UC Berkeley; moreover, the first writing of this essay occurred at a time when Berkeley’s activist legacies were facing new challenges to freedom of assembly and free speech when alt-right speakers invoked the legacies of free speech to legitimate what some deemed racist and injurious speech on our campus. In the summer of 2017, my colleagues and I had already planned a co-curated lecture series under the phrase “Public (Re)Assembly” in order to explore the political and aesthetic implications of assembly, indeed of public assembly, in our contemporary moment (Burton, Jackson & Willsdon 2016; Rogoff et al. 2017; Rogoff 2008; Præstegaard Schwartz & Scott Sørensen 2018; Sternfeld 2018, 2017).2 And as more alt-right speakers threatened to arrive on our campus in the fall of 2017 – prompting racist posters and threatening speech acts in advance of their arrival – we found that the gatherings around this series became newly reframed and newly poignant for all of us. What follows are some thoughts that animated this research platform throughout the academic year 2017/2018. To begin, we might note that the keyword assembly has a range of etymological associations. I will foreground five for now. 1 2 3 4 5

a bringing or coming together a gathering of persons for the purposes of deliberation and decision a work of art consisting of miscellaneous objects fastened together in a line, a series of workers and machines in a factory by which a succession of identical items is progressively assembled in schools, a general gathering of staff and pupils

These associations are wide and varied and provide a range of prompts for refining our thinking about cultures of participation. To take number one, such cultures are of course interested in knowing how to bring

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Figure 2.1 Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley (2017) Source: Photo credit – Pax Ahismsa Gethen

people and things together or enduring their coming together in ways that are often unexpected. We might consider in number three, the artistic genealogy of assembly; assemblage – from Dubuffet to Rauschenberg to Roman Bearden to Betye Saar – denotes an aesthetic practice of combination and juxtaposition, a way of bringing multiple perspectives and forms into the same space; as such, assemblage undergirds the genealogy of participatory aesthetics. Pushing ahead, the assembly line is a central image from industrial labor history; it prompts an image of work that has arguably been changed by a post-industrial shift in the nature of labor; the purported shift from Fordism to post-Fordist work practice tracks a move from the production of community objects to the monetization of services and experiences. As such, the 21st-century assembly line of experiential labor coincides with a supposed turn to participation. Meanwhile, the school assembly – a general gathering of staff and pupils for teaching, disciplining, training and perhaps inspiring – is also a familiar image, one being defamiliarized now as the nature of “school” is reassembled by 21st-century pedagogies, technologies and privatization strategies. All of those associations are resonant, but it is the second association on which I will linger the most, as it foregrounds the social and political dimensions of assembly, performance and participation (Jackson & Marincola 2016).3 Number two, A gathering of persons for the purposes of deliberation and decision, is of course the definition most associated with the long tradition of democratic social theory. Such democratic assemblies might take shape as protest (a space of gathering), as the public sphere (a space of deliberation) or in governmental bodies (a place of

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decision). Indeed, when I first started this project on public (re)assembly I wanted to explore the relation amongst protest and amongst governance. What does it mean to assemble in public in our present moment? And what does it mean to assemble public sector systems? The first question is not obviously related to the second. One might ask if and when there is a relation between the public appearance of the former and the systematic operations of the latter. To take up the first question about the present meaning of “assembling in public” is to invoke the long history of reflection about protest and about the public sphere, especially about the physical appearance and arrangement of bodies in real time and co-present public space. Within social theory, to assemble in public is to recall both the embrace and the condemnation of this appearance, embraced as a key element of socalled democratic process and condemned as an unruly take-over by the “masses” (Arendt 2006; Habermas 1991, 2005; Fraser 1990; Warner 2002). In her Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Judith Butler recalls the ambivalence amongst thinkers of all political persuasions about whether and how such assemblies index “the people” and whether they index a “populism” to be celebrated or a “populism” to be castigated. Butler cites Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to reinforce her argument that any appeal to “the people” as such depends upon a “constitutive exclusion” of who is not recognized within the assembly or who is rightly or wrongly represented by said assembly (cited in Butler 2015, p. 4). So too attributions of “democracy” or the “democratic power” of any gathering shift depending upon one’s tacit alignment with the principles and symbols of the gathering; what looks like brainwashed populism from one vantage point is heralded as democracy in action from another. For Butler, however, an assembly is most specifically “performative” in a different sense, that is, by virtue of its power as an “act of delimitation”, an act of both exclusion and inclusion. The performativity of assembly “establishes a fundamental problem of democracy even as – or precisely when – it furnishes its key term, ‘the people’”. Like an Austinian speech act (Austin 1971) that does things with words, Butler highlights the world-making power of assembly to produce a “people” that it simultaneously appears to describe and which it can never fully include. But assemblies are performative in other ways, ways that invoke not only the rhetorical sense of the performative but also the physical and aesthetic sense of performance. This means returning to the physicality of assembly, the appearance of bodies in real time and space, with roles assigned or assumed, sometimes with appropriate infrastructure for managing safety, crowd flow, sightlines and its durational unfolding. In my past work on the relationship between performance and socially engaged art, this infrastructural sense of performance is what I often emphasized (Jackson 2011). Notably, Butler brings this orientation to bear on her understanding of what it means to “assemble in public”, an orientation

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that takes seriously the physicality of “a concerted bodily enactment” next to their rhetorical effects: acting in concern can be an embodied form of calling into question the inchoate and powerful dimensions of reigning notions of the political. The embodied character of this questioning works in at least two ways: on the one hand, contestations are enacted by assemblies, strikes, vigils, and the occupation of public spaces; on the other hand, those bodies are the object of many of the demonstrations that take precarity as their galvanizing condition. After all, there is an indexical force of the body that arrives with other bodies in a zone visible to media coverage: it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt; it is this body, or these bodies, or bodies like this body or these bodies, that live the condition of an imperiled livelihood, decimated infrastructure, accelerating precarity. (Butler 2015, p. 10) I linger on this passage from Butler because here we might find a possible answer to my earlier questions. Once again, “What does it mean to assemble in public in our present moment? And what does it mean to assemble public sector systems? Is there a relation between the public appearance of the former and the systematic operations of the latter?” Here Butler suggests that there is an acute and urgent relationship between the former and the latter. The bodily assembly in public in fact provokes awareness of public sector systems, the need for access to such systems in order to sustain the lives of those bodies. The immediate, physical appearance signals its dependence upon social systems, the need for access to them. As someone who has devoted a substantial portion of her scholarly and administrative career to isolating such moments of systemic awareness, this perceived link is music to my ears. If only it were always true that bodily assembly provoked awareness in fellow citizens about everyone’s need for access to healthcare, employment, shelter, food and free education. But does it? Does it always? Does it in the United States? In the European Union? Does it in the ambiguous context of Brexit? Indeed, for many, is not the arrival of bodily assembly greeted with shock (and awe), disdain, even disgust and, at the very least, annoyed feelings of inconvenience? “Do they really have to block my way to work?” asks the inconvenienced citizen. “Do they really have to stop my path to the grocery store, or to school, or to the doctor?” Let us return one more time to other parts of this definition. Having thought about the performativity of gathering, deliberation connects assembly to the goals of the liberal public sphere, as Habermas and his critics elaborated it. It suggests that the assembled gathering is indeed a

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place to share perspectives, to share disagreements, and to reconcile the aspirations and demands of varied citizens and varied constituents. Decision, however, takes us elsewhere, certainly when set within the context of democratic governance. In such a context, decisions might imply the institution of a new process, a new law, a new regulation, a new binding agreement. And, once again, this is where we also find an interesting dialectic between the act of assembling in public and the act of assembling (and implementing) public sector systems. For Butler, there is a recursive and transitory relationship between the physical assembly and the decisions and power they have on something like “government”. In speaking about the Occupy movement or Arab spring, she notes: such enactments are invariably transitory when they remain extraparliamentary. And when they realize new parliamentary forms, they risk losing their character as the popular will . . . [further] . . . As the popular will persists in the forms it institutes, it must fail to lose itself in those forms if it is to retain the right to withdraw its support from any political form that fails to maintain legitimacy. (Butler 2015, p. 7) Dissatisfaction with the law or governmental processes – whether the laxity of its regulation or the restrictions of its regulation – prompts the desire to assemble, which in turn might evolve a new law or governmental processes, which in turn might create new dissatisfactions, which might in turn prompt new acts of public assembly – new strikes, new lock-outs. However abstract, the effort is to ensure that the popular will not “lose itself” in its “instituted” forms. But what does that mean? When citizens worry about losing themselves in institutions, that concern is often read as a concern to avoid one’s own bureaucratization, to ensure that the spirited expression of the people’s will remains alive and lively against governmental regulation. Understanding and largely appreciating that interpretation, I myself have been more interested to explore how the people’s will might remain alive and lively in regulation, that is in the public forms they institute. When and how do people see themselves in their instituted public forms? And is it possible for them to see themselves there more? For me, this is the moment when art comes in; this is where performance comes in. Many of my past preoccupations can be recast as participatory projects that use the arts to enliven our relation to the institutions that keep us alive; such public art projects – such cultures of participations  – have a chance of resensitizing citizens to their public systems, to the “will” behind and within their instituted forms. In Social Works, I shared some of my favorite examples of such publicly reassembled art and performance work (Jackson 2011). For instance, feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukules began her career washing museums in order to

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foreground the labor that kept a museum running; she then went on to becoming a semi-permanent artist in residence with New York’s sanitation department to foreground the labor that keeps the city running. In Touch Sanitation (1979–1980), she shook the hands of all 5000 sanitation workers in New York City’s five boroughs saying: “thank you for keeping New York City alive”. Or in Social Mirror (1983), she perched a mirror on the side of a moving garbage truck, inviting fellow citizens to see themselves reflected, literally, in their public sector system. Over the last decade, of course, we have seen a variety of new participatory genres with complex political stakes. The forms and formats of Occupy were most resonant for the way that they instilled liveliness into the project of instituting new forms, including the General Assembly and its human microphone, as well as DIY social institutions – public kitchens, libraries and daycares – that doubled as public art. In addition to exploring artists who enter systems of public service, we could also cite examples of public servants who deploy aesthetic practices. Take the feted career of the former mayor of Bogatá, Antanas Mockus. This mathematician, philosopher, and son of an artist ran for Mayor, won, and proceeded to engage the city as, he said, “a 6.5 million person classroom” (Caballero 2004, n.p.). At the time, the corruption, violence and incivility of Bogotá was perceived by some to be on the verge of chaos, unfixable. Mockus responded by using aesthetic humor to activate a different citizen consciousness. He put on a Superman costume and acted as a superhero: “Supercitizen”. Faced with extreme traffic, gridlock and accidents, Mockus responded by hiring 420 mimes to control traffic in dangerous streets. Mimes poked fun at reckless drivers. Mimes followed pedestrians who ignored stoplights, shaking their fingers and mocking their every move. Mockus called his cultural strategy “a pacifist counterweight . . . with neither words nor weapons, the mimes were doubly unarmed. My goal was to show the importance of cultural regulations” (ibid.). And, as he further described, “in a society where human life has lost value, there cannot be greater priority than re-establishing respect for life as the main right and duty of citizens” (ibid.). Traffic fatalities dropped by more than half during this period. Another time, Mockus asked citizens to put their civic power to use with 350,000 “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down” cards, distributed by his office to the populace. The cards were meant to approve or disapprove of other citizens’ behavior; people actively and peacefully used them in the streets. Such mechanisms allowed individual citizens to leverage their relationship to law and government in exchanges with each other; that is, it allowed citizens to reconsider their living relation to “instituted forms”. It dispersed that power to a range of people, turning everyday events into mini-assemblies, i.e., mini-gatherings for tacit and explicit deliberation; this participatory form allowed citizens to reconfirm or object to societal decision making over the norms by which individuals would interact with each other. Mockus’s

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ideas of citizenship culture demonstrate a normative function within a culture of participation. But in his participatory culture, the attempt was to re-stitch something like the popular “will” of the people – their emotions and desires – to public governance. Extra-parliamentary practices not only offered a counter to parliamentarian process; they served as a vehicle for re-performing and negotiating regulation; participatory aesthetics were deployed by “the people” as a vehicle for reckoning with the effectiveness or not of the “forms they had instituted”.

Reenactment Having explored interdisciplinary aesthetic questions around performance, having thought about social and political questions via a discussion of Assembly, I would like to now consider how to join aesthetics and political questions through productive repetition. Let me first return to our project In Terms of Performance and to some of the entries on reenactment. Like performance, reenactment also has a varied set of associations and the body of literature on it is broad and still expanding (Blackson 2007; Jackson & Kidd 2010; McCalman & Pickering 2010; Rosler 2011; Schneider 2011). It can mean repetition, reproduction or roleplaying. It can denote a performance offered in heritage sites and, more recently, a conceptual performance offered in aesthetic sites. I will start with a formal distinction – maybe an erroneous one – that Stefan Kaegi of Rimini Protokoll makes between historical reenactment and artistic projects. He writes, “Today, parallel to such historical reenactments, artistic projects often go far beyond the scope of historical reconstruction, especially when they move the live enactment of the past and its re-contextualization into the foreground” (Jackson & Marincola 2016).4 What does it mean to place context, or re-contextualization, in the foreground? To “enact again” might be to re-contextualize, to take out of context and place in a new one, and thereby to wrestle with a prior context so that it can make a different sense, or different non-sense, anew. Certainly that pursuit informs the odd and productive significance of some of the classic reenactment projects in the aesthetic sphere. In The Battle of Orgreave (2001), Jeremy Deller recreated a miners’ strike during the Thatcher era; as present-day participants played the roles of a past context they were forced to look anew at how this historical moment made sense of itself and how we make sense of it now. Or we can consider the many reenactment projects of Sharon Hayes. Her SLA Screeds (2003) are reenactments of the recorded cassette tapes that Patty Hearst shared with her parents when she asked them to collaborate with her captors. Hayes’s reenactment of a transcribed script puts the politics and strangeness of Hearst’s supposed brainwashing, and her roleplaying as Tania, on doubled display. Or consider In the Near Future (2008), where Hayes oddly and intriguingly offered a

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one-person reenactment of the protest strike of African American sanitation workers; in this famous moment in U.S. civil rights history, African American men held posters declaring “I AM a MAN”. Hayes also held a sign bearing that phrase, a reenactment that honored the strike’s protest legacies while also introducing gender dissonance to question the aspirations of manhood. “With re-enactment”, to return to Kaegi, “viewers, players, users, and concerned persons themselves climb once again into a stranger’s skin” (2016, n.p.). But, as he continues, the result is often, not simply a reconstruction of the past, but a speculative reflection on our present and future. Kaegi calls such a project “an anticipatory simulation game” (2016, n.p.), one that prepares us for the arrival of the future. Let us think further about this simulation game, the anticipatory simulation game, the “disturbances” in the linearity of time and how reenactment can be construed both as a variant of participatory aesthetics and maybe even as a variant of participatory politics. First off we must ask what it means to re-contextualize something, to place it in a new context; second we might also ask what it means to climb into a stranger’s skin (what those of us in the performing arts would call acting). Yes, reenactment is about past and present, but it is also about assuming a different role, a different character. What happens when you play someone else? Or play yourself as another self? And furthermore, is there political significance (civic significance) in our capacities to do that form of play? They, I mean we, meet every two months in the large assembly room inside the offices of the Berkeley Unified School District. They, I mean we, start to trickle in to find a seat amongst the rows of folding chairs placed on linoleum floors under fluorescent lights while in front of us, they – though it could be we – take their seats in front of the tables placed on the portable stage set up for the evening. They don’t look at us, even though we look at them, as they arrange their papers and microphones and as the clerk calls the meeting to order. And the meeting is off and running, or off and stumbling, as minutes are shared, as motions to approve are seconded, as the group, on and off the portable stage, recalls the finer parts of the rules of order. “Point of order,” someone might call from the sidelines, “excuse me, you can’t call point of order now,” says someone else. And we putter along, managed by the city council ‘agenda’ and its underwhelming plot plodding along, punctuated by occasional thumps of a gavel when a motion is carried. As if something happened, as if the motion carried us, as if the motion has changed us in some way, a decision made that has changed our ways of operating in the world. I’m there – we are there – for the big event which is a vote to install a 1% tax on private development to support the arts in the city of Berkeley. When the agenda tells us that it’s time to deliberate, I, and

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others not on the portable stage, line up as we planned to do in front of a microphone. Two go ahead of me and speak to express quickly their support of the measure – and then cede the rest of their three minutes to me. By the time I get up, I have five extra minutes attached to my three to share a prepared statement about the importance of the arts to the vitality of the city. I attempt to make eye contact with those on the portable stage. Two stare at their paperwork, and I try to will them to look up as I speak. I feel like I’m doing a scene study in acting class. I have my objective, and they are my obstacle. I recall this scene as an exhibit in the mundane process of public assembly in part because I was prompted to recall this kind of scene when I first learned about Aaron Landsman and Mallory Catlett’s City Council Meeting series (Landsman & Catlett 2013). Now I recall their project every time I return to the scene of my own city council meetings (I served as a cultural commissioner for the City of Berkeley for five years). In this project, which has been enacted in cities such as New York, Tempe, Houston and San Francisco, the City Council Meeting team reenacts transcripts from actual city council meetings in each region, creating a team of participants to decide on the arc of the evening and welcoming a wider audience to become participants in the wider process. I am interested in this project, not necessarily because it is the most exciting reenactment one could imagine but to ask about the possibilities of, you could say, a reenactment consciousness. What happens when a reenactment consciousness – an abstracting or complex process of sensitization, re-contextualization or “disturbance” – is brought to the daily rituals and public systems that we think of as dead or dying? What happens when the critical consciousness of a reenactment frame is brought to these mundane and repetitive unfurling operations of public life, of public sector life? These are public sector and civic processes that sustain our lives, keep our parks going or distribute resources. What is the role, one might ask, of roleplay in this process, especially when those on one side of the portable stage assume a position on the other? To briefly describe, the performance reenactments of City Council Meeting (Figure 2.2) are divided into three parts. Participants first enter an ante room, where there is an orientation video that mimics what it is like when you enter certain kinds of court or civic places: you hear instructions about how you will show you ID, where you will line up, how to prepare etc. Instead of those instructions, in City Council Meeting you are offered a bit of introduction into some theories of democracy from Plato to Aristotle, informed a bit by Rancière. The second section of the performance is a reading of transcripts from actual government meetings. The final section is created locally with artists and collaborating community members, which goes differently every time, creating some kind of animated combination to reflect on what was just heard. City Council

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Figure 2.2 Aaron Landsman, City Council Meeting, NYC, 2013. Source: Photograph by David A. Brown/dabfoto creative

Meeting are performance spaces where participants in situations reenact and sometimes re-interpret the behaviors of city governance, its rituals of entry, its pedagogical orientations, its rules etc. When viewers arrive they are given a choice of what they want to do and how they want to participate. They can be a counselor and read the meeting; they can be a speaker and say a piece of testimony (“I have a claim”); they can be a supporter where you do not necessarily have to say anything but you get instructions on the side at certain points about how to be involved; or you can be a bystander, which means that you can just watch. Once that is done the meeting starts and the local group of artists (the staffers) push the performance along. Staffers act as a kind of run crew throughout the performance and also keep performers on book, on script, as they go. This project came about because Landsman, one of the collaborating artists, was asked by a friend to attend – or, as he said, was “dragged” to – a city hall meeting with friends of friends. A council member had said that they were going to talk about a zoning issue that was going to be “really hot”. In the midst of the mundanity, the fumblings, the passing of the papers, they entered a moment that foregrounded for Landsman the theatricality of the assembly: a man came forward to complain about the state of the park in which he was living. He brought in a bag whose

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contents he dumped on the stage before the city council members, and it was filled with drug paraphernalia, used condoms and trash. He said, “this I picked up in the kid’s zone, in the playground area”. There was a flurry of activity and shock amongst council members who asked the man to leave; council members decided to suspend the meeting because he had created a public health hazard. To this he responded, “thank you for making my point better than I could have”. It was in this moment that Landsman connected the scene to “theatre” and thought, “what if we try to create some theatre from this”, foregrounding the theatricality of assembly in order to re-dynamize our connection to these processes. It seemed as if every city and almost every meeting, there is some apparently innocuous issue that gives way to more fundamental rifts, which start to come forward and energize a community to think about how it wants to be regulated. (ibid., p. 57) Let us connect that thought to my earlier questions about how to ensure that the popular will does not “lose itself” in its instituted forms. City Council Meeting reenactments try to re-dynamize the popular will, a will engaged in reevaluating its instituted forms. If reenactment helps with the process of re-energizing the popular will in relation to its instituted forms, it does so via the form of participatory roleplay. “The issues we use in our transcripts are often chosen in order to make sure that people think about the form” – the form and, as Landsman also says the “structures of participation”, so that people become differently attentive to those forms. Participants might find themselves reconnecting affectively, and oddly, with particular protocols for deliberation and decision making. Civic meetings, collective bargaining, public deliberation, collective agreements – all of those public processes have their protocols, repeated again and again over time. They become so familiar that we stop noticing their formal character. In swapping roles, however, and reenacting, the ritual of assembly becomes newly visible to us, newly urgent. Said one participant: I found the experience of being mayor for one-hour empowering. We can feel so defeated by the world around us, thinking we are powerless to change our environment. Taking a careful serious look at how the guts of a city work is a good thing to do. These are the very politics that matter most to our lives. (ibid.) That is one testimonial, but it is useful next to concepts of political governance. Reenactment allows an enlivened relation to a civic culture of

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participation, in part by reminding us that anyone could play anyone else’s role. As a last example, I will invoke the work of Paul Ramírez Jonas. In project after project we find Jonas engaging the stuff of public art – monuments and memorials – and recontextualizing its forms. In a piece like The Commons (2011), Jonas re-interprets the nationalist monumental conventions of the horse and rider. His large, oversized monument is cast not in bronze but in cork. Beholders are invited to tack notes of responses on its torso, turning an inert form into a space of modest participation. In many of his projects Jonas uses small interactions to provoke awareness of wider public systems. For instance, in Keys to the City (2010) – in New York City and elsewhere – Jonas engaged civic leadership to pass keys to unusual publicly-maintained sites. The Key to the City is passed to everyday citizens – not only high profile leaders – thereby encouraging residents to explore the civic landscape and reflect upon their role in its collective ownership. Jonas brought that same consciousness to other types of public practice in his more recent work, Public Trust (2016), a project that offered another case study on the art of participatory reenactment (Figure 2.3). This project was staged in three public squares in the Boston region; in each site, he used a trained team of interlocutors to invite citizens to make a promise publicly. As visitors walked through the train stations

Figure 2.3 Paul Ramírez Jonas, Public Trust (2010) Source: Photo credit – Ryan C. McMahon

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and plazas they lingered at the tables assembled for conversation and fabrication. Behind them a larger dynamic billboard displayed a series of promises collected from the daily news and from their fellow citizens on the ground – promises like “MBTA pledges to keep stations clean” or “Saudi Arabia promises to protect pilgrims” or “I promise to visit my grandparents more” or “Chelsea Clinton vows to stay friends with Ivanka Trump” or “I promise never to have cosmetic surgery”. In Public Trust participants had to consider the possibility of promise making and face the unease of sharing it publicly. Would that public sharing make them more accountable to their own speech act? Would receivers be inspired by it or confused by it, welcome it or laugh at it? Meanwhile, Jonas’s team worked materially and immaterially to seal the promise – in a handshake, by placing a hand on a Bible or doing their own rubbing on a piece of paper. Once again, the intimacy of a micro-gesture found its way into a systemic structure for re-activating public assembly, a space for reenacting and reconnecting with instituted forms. Motions made, motions carried. Interruptions and points of order. Promises made, promises betrayed, promises kept. Engraved, imprinted, ritualized, monumentalized. Whether reenacting the civic or reassembling the public sector, such practices share in the attempt to animate the hardened repetitions of public systems, reminding us that such systems were and might be central to the maintenance of an equitable and democratic life. I continue to be interested in these types of participatory art projects, including those that use reenactment to cultivate an affective connection to public systems. Can the “popular will” still see itself in the collective organizing, in civic meetings, in traffic regulation and in the parliamentary regulations it institutes? Can “the people” engage in a process for reimagining these processes anew? Finally, by joining performance to the productive repetitions of participatory assembly, the retrospective act of reenactment becomes a vehicle for future speculation, for imagining the life cycle of systems and for participating in systems that keep us alive.

Notes 1 Following the “linguistic turn” of the 1970s has been, since at least the mid1990s, the performative turn; some may argue we are still in the midst of this turn, if we take subsequent turns, including the affective, the participatory and so forth to be constitutive elements of the initial turn towards the performance-based. This “turn” has been examined in numerous works over the last 20 years. 2 The recent turn to modes of assembling – and, more generally, pedagogical gathering – in curatorial and exhibitionary strategy has been theorized by Irit Rogoff, Nora Sternfeld and numerous others, many of whom work with Rogoff and Sternfeld in the freethought research platform first established in conjunction with the Bergen Assembly 2016 at the Norwegian Triennial. 3 For an overview of different approaches to participation, see entries by Frieling, R (2016) and Tancons, C (2016), on “Participation”, in Jackson & Marincola

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(eds.), In terms of performance, www.intermsofperformance.site/keywords/ participation/rudolf-frieling and www.intermsofperformance.site/keywords/ participation/claire-tancons. 4 See entry by Kaegi, S 2016, “Reenactment”, in Jackson & Marincola (eds.), In terms of performance, www.intermsofperformance.site/keywords/reenactment/ stefan-kaegi.

References Arendt, H 2006, On revolution, Penguin Books, New York. Austin, JL 1971, How to do things with words, Oxford University Press, London. Blackson, R 2007, ‘Once more . . . with feeling: Reenactment in contemporary art and culture’, Art Journal, pp. 28–40. Bourriaud, N 2002, Relational aesthetics, trans. S Pleasance & F Woods, Les Presse du réel, Dijon. Burton, J, Jackson, S & Willsdon, D 2016, Public servants: Art and the crisis of the common good, MIT Press, Cambridge. Butler, J 2015, Notes toward a performative theory of assembly, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Caballero, MC 2004, ‘Academic turns city into a social experiment’, The Harvard Gazette, 11 March, n.p., https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2004/03/ academic-turns-city-into-a-social-experiment-2/. Fischer-Lichte, E 2008, The transformative power of performance: A new aesthetics, trans. SI Jain, Routledge, New York. Fraser, N 1990, ‘Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy’, Social Text, pp. 56–80. Frieling, R 2016, ‘Participation,’ in Jackson & Marincola (eds.), In terms of performance, http://intermsofperformance.site/keywords/participation/rudolffrieling. Habermas, J 1991, The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society, trans. T Burger, MIT Press, Cambridge. Habermas, J 2005, Democracy and the public sphere, trans. L Goode, Pluto Press, Ann Arbor. Jackson, A & Kidd, J 2010, Research, practice, and innovation in museum theatre and live interpretation, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Jackson, S 2011, Social works: Performing art, supporting publics, Routledge, Abingdon, UK. Jackson, S & Marincola, P 2016, In terms of performance, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Philadelphia, www.intermsofperformance.site. Kaegi, S 2016, ‘Reenactment,’ in Jackson & Marincola (eds.), In terms of performance, http://intermsofperformance.site/keywords/reenactment/stefan-kaegi. Landsman, A & Catlett, M 2013, ‘City council meeting’, Theater, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 65–99. McCalman, I & Pickering, PA 2010, Historical reenactment: From realism to the affective turn, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Parker, A & Sedgewick, EK (eds.) 1995, Performativity and Performance, Routledge, New York. Præstegaard Schwartz, C & Scott Sørensen, A 2018, ‘Artivism and para-institution’, Nordisk Muesologi, pp. 121–135.

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Rogoff, I 2008,‘Turning’, E-flux, November, n.p., www.e-flux.com/journal/00/68470/ turning/. Rogoff, I, Harney, S, Heathfield, A, Mollona, M, Moreno, L & Sternfeld, N 2017, Freethought, http://freethought-collective.org. Rosler, M 2011, ‘The second time as farce’, Idiom, February 21, n.p., http://idiom mag.com/2011/02/the-second-time-as-farce/. Schneider, R 2011, Performing remains: Art and war in times of theatrical reenacment, Routledge, New York. Sternfeld, N 2017, ‘Para-museum of 100 days: Documenta between institution and event’, On Curating, www.on-curating.org/issue-33-reader/para-museum-of100-days-documenta-between-event-and-institution.html#.XKuX9y-B2fc. Sternfeld, N 2018, ‘Why exhibit at all? An answer from the year 2030’, Qalqalah, https://kadist.org/program/qalqalah-un-reader-n3/. Tancons, C 2016, ‘Participation,’ in Jackson & Marincola (eds.), In terms of performance, http://intermsofperformance.site/keywords/participation/clairetancons. Warner, M 2002, ‘Publics and counterpublics’, Public Culture, pp. 49–90.

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Autonomy and collectivity at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in Japan Gunhild Borggreen and Anemone Platz

In the recent proliferation of research concerning collaborative and participatory art, many scholars and art critics highlight that the “social turn” in contemporary art can be found all over the world. There is a sense of “universalism” attached to the notion of collaborative and participatory art – not that all artworks in the world are created in this mode but rather that collaborative and participatory art practices can be found anywhere in the world and are subject to similar circumstances. Recently, there have been several publications in English concerning the social turn in contemporary Asian art, including Japan (Kikuchi 2015; Kumakura & Nagatsu 2015; Kitagawa 2015a; Wang 2017; Jesty 2018, 2017; Tomii 2017; Kajiya 2017; Favell 2017; Kawashima 2017; Valjakka & Wang 2018; Corlin 2018; Cheung 2015). Yet, there is a peculiar lack of attention to socially engaged and participatory art in Asia among some of the established Western scholars and critics. Art historian Claire Bishop, for example, explicitly avoids Asian countries in her approach, stating that although she has visited two art projects in Asia (one in Chiang Mai and one in Beijing), the projects “sat uncomfortably in my narrative, despite the fact that the instigators of both projects were trained in the West” (Bishop 2012, p. 288). In this chapter we begin by highlighting some dialectics between autonomy and collectivity in the history of European aesthetics and in modern Japanese art. We then locate issues of autonomy and collectivity by analysing the aesthetic and the social dimensions of two selected art projects at 2018 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (ETAT) in Niigata Prefecture in Japan. This perspective allows for a discussion of the negotiations of social and political autonomy that take place when the village residents engage with the art project. They engage both on an individual and a collective level, as well as in the relationship to the organizers of ETAT. By mapping the details of participation in terms of collective co-production and ownership, we find the conventional notions of artistic autonomy challenged and expanded.

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Concepts of autonomy The notion of autonomy is central to much of the theoretical discussion of socially engaged and participatory art. According to the Oxford Dictionary, autonomy means “the right or condition of self-government” or “freedom from external control or influence”. The term heteronomy, meaning “actions influenced or controlled by external forces”, as an opposite to autonomy, figures in art theoretical discussions too. An example is philosopher Peter Osborne’s discourse of the dialectics of autonomous and heteronomous determinations, in which he combines Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of pure practical reason with Theodor Adorno’s notion of art’s contradictory “double character” of autonomy and social fact (Osborne 2012). The words collectivity and collaboration often become the opposite when speaking of artistic autonomy: an artwork becomes collective or collaborative when the artist gives up aesthetic autonomy and control over the work. Many artists and critics point out how participatory art distribute authorship from one single artist to a group of people, who might not be professional artists but have a variety of different perceptions, skills and knowledge. Although participatory art does not necessarily erase authorship, the participatory process moves the attention away from an individualistic model to a socially horizontal structure (Finkelpearl 2014). In his book The One and the Many, Grant H. Kester (2011) discusses the concept of autonomy as a means to elaborate on its apparent opposite, the collaborative and collective. He references literary theorist Martha Woodmansee, who traces the historical articulation of aesthetic autonomy back to mid-18th-century Germany, specifically the notion of autonomy in writings by the author and philosopher Friedrich Schiller and the author and essayist Karl Philipp Moritz. For both, the concept of aesthetic autonomy took two different but interrelated forms, namely the autonomy of the artwork itself and the autonomy of the artist. Kester quotes Schiller, who claims that the artwork should possess “an absolute intrinsic value that is entirely independent of the powers of comprehension of its readers” (Kester 2011, p. 39). Moritz in a similar manner states that the work of art exists “for the sake of its own internal perfection”, and that ideally the work of art should be a “self-sufficient totality” (Kester 2011, p. 236, note 38). Such autonomous aesthetics could only be secured if the artist, who produced the work, denied any self-interest and created the artwork only for its own sake. This notion of a “pure” and “authentic” work of art detached from everyday life is part of the formation of modern art in Western cultural history, and it “departs dramatically” (as Kester has it) from the aesthetics of previous periods, when art had a functional role in society. In the history of art, the avant-garde movements in the early 20th century and the 1960s challenged the notion of aesthetic autonomy. Avant-garde art wanted to dissolve the borders between art and everyday

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life, and sought to dismantle the notion of the artwork as “pure” and “detached”. Kester concludes that autonomy has been central to modern art because of the paradoxical relationship between the aesthetic and the social. This tension between keeping a critical distance and succumbing to “impure” realms of “non-art” is at the core of the modern tradition. Kester draws a line from the avant-garde traditions to the participatory and process-based practices of current collaborative art and points out how the current trends in similar ways challenge the idea of the singular genius of the artist and the notion of unity and intention in the fully formed work of art. The collective, both in terms of multiple authorship and in terms of the unlimited variety of production processes, comes to stand as a new opposition against the conventions of aesthetic autonomy that have thrived in Western art discourse since Schiller. So much so that collaborative art practices, according to Kester, make up a new paradigm in contemporary art production. Philosopher and anthropologist Néstor García Canclini (2014) makes the same argument from a different perspective. In his view, art has moved beyond its autonomy due to massive changes in society but primarily by being incorporated into a large-scale art market. He doubts that the theoretical tools and methods that have been used to understand art in modern sociology and postmodern aesthetics still suffice to explain the interrelations between art practices and everything else, such as society, creativity, industriousness and finance, to name but a few. But the fact of “the art spreading beyond its own field and becoming blurred as it mixes with urban development and the design and tourism industries” also leads him to challenge the boundaries taken for granted in social sciences when analysing art (fields) (Canclini 2014, p. xiv). According to his stance, to overcome the limitations of borders in order to protect autonomy, a process he calls “transgression” has been at the heart of artists’ practices since the 19th century. However, the “field” where art takes place has always expanded its boundaries, and has spread into innumerable areas of social life, without necessarily being representative of a movement, tendency or social direction. This makes it more and more difficult to frame the borders that have to be transgressed. Rather than studying the field of art itself, it is crucial to scrutinize what happens “when it intersects with other fields and becomes postautonomous”. By this Canclini means that art practices as objects are replaced by art practices based on contexts (media, urban spaces, digital networks and forms of social participation) where aesthetic differences dissolve (Canclini 2014, p. xviii). By incorporating art into a large-scale market and the artists inserting themselves into society interacting with other areas of social life such as fashion, media and political struggles, art and artists leave there autonomy behind (Canclini 2014, p. xxii). On the one hand, this means that the artist desists from potential interests in artistic autonomy to attend needs and

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requirements of the other players in the different social contexts. On the other hand it gives the postautonomous artists leeway to redesign their creative power and its results, and adapt it flexibly to whatever new field, space or network it may be inserted in, a cultural process Canclini suggests calling “unsure localization” (Canclini 2014, pp. 125–127). The artworks change their meanings and their autonomous impact depending on the fields they are presented and consumed in; thus, art is “rather a place where questions and doubts are translated and retranslated, where they hear their ringing echoes”, eventually leading to “unsure localization” of many cultural processes (Canclini 2014, pp. 112, 125–127).

Autonomy and collectivity in modern Japanese art Turning to Japan it becomes clear how the Western concept of aesthetic autonomy in modern art unfolds in different historical, cultural, social and political contexts. Many of the European philosophical and aesthetic theories of art came to Japan in the late 19th century and were negotiated in relation to complex formations of the nation state and Japan’s peripheral position in geopolitical terms. Art historian Dōshin Satō has examined the ways in which the vocabulary and concepts of art entered Japan in connection with the country’s participation at the World Exposition in Vienna in 1873 (Satō 1996). He points out that the concept of “fine art” (bijutsu) was a linguistic construction invented by the Japanese authorities to fit the entries for the Vienna exposition. This construction of a new vocabulary had ontological implications because it changed the modes by which different art practices were defined, and it influenced the entire structural organization of art, including art education, museum institutions, art criticism, art markets and the notion of a general public art audience. As Satō (2014) argues elsewhere, the Japanese government’s import of Western art concepts was based on a national cultural strategy with three distinct goals: to protect and preserve Japanese ancient art and antiquities against the impact of Japonisme; to export Japanese artistic craft produced for the European and American consumer markets; and to demonstrate Japan’s national prowess in modern art as a means to be accepted by Western countries as a highly civilized culture. It is not the aesthetic autonomy discussed so far that is at stake here, but rather the political. The cultural strategies adapted by the Meiji government focussed on preserving the autonomy and authenticity of pre-modern Japanese art objects and practices, while insisting on the geopolitical autonomy of the modern nation state in the wake of what the Japanese government conceived of as “unequal treaties” made with the USA and several European countries in 1858. While the notions of individual expression and the “art for art’s sake” approach were adapted and established in Japan in the first decades of

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the 20th century, other parts of the Japanese art system were funded upon collectivism and collaboration. Art historian Alicia Volk (2013) shows how avant-garde painters in the 1920s turned to a radical individualism in protest against the authority of the collective, of the exhibition institutions and of the nation. The notion of artistic autonomy was used as a means to secure organizational autonomy for the individual artist in the midst of a national construction of art systems. As Volk argues, this dialectic between authority and autonomy demonstrates an ambivalent position towards collectivism in the early periods of Japanese modern art. Similar conclusions are formulated by art historian Gennifer Weisenfeld (2002) in her study of the Japanese art collective Mavo and other avant-garde artists in the first three decades of the 20th century. She concludes that Mavo maintained a fundamental belief in the autonomy and free will of the individual and that the cultural anarchism of the group was informed by antagonism towards the authority of the Japanese state in the establishment and maintenance of national art institutions from ca. 1870 until the 1910s. The autonomy of the artwork (as a result of the artist’s autonomous “self-expression”, jiko hyōgen) and the autonomy of the artist (being independent and free from organizational constraints) thus transgressed the boundaries between the aesthetic and the political. This seems to indicate that the notion of aesthetic autonomy in the Japanese history of modern art is always already part of a social dimension. Art historian Reiko Tomii defines the collectivism of Japanese artists as “strategic alliances of artists motivated to seek and create alternatives to the existing options, be they artistic/expressive or social/operational or both” (Tomii 2013, p. 232). She identifies three phases of collectivism in the modern and postwar period, which did not replace each other in a chronological order, but came to exist side by side. Tomii adapts an operational rather than a stylistic approach to describe the complex genealogies and relations. The three phases are kindai bijutsu (“modern art”, corresponding roughly to 1907–1945), gendai bijutsu (“contemporary art”, roughly from 1945 to the 1970s) and kontemporarii āto (a transliteration of the English contemporary art, “recent art”, from the 1980s to now). The first phase, kindai bijutsu, was characterized by the organization of bijutsu dantai, art associations, while the gendai bijutsu was dominated by the more loosely connected activity-based, shūdan, groups. The current phase of art is based on “communities” and “units” and is a “more fluid and broadly based collectivism”, but all three phases of collectivism exist at the same time and are still driving forces of the recent art scene in Japan in terms of organization, exhibition practices and collaboration. Tomii argues that the bijutsu dantai concept still makes up a fundamental part of what she calls “a wide and pluralist spectrum of cultural production and consumption in twentyfirst-century Japan” (Tomii 2013, p. 239).

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Much of the neo-avant-garde art in Japan (during the phase Tomii calls gendai bijutsu) was closely tied to radical left movements and to the antiwar and anti-capitalist activism in the postwar political and cultural environment. In his book Art and Engagement (2018), art historian Justin Jesty looks at the relationship between art and politics in Japan in the immediate postwar period from 1945 to 1960. Jesty argues that through their creativity and collaborative action, Japanese postwar avant-garde artists contributed to society by displaying commitment and solidarity in a period of uncertain transformations before the grand narrative of economic growth and social stability began in the 1960s and continued to the 1990s. In his account of the history of socially engaged art in Japan, art historian Kenji Kajiya (2017) provides an overview of the different terminologies used in contemporary Japanese art criticism. He notes how the concept of “art project” (āto purojekuto) is used to describe the kind of art exhibitions, performances, workshops and other cultural activities that have existed in Japan since the 1990s, in which museums, local governments, nonprofit organizations or artist groups create experimental art projects on low budgets. Kajiya mentions the Japanese version of (new genre) public art in the mid-1990s, which often consists of outdoor sculptures with no specific context with the urban site in which they are installed. Due to the relatively low funding for public art and little if no selection criteria, the artworks maintain an impression of autonomous art because, as Kajiya notes, the sculptures “were not based on public values but were sustained primarily by the personal sensibility of the artists” (Kajiya 2017, p. 7). The small amount of public art funding and limited private sponsorships for contemporary art in Japan maintain a kind of autonomy for the artists and their art projects, although, as Jesty points out, artists hardly find it liberating to be without monetary support (Jesty 2017). The economic stagnation that began in Japan in the early 1990s and continues to this day has challenged the general assumptions of modernity’s blessings (such as progress, expansion and neoliberalist capitalism), and restructured social and cultural values. Some people, including contemporary artists and artist groups, turn to other types of value exchange in civil society, such as altruism, volunteer work and activism in regard to urban regeneration plans, disaster relief or antinuclear protest (Borggreen 2018; Ferilli 2016; Mōri 2015). As Adrian Favell (2016) points out, it is also the same kind of “post-growth” conditions that have spurred artistic response to ageing communities and depopulation in rural areas, including rural art festivals as the EchigoTsumari Art Triennale. Jesty sees these tendencies as a way in which a diverse group of artists, co-creators and participants engage in creating common values without recourse to a neoliberal teleology of growth (Jesty 2017).

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The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2018 as field of research We now turn to our two contemporary case studies at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale. The main purpose of our current research project is to investigate the various forms of collaborations and community building taking place at ETAT. We attempt to shed light on the claims formulated by Fram Kitagawa, the founder and general director of the triennale, that art contributes to community building (machizukuri). In this study, the research design, the in-situ encounters, as well as the subsequent analyses combined an aesthetic and anthropological approach. The former focussed on examining the aesthetic properties of the artworks, including compositional, material and performative elements, as well as their art historical context. The latter approach aimed at gaining ethnographic insights and qualitative data through semi-structured interviews regarding differentiated attitudes of local residents towards specific artworks. During two months of fieldwork, we encountered over 200 artworks and spoke with individuals such as curators, artists, volunteers, members of neighbourhood associations, local residents, visitors, scholars and art critics. We collected materials from local newspapers, exhibition catalogues, posters and web-based information, while also documenting our encounters through photo and video film. Here, we focus on two specific artworks and their sites, namely the work Atlas Lamenti in the village of Chūjō, and the Green Room Project in the village of Sekiasa. A shared quality of both artworks is that they can be experienced by local residents not only as an object of contemplation but also as an object that can be transformed and performed by them. As our case studies will show, this kind of relationship between an artwork and the local population, between artistic autonomy and operational collectivity, is negotiated and seems to have an effect on the intensity of the interaction and participation. ETAT was inaugurated in 2000 and is one of the many examples of regional art projects (chiiki āto) that have been initiated in Japan during the last decades. The 2018 instalment of ETAT featured 378 artworks by 335 artists from 44 countries (Ogura 2018, p. 17). The artworks and events are spread over an area of 760 km2, and while many artworks are displayed in museums in the area, most works are placed outdoors or installed in vacant buildings such as houses, schools or factories. ETAT 2018 lasted for 51 days and had 548,380 visitors (Tōkamachi City 2018). ETAT is curated by the Tokyo based commercial art gallery Art Front Gallery and general director Fram Kitagawa. An open call for artworks or projects is published about two years before the event, and artists from anywhere can submit a proposal. Local villages and districts in the Echigo-Tsumari area can apply to host an art project on the condition that the local residents commit to taking active part in practical matters concerning the artwork, such as maintenance, keeping the place clean

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and attractive, and communicating with artists, curators, volunteers and visitors. As a rule, the artworks are allocated to the site by Art Front Gallery and Kitagawa, so that local residents do not know beforehand which kind of artwork they will be hosting, just as the artist cannot point out a particular or favoured location for the project in advance. Kitagawa claims that art contributes to community building. As the subtitle of one of his publications (2015b) suggests, art is capable of revitalizing the bond between a locality and its people. He argues that ETAT is an art event with the scale and the variety of artistic practices to provide a multifaceted platform that gives local residents an opportunity to engage. This can happen within existing local associations or through new types of resident networks that may be established within other constellations than the traditional ones. Kitagawa’s accounts of the triennale and his underlying ideas focus on art as a vehicle for collaboration: the artists produce the artwork and the local population contributes with various forms of activity. Not all these activities are part of the artwork proper, but they contribute on a societal level to support or improve the site and strengthen local social networks. Art “has the power to create experiences and phenomenological effects” (Kitagawa 2015a, p. 14). It is the experience and exchange that “moves people, speaks to people, and engages people” (Kitagawa 2014, p. 221). Kitagawa’s curatorial narrative focusses on the positive effects of artworks and art-related events on rural revitalization processes and community building. The works and events may not only attract visitors but also reconnect people in existing networks, and they may retain old or attract new residents to an area. In this sense, ETAT works as a channel of transmission of regional attractiveness. The triennale in itself may be seen as a single large-scale collaborative art project that involves a number of different types of human actors, from the main curators and their staff to the many artists and artist groups, museum and galleries, audiences, volunteers, local residents, local governments and many others. The way ETAT is managed, promoted and experienced thus suggests a shift in the ontology of art because the focus is not the individual work of art in itself but the totality of many different works mixed together with a range of “non-art” experiences such as the landscapes and infrastructure of the area, overnight stays, means of transportation, local food served at art spaces or local restaurants, crafts and souvenirs specific to the area and the like. In Canclini’s sense, it adds fields of intersection to the field of art, such as the landscape itself and the original buildings now used for a different purpose, and thus opens up for postautonomous art practices (Canclini 2014, p. xviii). From a critical perspective, this is the kind of mixture of “art” and “nonart” that erodes the idea of art as autonomous and free of economic interests or ideological agendas. Criticism has been voiced, among others, by literary critic Fujita Naoya. He identifies what can be seen as a

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heteronomous interference when he argues that the neoliberal economy of large-scale festivals such as ETAT contributes to a co-option of artists and a devaluation of art and its political potential (Fujita 2016). There may be a case of Adornian dialectics between the heteronomous and the autonomous because the art festival format can be seen as a reenactment of the modern-period bijutsu dantai system in which Art Front Gallery provides the collective operational system in which individual artists and art groups can display their works of art. Thereby it echoes the tensions between the autonomy of the artist’s self-expression and the autonomy of the artist in terms of organizational constraints, as discussed earlier. However, as will be made clear in the following, the autonomy of the artist is balanced with another kind of autonomy, that of the local neighbourhood association, in terms of how and to what extent the residents are ready to engage with the artwork. The independence of the village people is carefully negotiated in light of the aesthetic experience and social fulfilment of the art project. It attends the form of a postautonomous condition as artists, local residents and visitors intersect with each other’s social contexts. Atlas Lamenti The artwork Atlas Lamenti (Figure 3.1) by Chilean-French artist Emma Malig is installed inside the prayer hall of the small Kōryū Shintō shrine in the village of Chūjō. The Kōryū Shrine is dedicated to a rain-bringing deity. The space is about three by six metres and has no windows. The artwork itself is a sphere of about two metres in diametre suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the space. It is made of semi-transparent white gauze, on which various images and words are imprinted. The image and letters become silhouettes against the illumination from a light bulb at the centre. Smaller spheres are made in a similar manner and placed inside each other in the sphere. While the outer sphere is fixed, the smaller ones spin clockwise around the vertical axis with the help of a small motor under the ceiling. The illumination produces moving shadows in various patterns on the other layers of gauze, as well as on the wooden floor and the walls. Some images are abstractions that look like markings representing land on a map while others are figurative and resemble silhouettes of mountains by the sea. There are no other sources of light in the space, except when someone opens the sliding door to enter the room. A hidden loudspeaker plays a tune of seemingly random string instrument notes. The layers of transparent materials mounted on thin wavering sticks make the object appear somewhat fragile and vulnerable. The faint ambient soundscape, in minor tones, creates a slightly melancholic atmosphere. The title of the work means the lament or pain of Atlas. In Greek mythology, Atlas was a Titan who, as punishment for fighting the

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Figure 3.1 Emma Malig, Atlas Lamenti, 2018 Source: Photograph by Gunhild Borggreen

Olympians, was condemned to stand at the edge of the world and carry the heaven on his shoulders. The figure of Atlas is associated with cartography, especially terrestrial globes and maps. The title also refers to the hardship of involuntary exile that the artist herself experienced, when she

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Figure 3.2 Kōryū Shrine, Chūjō village, Niigata Prefecture, August 2018. Source: Photograph by Osamu Nakamura

fled with her family from the dictatorship in Chile at age 17 and settled in France. A poster in Japanese and English at the back of the space provides information about the artwork and states that it is part of a series by Emma Malig entitled Wanderings, exiles. The English part of the text reads “In its infinite rotation, the artwork reminds poetically the migrant’s long journey, the crossing of the oceans, the tragedy of shipwrecks”. Some of the words inscribed on the sphere are clarified, such as the Latin word lamenti, “complaint, expression of pain”. The Spanish word destierros is explained as “exile; he who, by will or not, left his country. Person being driven out of his country, or who chooses to leave it”, and the French word errance is explained as “action of walking, of travelling endlessly, without purpose”. Atlas Lamenti appears to be a conventional work of art in terms of aesthetic autonomy. The artist has transformed her ideas and imaginations into an object, which is then presented to the viewers as a finished artwork. Even the musical tune, despite its ephemeral qualities, is produced beforehand and included in the unity of spacial, visual, and sonic elements. The artist is autonomous in making aesthetic decisions concerning materials, size, colour, light, sound and other elements, and she is the author of the short text on the poster that presents her autonomous conceptual and contextual background. If the viewer knows it is a

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part of a series of works by Malig, it may give the viewer an impression of a theme that is of personal importance to the artist, something she pursues through a variety of visual and sonic manifestations beyond the specificity of place and time. At the same time, Atlas Lamenti also testifies to a number of collective aspects, which modifies these indications of autonomy. Although, in her application to participate in ETAT, Malig stated her wish to display her work in a Shintō shrine, she could not decide the location. Traditionally a Shintō shrine is understood as the home of ancestral souls that have found their last spiritual resting place in its precincts. They transform into deities (kami). Depending on their deeds in their lifetimes, they are not only revered at the site by their families or the village but are also worshiped as guardians. Furthermore, ancestral souls are believed to be capable of bearing past and present burdens in order to help the living overcome their hardships. Thus in a spiritual sense, too, the Kōryū Shrine was an obvious and meaningful space for displaying the Atlas Lamenti. The first time we visited the site the entrance to the prayer hall of the shrine was open and we could see the illuminated globe from afar (Figure 3.2). Visitors to the shrine would come and go, fulfilling the usual rites and prayers without letting themselves being disturbed by the object that filled the entire central space of the prayer hall. The triennale had just started, and the two volunteers at the entrance were members of the Association for the Promotion of Chūjō District, which had supported the shrine’s priest in his application for an art project for the site. They expressed and visibly displayed a sense of pride in and ownership of the artwork. As one informant, a female employee of the district’s administration, later expressed it: I have been following the development of the globe closely, and helped by translating while Ms. Emma was here, so I feel that I contributed to making it, although I didn’t actually take part in building it. A local carpenter was involved with the construction of the structure, but otherwise the artist worked mostly alone. There is a respect for the artist’s autonomy in this remark but also a claim towards a collective contribution. Similar statements from other informants indicate that the sense of ownership was part of the motivation for the many local helping hands, who had cleaned and prepared the shrine site before the artist’s arrival and throughout the festival. Several articles in the local press furthermore stimulated the process of ownership formation among the residents. Through the articles by association chairperson Sansei Niwano in the local newspaper, the neighbourhood could closely follow the artist’s work, along with Niwano’s down-to-earth struggles with language and communication. The articles also describe his feeling of satisfaction when he discovered that, in spite

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of these concerns, international exchange had become possible even in a remote countryside village. The artist’s emotional tears when she first visited the shrine and her referring to it as the perfect site for the project she had in mind (Niwano 2018) endeared her to the local residents. Again, it is apparent that the notion of the autonomy of the artist is strong, but it is important to acknowledge the degree of collective anticipation and engagement because the expanded scope of the artwork is understood by the receiving community to include the preparatory stages, the context of the site, as well as the human actors involved. It also becomes obvious from Niwano’s reports that the villagers’ hospitality did not stop with a welcome and a farewell reception. This was also confirmed by our informants. Malig was shown around the village and its touristic spots, and local people organized visits to other artwork sites in the region (Niwano 2018). The artist became a familiar figure during her stay in the neighbourhood. In our multiple interviews with members of the district’s promotional association, it became clear that people in the vicinity followed the artist and her work closely. The local residents’ feelings of gratitude for Malig’s work and her presence in the village found its culmination in a dance performance by a local female amateur dance group. Sōko Ōfuchi, a dancer from the prefecture, choreographed the dance with inspiration from the history and legends of the shrine and its surroundings, including the plea for rain that this summer was more needed than ever. The new performance was a present to the artist enacted by eight dancers in front of the open shrine and the illuminated Atlas Lamenti on Malig’s last evening in town. According to Mika, one of the dancers, the beautiful and emotionally loaded event also worked as a kind of transfer rite for the local neighbourhood before it took over the final ownership and responsibility for the artwork. This collaborative gesture by a group of local residents can be seen as an expansion of the artistic autonomy of the work. The volunteers did not interfere directly with the sphere and the soundscape within the shrine building, so the autonomy of the art object itself remained intact. However, if the artwork is understood to be the entire context of the site and the people involved, the constant transformation of the work through collective contribution and ownership points in the direction of a postautonomous condition. The artist did not need to redesign her artwork because it had an inherent flexibility that allowed for an installation in another space and network, a feature that corresponds to postautonomous art. Independently of its “unsure localization”, it was received and appropriated within the framework of the given local identity and meaning (Canclini 2014, p. 125). Green Room Project 2018 The Green Room Project 2018 is located in a former ski lift building in the village of Sekiasa (Figure 3.3). The artist Kōichi Sakai initiated the

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Figure 3.3 Former ski house in Sekiasa village, Niigata Prefecture, August 2018. Source: Photograph by Gunhild Borggreen

project in 2006, and for the first two instalments of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, a different building in another municipality had been used. The Green Room Project moved to its present site for ETAT 2012 and was open during the 2015 and 2018 instalments. There are three floors in the former ski lift building, and each floor is dedicated to different parts of Sakai’s overall project. A poster at the entrance visualizes the structure as a tree with the tree trunk on ground floor, the foliage on second floor and the snow-covered crown in the attic. On the ground floor, several of Sakai’s previous works of art were displayed, all of them made as rubbings of objects from the local neighbourhood, such as imprints of farming tools, and pillars or floorboards of houses. These rubbings, made with coloured crayons or pencils, function as an ethnographic memory, in which materials and tools from an everyday life soon to disappear are traced and secured as an imprint. The Green Room begins in the stairway and expands into a space of about five by ten metres on the second floor (Figure 3.4). This space also contains an area with a table and benches where visitors are invited to create rubbings of dried leaves, cut them out, and paste them on the walls. The walls and ceilings of the Green Room are covered with green paper leaves made by local residents and visitors, and together the thousands of leaves resemble foliage in a dense forest. The totality of the space

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Figure 3.4 View of Kōichi Sakai, The Green Room Project 2018, August 2018. Source: Photograph by Osamu Nakamura

creates a sense of unity and sameness due to the overall green colour of the leaves (Figure 3.4). Zooming in, however, there are no recurring patterns or repetitions in the space because all the leaves are individual in shape, size and colour density. For every leaf, there is an element of corporeal and tactile engagement in the indexical imprints of textural surfaces – an engagement which involves the maker’s physical encounter with the dried leaves and the movement of the body when tracing the leaf with the pencil on a piece of paper. They are imprints of botanical registration of local forestry, and together with Sakai’s rubbings from house parts and agricultural tools they form a kind of ethnographic archive of everyday local life and living. Rubbings are known throughout cultural history as a way to record elements of historical, social or personal significance, such as impressions of text and image from stone inscriptions known in China as early as the 7th century. Rubbings can be made from coins, tools or other artefacts of domestic material culture, while other types of rubbings can be made as imprints of natural sources, such as earth, stone, trees or, indeed, leaves. As curator and art historian Allegra Pesenti (2015) points out, the traces of objects and textured surfaces made by rubbings can function as a recording or a visualization of memory, and sometimes reveal aspects that are not visible to the naked eye. Rubbings are made to emphasize

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materiality and process through an indexical relationship. The Surrealist artist Max Ernst began to use rubbings as a technique in his art practice and called them “frottage”. For Surrealist artists, frottage was a technique to undermine the artist’s control of the work and let chance and the unconscious work together. This can be seen as a way of understanding autonomy in other ways – not in contrast to the collective but as a cancellation of the artistic intention. Pesenti emphasizes a difference between the concept of rubbings and the concept of frottage because a rubbing involves a direct indexical mark of the properties of the object, while a frottage uses rubbing technique to produce an imagery that is not related to the source of the imprint. We can understand this particular technique from both an ethnographic and an aesthetic perspective. These do not necessarily exclude each other: the term rubbing includes a notion of ethnographic registration of the different kinds of natural and material culture in the neighbourhood, in which the index of the imprint refers to “a real thing or fact” by virtue of being connected with the object as “a matter of fact” (Paulsen 2013, p. 85). The term frottage as invented by Ernst, on the other hand, frames a rubbing within an aesthetic dimension because the rubbing in this case is “an artistic process, not to replicate external objects, but to form new and unrelated imagery based on them” (Pesenti 2015, p. 12). Both modes of imprint are present in the Green Room because many of the tracings appear to be registrations of the source as “a matter of fact”, while others highlight imaginary elements that create associations to other forms. The imprints are also indexes of the different ways in which their makers were bodily engaged with the process of tracing: some people used forceful movements, while others made their pencil traces soft and barely visible. At the same time, some approached the mode of tracing as a frottage in the aesthetic sense, outlining elements that would transform the representation of a leaf into something else, for example by leaving a small notch blank and adding a dot so the leaf resembles a fish. The technique of rubbing allows for both ethnographic and aesthetic approaches to individual imprints while also erasing singularity and individual authorship. There are various degrees of involvement and detachment at play in the tracing of objects and surfaces. The participants in the Green Room were invited to engage in this simple technique of rubbing, a collective activity that does not require professional artistic skills and is easy for anyone to join. At the same time, it was important for some of the participants that this was different from how they remembered rubbings from elementary school. As one woman stated: “Luckily it’s not like being back in school, when we’d get a grade and my leaf would be compared to the other children’s leaves”. For her, the rubbings in the Green Room served a more fulfilling purpose because the individual rubbings became part of a larger collective totality when they were pasted on the wall.

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During our repeated stays in the Green Room we observed how visitors engaged in producing green leaves using the technique described. There was a sense of sharing the experience of creating a rubbing, as friends or family members would sit down next to each other at the table and engage in the activity together. There were also occasional conversations among people who did not know each other. At the table, people would move to make space for newcomers. The participants would try not to interfere with each other and give other people room to make their imprints. The same happened when they pasted their leaves on the wall: everyone would try to find a space on the wall where their own leaf would not cover or interfere with other people’s creations. In this sense, the Green Room Project highlights the issues of autonomy and collectivity in a double sense because the rubbings can be seen as an automatic transposition of an image, while the sense of collaboration or collectivity in the production of the artwork as a totality dominated the social interactions of the participants. The villagers’ active support for the project was evident in their continuous involvement. There were always local volunteers to give information and answer questions, tell stories related to the artwork and its visitors, serve refreshments and encourage visitors to make a leaf. The Green Tunnel, a 55-metre-long accessing corridor covered with real plants, was an idea originated by the locals, who also planted and cared for the different types of calabashes. The Green Room Project site has developed into a space for genuine social interaction, a place for socializing and constructing memories. The neighbourhood association has expressed its satisfaction with being involved in the project. The space allows for long and repeated visits and invites active engagement in its development for both local residents and visitors, alone or as couples and families. Our informants unanimously stressed that the project has led to a strengthening of local collaboration and team spirit as result of increased meeting activity in the village association in the pursuit of a common goal. This has also led to other types of social activities among the villagers. In interviews with the artist, it became clear that he has developed a close relationship to the neighbourhood association of Sekiasa over the years, although he also expresses concern about what might be called “unsure localization”, to use Canclini’s term. Sakai is aware of the vulnerability of the project that can become subject to heteronomous forces and be closed down or moved to another location, as has already happened once. The villagers’ contributions to the totality of the art project, such as the green tunnel as well as the creation of a social space for locals and visitors alike, is an example of a postautonomous situation. Here the artist redesigns his creative powers in order to adapt to new locations and environments, but without compromising the participatory nor the aesthetic dimensions of his concept.

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Conclusion In this chapter, we have investigated the notion of autonomy and collectivity on various levels. After providing an overview of various notions of autonomy and collectivism in Japanese modern and contemporary art, we analysed how the conceptions of authorship, autonomy, collaboration and community are negotiated in two specific art projects at the EchigoTsumari Art Triennale. Through our interviews with village residents, neighbourhood associations, volunteers, visitors, artists and organizers, it has become clear that there is a dialectic interdependence between autonomy and collectivity at stake. We have examined how these notions of autonomy are challenged because the ontology of art is undergoing a transformation in the contemporary art scene and has come to form a broader postautonomous framework of aesthetic practices and social interactions. The location of ETAT in the rural areas of the hinterlands of Japan is often seen as a means of deconstructing what is left of neoliberal thinking in a postgrowth society. The structure of ETAT itself takes on a postautonomous position in its oscillation between hierarchical top-down curatorial principles and the open format of the traditional bijutsu dantai system in the Japanese art world. Emma Malig’s Atlas Lamenti embraces the site and its context of spiritual practice and archaeological history, and manifests itself through the collaboration with local residents and their different contributions. Kōichi Sakai’s Green Room Project is conceived as a participatory and collective artwork as well as an ethnographic archive of local natural and material culture. In both projects, village residents were active in the production and maintenance of the artwork and used the space and the activities as means to revitalize their own village community. While Atlas Lamenti was a space of individual contemplation and performance of rituals, the Green Room Project became a space for local socializing with neighbours and visitors. Although initiators, social involvement and ways of engagement differed, both projects were ultimately realized with the autonomous decision of support of the local associations and their members. For the different actors in the creation and maintenance of the art projects, the meaning of their participation overall, their role in particular and the result of their involvement are diverse and multifaceted. A local female volunteer in her 60s formulates how her notions of art and participation changed during the project: [At first] I did not want to volunteer in the artist support group. . . . Art for me is a picture that I go to see in a museum. I didn’t know that this also is art. . . . I finally found out for myself “ah, I don’t need to know what art is, it doesn’t matter.” The point is to enjoy being part of the project. By doing this, you know, I also have become part of this artwork and now I feel proud of how it turned out.

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This is just one example that illustrates the deployment of various views on autonomy, participation and (collective) ownership at ETAT. The ETAT and its artworks intersect with other fields of local activity and identity in a complex postautonomous network of places and people. It signifies a transgression back and forth between the aesthetic and the social spheres, between the artist and the co-producers and between the artwork and its contexts of space and social participation.

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no. 8, http://field-journal.com/issue-8/the-development-of-art-projects-in-japanpolicy-and-economic-perspectives. Kester, GH 2011, The one and the many: Contemporary collaborative art in a global context, Duke University Press, Durham. Kikuchi, Y 2015, ‘Negotiating histories: Through tradition and participation in contemporary East Asian’, World Art, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 5–19. Kitagawa, F 2014, Bijutsu wa chiiki o hiraku. Daichi no geijutsusai jū no shisō (Art opens the local community: Ten visions of the Great Earth Art Festival), Gendai Kikakushitsu, Tokyo. Kitagawa, F 2015a, Art place Japan: The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and the vision to reconnect art and nature, Princeton Architectural Press, New York. Kitagawa, F 2015b, Hiraku bijutsu. Chiiki to ningen no tsunagari o torimodosu (Opening art: Restoring the bonds between the local community and its people), Chikuma Shinsho, Tokyo. Kumakura, S & Nagatsu, Y 2015, An overview of art projects in Japan: A society that co-creates with art, Arts Council, Tokyo, https://tarl.jp/wp/wp-content/ uploads/2017/01/tarl_output_38-1.pdf. Mōri, Y 2015, ‘New collectivism, participation and politics after the East Japan Great Earthquake’, World Art, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 167–186. Niwano, S 2018, ‘Dai 7-kai Daichi geijutsusai. Hitotsu no kokusai kōryū 1. Chūjō ni sakka Ema-san ga yatte kita’ (An international exchange at the 7th Art Festival 1: Artist Emma arrived in town), Tōkamachi Taimusu, 8 July and 28 July. Ogura, Y (ed.) 2018, Daichi no Geijutsusai Echigo Tsumari Aato Torienaare 2018 Kōshiki gaidobukku (Great Earth Art Festival: Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2018 official guidebook), Gendai Kikakushitsu, Tokyo. Osborne, P 2012, ‘Theorem 4: Autonomy: Can it be true of art and politics at the same time?’, Open, vol. 23, http://onlineopen.org/theorem-4-autonomy. Paulsen, K 2013, ‘The index and the interface’, Representations, vol. 122, pp. 83–109. Pesenti, A 2015, Apparitions: Frottages and rubbings from 1860 to now, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX. Satō, D 1996, “Nihon bijutsu” tanjō. Kindai Nihon no “kotoba” to senryaku (The birth of “Japanese art”: “Language” and strategies of modern Japan), Kodansha, Tokyo. Satō, D 2014, ‘From art and identity: For whom, for what? The “present” upon the “contemporary”’, trans. S Allen, Review of Japanese Culture and Society, vol. 26, pp. 341–361. Tōkamachi City 2018, Daichi no Geijutsusai kaisai kekka gaihō oyobi (Press release on Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2018), 26 September. Tomii, R 2013, ‘Introduction: Collectivism in twentieth-century Japanese art with focus on operational aspects of dantai’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 225–267. Tomii, R 2017, ‘Localizing socially engaged art: Some observations on collective operations in prewar and postwar Japan’, Field: A Journal for Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, no. 7, http://field-journal.com/issue-7/localizing-socially-engagedart-some-observations-on-collective-operations-in-prewar-and-postwar-japan. Valjakka, M & Wang, M (eds.) 2018, Visual arts, representations and interventions in contemporary China: Urbanized interface, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam.

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Volk, A 2013, ‘Authority, autonomy, and the early Taishō “avant-garde”’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 451–473. Wang, M 2017, ‘The socially engaged practices of artists in contemporary China’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 15–38. Weisenfeld, G 2002, Mavo: Japanese artists and the avant-garde 1905–1931, University of California Press, Berkeley.

4

Cross-cultural collaboration Modes of participation for co-creation of the urban public space Minna Valjakka

Introduction Micro Galleries (henceforth the MG) was commissioned as a part of the Radical Resilience Week in Tai Hang, Hong Kong in April 2013. With some financial support and volunteers, the cross-cultural artistic intervention displayed urban gardening, posters, prints, stencils, photographs and installations in a neighbourhood under urban redevelopment. Although the first MG event was planned as a one-time experiment, the positive feedback encouraged the MG to pursue its vision to be a “global arts initiative that uses art as a vehicle to create positive change” (Micro Galleries 2018). In 2013–2017, ten more initiatives were taken upon in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Australia, South Africa and Austria, varying from small-scale installations to commissioned artworks and the Micro Galleries Festivals (multiday events). The growing number of artists, artworks and workshops during those five years show that the MG programme has gradually diversified in terms of artistic practices, interdisciplinary activities, forms of participation and audiences. It became evident already during my site observations in Tai Hang in 2013 that some residents started to appreciate the spatio-aesthetic transformation created through the cross-cultural collaborations. Rather than being mere viewers, some people took it upon themselves to care for the displays (e.g., watering the plants) and discussing the works with visitors. While this first MG event was not conceived as “participatory art” − as relying on predetermined physical interactions of the audience to be fully actualized – it inspired people to engage with the works in different ways. Such “expanded participation”, manifesting itself “beyond the audience functions of viewer or spectator allotted to us by most cultural arenas” (Rogoff 2005, p. 122), can often take even more varied and unexpected forms in an urban residential neighbourhood than in a safeguarded art institutional space. The responses may fluctuate between denial and affirmation and move from rejection, stealing and even destruction of the work to maintaining, remediating and contributing further elements into it. It is precisely these unforeseen forms of participation, including the refusal to participate, that require a more in-depth investigation of the

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modalities of participation for studying these novel (un)authorized participatory artistic practices in a contested urban environment. Second, the physical absence of the artist and his/her agency in curating any predesigned activities, along with simultaneously happening events, introduce novel affective dimensions and roles of participation to be explored. The close analysis of the MG Festival in Jakarta in October 2017 further shows that co-creating a street art event in the urban public space for and with the local communities through a cross-cultural collaboration of several concurrent sites, works and processes proposes a new set of challenges for investigating the transitory positionalities of participation and their interrelationships – especially in a postcolonial context. My approach is motivated primarily by Irit Rogoff’s (2005) and Sruti Bala’s (2018) calls for a broader and a more critical theorization of participation, which extends it into the realms of visual culture and nonparticipation. Their insightful takes inspire new possibilities to investigate the differentiated yet interrelated forms of “participation” and “collaboration” enacted for and through artistic practices. I hope to contribute to these emergent discourses by analysing the multiple modalities and positionalities and their transitory characteristics in a cross-cultural street art event. By focussing on participatory artistic practices in the urban public space, not necessarily initiated by contemporary artists, or not always conceived as “art” neither by the residents or the person who made them (e.g., miniature gardens), I will foreground the challenges and contingencies of participation that occur in a location more open to unpredictable circumstances, physical encounters and contested perceptions than is usually the case in a more supervised art institutional setting (e.g., a gallery). While so doing, I wish to theoretically and methodologically broaden the discussions in participatory art studies that have tended to focus on a singular art project made by an artist or an art collective and have taken the artistic intentions and/or the preconceived roles of participants as the analytical starting point. Examination of the intricate interdependencies before, during and after an artistic intervention in the public space can introduce a more nuanced precision to debates around the questions of (non)participation and its transformations. In the light of other street art events and participatory art projects in East and Southeast Asia – many of which feature only one form of art (e.g., painting murals, singing in a choir or contributing to an urban knitting project) – the MG Festival in Jakarta in 2017 provides an illuminating case study. As such, it helps to investigate “participation” and how participation emerges in a cross-cultural context with an emphasis on co-creation, diversified activities and multimethod artworks.

Methodology This study builds upon interdisciplinary methods and conceptual frameworks from art studies and urban studies to enable a more detailed

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investigation of participation in multimethod (street) art events in the urban public space. The analyses draw on longitudinal on-site research to gather and triangulate data on the responses of immediate and broader audiences, the possible impact of the project and the transformations in the spatio-aesthetic dimensions of the site. As Claire Bishop (2012, pp. 5–6) articulates, analyses based on secondary materials often remain fragmented for comprehending the “affective dynamic” between artists and the audience because participatory art “tends to value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness”. The importance of an anthropological approach for exploring the relations between forms of engagement is further advocated by Ben Walmsley (2018, p. 272): he promotes a shift towards “a more complex phenomenological question, which asks how people experience the arts and culture and why people want to understand its value”. Walmsley therefore speaks for “a process of deep hanging out” to feel and experience the possible value of art. To gain an in-depth, historicized understanding of gradually growing cross-cultural and diverse forms of participation in the MG events, I have taken a qualitative research approach with an emphasis on ethnographic fieldwork periods varying from one week to six months during 2013–2018.1 The main methods include participatory observations, postevent follow-ups, field notes, visual documentation and formal analysis of the artworks, along with both semi-structured in-depth interviews and informal discussions with artists, organizers, collaborators, volunteers, residents and audience members made during the MG projects in Hong Kong in April and December 2013, and in Jakarta in October 2017. Further post-event site visits were made to Hong Kong in May 2014 and February 2015, Cape Town in December 2015, and Jakarta in March and December 2018. In Jakarta, three Indonesian research assistants facilitated the gathering of the data from Indonesian artists and residents. During the five years, more than 130 people were consulted for this study and some more than once. In Jakarta, 17 Indonesian and 11 international on-site artists and two international off-site artists, two volunteers, two village chiefs, 23 residents, 17 visitors and three representatives of the collaborators were interviewed for their involvement in and perceptions of the MG Festival. The semi-structured anonymous interviews, lasting 30–90 minutes, explored a range of issues around the artistic practices, motivations to participate, expectations, outcomes and experiences on interaction during the event, as well as possible positive and negative impacts on the local residential and/or art community and further suggestions for any improvements. The secondary resources include MG production materials, media reports and online sources to facilitate further contextualization. From these versatile materials, the most relevant information is drawn for current conceptual analysis and mirrored against existing trajectories of

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Indonesian art in relation to sociopolitical transformations, the intricate position of NGOs in civil society formation in Jakarta and to the critical discourses and art and forms of participation and collaboration in arts. This long-term multi-sited investigation directly informs the analytical frameworks of positionalities and (un)intended modes of participation in different sociocultural contexts. While these analytical approaches are primarily based on the MG Festival in Jakarta, they are designed to be further adaptable to investigating other art(istic) events across geographic regions. Because the MG typically organizes one Festival in a selected city, locally embedded artists and cultural producers are included in the project already in the planning phase to work with the international team and to facilitate close collaboration with local communities. Further volunteers are recruited to share organizational responsibilities (e.g., media relations and translations). In the MG Festival in Jakarta in October 2017, such locally engaged cross-cultural interaction was prominent in the organizational structures, supporting collaborators and in the affective dynamics and aesthetics of the activities, taking place at the main site, a 400-metre long alley running in between two villages (kampongs) and the MG rooftop hub. Some unauthorized interventions (e.g., digital basking and mural painting) were further created in the vicinity of the two locations. Installation of the works and most of the events took place on 30 September–8 October, yet people were invited to independently visit for two more weeks during the Open Air Galleries stage. Artists were recruited through an open call for proposals from all spheres of art. A curatorial team of both international and Indonesian members chose 57 artworks by 50 artists and art collectives to be displayed. Preference was given to “locality” not only in the subject matter but also in the forms of agency; hence around 72% of the on-site artists and art collectives were Indonesian. Adding to the cross-culturality, one Indian artist, three Europeans, three Europeans based in Asia, three Australians and two Australians based in Hong Kong were invited. Furthermore, the artworks, workshops and interventions addressed local (Jakartan and Indonesian), regional (Asian) and internationally shared issues. Variety was also evident in the artists’ age range (22–49) and artistic expertise, including photography, street art, graffiti art, installation art, poster art, sticker art, traditional dance and theatre, urban art, environmental art, sculptures, murals and artworks that relied on predetermined forms of participation. The diversity and inclusiveness were further echoed in the artworks and activities consisting of 13 workshops from community gardening to stencils and beat boxing. The Jakarta Festival was clearly the largest, most versatile and cross-cultural MG event so far.

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Participation, art and the urban public space in a postcolonial context A wealth of literature demonstrates the prominent interest in what Claire Bishop (2006) calls the “social turn” in contemporary art. Scholars have addressed the varied forms of audience participation through concepts such as “connective aesthetics” (Gablik 1992), “relational aesthetics” (Bourriaud 1998), “dialogical art” (Kester 2004), “‘do-it-yourself’ artworks” (Dezeuze 2010), “collaborative art” (Kester 2011), “participatory art” (Bishop 2012), “social works” (Jackson 2011) and “gestures of participation” (Bala 2018) based primarily on Euro-American case studies. The transformative power of “art activism” (Felshin 1995; Thompson 2015; Ramírez Blanco 2018) has been highlighted especially in relation to social movements (Reed 2005; McCaughan 2012). These pioneering studies elucidate the intricate interactions between art, artists, audience and society, and embrace the “urban encounters” (Radice & BoudreaultFournier 2017), but they seldom, except for Kester, cover art projects in Asia. Despite the illuminating insights, given their shifting yet rather predominant focus on freedom of expression, democracy, anti-capitalism and antagonism, these frameworks are not always fully applicable to participatory artistic practices which rise from local prerequisites in postcolonial environments. Another line of enquiries which aims towards locally grounded studies of art and its engagement with sociopolitical issues in Asia illuminates the great variety of aspirations and strategies also beyond the usual art institutional settings (Turner 2005a; Lee 2013, 2015; Turner & Webb 2016; Jesty 2018; Valjakka & Wang 2018; Valjakka 2018; Wang 2018). Insights of novel forms of participation include the enhancement of civil society formation through art installations and choir singing in Hong Kong (Cheung 2015), transnational exchange through networking of large public screens (Papastergiadis et al. 2014) and “Art-Led-Participative-Processes” mainly in Southeast Asian everyday environments as part of artistic research (Koh 2016). Besides singular artworks relying on one specific method of participation (e.g., listening to the surrounding soundscape), (un)authorized art(istic) events may include multiple simultaneous or succeeding activities with mixed approaches of performance, installation, multimedia and street art in daily environments. To some extent, many of these artistic practices emerging in the context of civil society formation around Asia resonate with Chantal Mouffe’s (2007, 2013, pp. 85–105) perceptions on an agonistic approach in critical art that foregrounds counter-hegemonic interventions, but the preferred aesthetic strategies do not necessarily seek direct confrontation. This is not to claim that the artistic practices aiming at sociospatial change in Euro-American contexts could be reduced to representations of subversiveness either. Because of the varied

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sociopolitical norms and cultural value structures, in some parts of East and Southeast Asia participatory artistic practices in public spaces may opt for more subtle and informal forms and prefer strategic collaborations with different interest groups. These spatio-temporally changing parametres are too diversified to be discussed here in detail, yet this less confrontational approach is visible, for instance, in the cultural activism in Mainland China, where the aesthetic trajectories include, but are not limited to, subtle and/or abstract expressions of sociopolitical criticism under the currently growing censorship (Valjakka & Wang 2018). At the same time, given the recent social movements worldwide, especially in public discourse but also in scholarly studies, street art has become more prominently framed through the capturing narrative of sociopolitical resistance (see, e.g., Awad & Wagoner 2017; Taş & Taş 2014). Such aspirations are not unknown in East and Southeast Asia, but the current broad understanding of “street art” commonly embraces any forms of artistic interventions in the urban public space. This even applies to apolitical commissioned works that inevitably both complicate the ideas of political practice and require a more detailed analysis of the “political” in terms of content, context, action, aim and reception. More importantly, and corresponding to participatory art, sociospatial transformations can also be promoted through more constructive and collaborative strategies in street art. This is especially evident in cities where the possibilities for any kind of unauthorized political participation in urban environment are limited or criminalized. Intricate social, political and cultural circumstances can be especially challenging for participation in the urban public spaces in postcolonial and multicultural contexts, such as Jakarta, where the contestations of representation and power relations between different ethnicities, institutions, religions and ideological frameworks prevail in relation to colonial legacies (Kusno 2000, 2010). In a similar vein, the representation and appreciation of local artists can still be hampered by the current paradigms of art historical narratives and hierarchic relations between local, national and international art institutions. A “localist” cultural policy, focussing on protectionism and the preservation of authentic Indonesian culture has, nonetheless, caused tensions in the circulation and consumption of culture in relation to international markets (Jones 2013, p. 278). Similar strains are echoed in the public discourses on street art and participatory art projects in Jakarta. The concerns expressed by local artists regarding “foreign” or multinational NGOs inviting non-Indonesian artists and street artists at the expense of “local” artists can be understood through the acknowledgement of the longstanding and intricate role of NGOs for strengthening civil society formation in Indonesia. Especially after the change of regime in 1998, the complex sociopolitical and economic transformations led to an unprecedented growth of NGOs which was not always unproblematic (Eldridge 1990; Hadiwinata 2003; Beittinger-Lee

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2009). During the interviews, it became evident that some Indonesian artists perceive foreign NGOs as advocates of foreign interests regardless of their programmes, while some artists are more welcoming towards their financial support on the local art scene, assuming that artists can preserve their autonomy over the production. Such perceptions should also be mirrored against the growing complexities of “local”. This is especially relevant in a geographically vast and culturally and ethnically diverse country such as Indonesia, where each city and its art scene have developed specific characteristics. An artist based in another city in Java or on another island is not necessarily considered as “local” in Jakarta. Furthermore, the views on the appropriate representation in terms of nationality vary greatly: even though 29 of the 41 on-site artists in the MG Festival in Jakarta were Indonesian, two of the interviewed residents and three of the Indonesian artists felt that there were too many foreign artists. Yet, these three artists also highlighted the interaction with international artists and potential international recognition as a motivation to participate. Degrees and interrelations of “foreignness” and “localness” are a matter of nuance depending on circumstances of cross-cultural encounters, but to acknowledge these notions resonates with the well-justified criticism of mere implementation of collaborative and participatory art practices and reconsideration of the ethics of co-opting (Kester 2011, pp. 1–2, 135, 185; Downey 2009), especially in cross-cultural projects. Such an approach is a prerequisite of critically analysing the possibilities and discrepancies of varied politics of participation in postcolonial circumstances. In the sociocultural context of a residential community, the vastly divergent relationships between predetermined, spontaneous and refused participations and their discursive articulations diversify the modalities and positionalities of participation – and their intricate interdependencies. “In expanding the parameters of what constitutes engagement with art”, as Rogoff (2005, p. 121) eloquently reminds us, “we might in fact be entertaining an expanded notion of the very nature of participation, of taking part in and of itself”. It is exactly these complexities of “expanded participation” (ibid) and their unplanned manifestations that can be considered as the defining characteristic premised upon cross-cultural collaborations and simultaneous activities at the MG Festival in Jakarta. As Rogoff further points out, we “believe in the principle of participation”, but we rarely analyse in detail these activities and what constitutes the modes of having public manifestations (ibid). Even more importantly, as Bala (2018) elaborates in great detail, the “gestures of participation” should also be understood as including the possibility of non-participation, especially if positioned in the broader context of civic participation. I share Bala’s (2018, pp. 2–3) interest to extend the research of participatory art beyond the evaluation of its social qualities, format and devising, but I will rather delineate how these novel artistic practices of street art

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further contribute to “altering the terms and conditions of participation” along with considering a refusal to participate “as a critical form of participation”. Whether a resident can also opt not to participate and under which conditions s/he might be able to do so are also questions to take into account when analysing an art(istic) project organized in everyday environments.

Broader horizons of and for participation The expanding diversity of participatory practices in contemporary art since the 1960s has generated a variety of critical theoretical responses on the questions on ethics, aesthetics, impact and distribution of agency. Consequently, participation in art should be taken as a historical concept that requires an in-depth contextualization of production and reception (see e.g., Kraynak 2003). It is therefore vital to acknowledge – especially in a postcolonial context – that the belief in aesthetic universality may disregard the local specificities of art production (Kester 2004, pp. 104–107) and result in a kind of provincialism where artists rely “on a generic set of creative solutions and a priori assumptions” (Kester 2011, p. 135). Relying on the potential for a cross-cultural collaboration, the MG Festival provides many possibilities for individual artists, art collectives, professionals from various backgrounds and audiences to participate. Hence, “participation” here takes more intricate forms than Bishop’s (2012, p. 2) definition of it as “in which people constitute the central artistic medium and material, in the manner of theatre and performance”. In the MG Festival, the shifting positionalities of participation emerge from the multidimensional de- and reconstruction of the roles of artist, audience and participant. Suzanne Lacy’s (1995, p. 178) diagram of “the audience as a series of concentric circles with permeable membranes that allow continual movement back and forth” provides an illuminating starting point, yet it can be further modified to respond more closely to the practicalities of the changing forms of participatory agency in the MG Festival (Figure 4.1). Maintaining the “genesis of the work as a point in the center” (ibid.), I have redesigned the diagram to delineate the process of the MG Festival as a platform that through its varied agency of participation enables the creation of the artworks and workshops. Consequently, the “different degrees of responsibility for the work” (ibid.) reveal the importance of the core organization, including the local creative team members and the main national and international collaborators – all taking different roles in terms of financial, material or practical support. Without this cross-cultural basis laid out for the artists both on-site and off-site, the artworks, interventions and workshops could not exist in such a collaborative form. Assisting the processes further are then the volunteers, some of whom also assist the artist(s) to create the made-in-situ installations

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Core organization (including local team members) Main collaborators (e.g., financial and material support) Volunteers Artists on-site Artists off-site Residents Immediate audience Media audience Audience of myth and memory

Figure 4.1 Forms of participatory agency in the MG Festival in Jakarta. Source: Copyright by Minna Valjakka

and thus to an extent share the role of the artist. Next in these circles of responsibility are the residents and the immediate audience (e.g., visitors): many of which are not only viewers but actively take upon “expanded participation as collaborators and assistants of artists, providing snacks, documenting the event and so forth. The media audience, together with the audience of myth and memory – also often including the off-site artists – then continues to disseminate the responsibilities (e.g., knowledge exchange) and affective responses of the whole event even further. As shown by this diagram, transitory and often overlapping positionalities are inevitable and further foregrounded by simultaneous activities and potentialities embedded in changing forms of participatory agency. Instead of fixed identities or roles of participation, the concept of permeable membranes enables the understanding of fluidity of positionalities in these cross-cultural and mixed-method artistic projects with concurrent events: a resident, a volunteer or a representative of a financial supporter might take upon the shared role of an artist in assisting in an artwork or by starting to create their own. In a similar vein, an on-site artist or a volunteer assistant of one artwork is inevitably also an immediate audience of other artworks on-site. Yet Lacy’s suggestion of intended nonhierarchical interactivity “with permeable membranes” is not necessarily fully possible in a postcolonial urban environment guided by different sociopolitical and cultural norms. In Jakarta, in a Muslim majority neighbourhood in which some are more conservative than others, not everyone

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was eager to participate, not even as a viewer, although the clear majority of residents visibly enjoyed the Festival. Furthermore, not all the positionalities of participation are equally permeable for all the participants because they are also bound by spatio-temporal modalities. For instance, an off-site artist cannot share the positionalities based on physical presence (e.g., resident, on-site artist, immediate audience) and vice versa. The politics of these transformative positionalities can be complicated further by taking into account how the varying forms of participation and collaboration are interacting. In the existing literature, participation and collaboration are often taken as somewhat differentiated forms of agency in contemporary art practices, which may or may not be interrelated but do not necessarily directly correlate with or depend on each other. The preference of these two concepts varies from author to another. For instance, Kester (2011, pp. 1–2) emphasizes both the positive and the negative connotations of collaboration as working together, which may also imply a betrayal or forced cooperation. His interest lies in “collaborative projects that unfold through extended interaction and shared labour, and in which the process of participatory interaction itself is treated as a form of creative praxis” (Kester 2011, p. 9). While it is not explicitly indicated, Kester seems to give prominence to collaborative projects which challenge the authority of the artist, stress durational interaction on site and employ egalitarian methods for joint work (p. 65). Similarly, Downey’s (2009, p. 603) main interest lies in ethics and degrees of collaborative artworks, and he concludes with a need of “a theory of collaboration and participation that employs an ethics of engagement . . . but as a way of re-inscribing the aesthetic as a form of sociopolitical praxis”. Rather than offering strict definitions because of the extremely diversified and transformative artistic practices, I am more interested in analysing the interrelations of the forms and levels of both participation and collaboration and their intricate interdependencies. To do so, I propose that in relation to the MG Festival these questions can be further addressed through three main variables: the form of agency (individual or collaborative work), the form of production (preconceived or improvised) and the main locus of production (premade elsewhere or made in situ). Through this three-dimensional model, the aim is to illuminate the dynamic and shifting interdependencies emergent in between these three variables and enacted through an artwork or an intervention (Figure 4.2). An individually preconceived and premade work, such as a poster, pasted up by the artist him/herself during the Festival (A) requires the least amount of collaboration, yet depends on the physical participation in the event by the artist in person. Because of limited financial resources for travel, it is not possible for all the artists to come to participate onsite and hence they submit their individually (or collaboratively) preconceived artworks to be printed and installed by others (B). This kind of cross-cultural collaboration as working together is further enhanced by

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Collaborative

Collaborative Improvised Made-in-situ Individual Preconceived Premade

Made-in-situ

Improvised Figure 4.2 The varying interrelatedness of three main variables of participation and collaboration enacted through an artwork or an intervention. Source: Copyright by Minna Valjakka

the MG, as the on-site artists are also expected to cooperate with each other by organizing workshops and/or assisting other artists if needed. For instance, although most of the artworks are selected in advance, some need further rendering on-site to fit the specific spot, while some might not work out and need to be replaced. Such organic (translocal) siteresponsiveness (Valjakka 2015, 2018) often inspires more improvised artworks to be made in situ, some in collaboration with other artist(s) and/or with the audience (C). Many of the artworks and interventions in Jakarta were nonetheless preconceived to be enacted directly in collaboration with the audience (D), requiring a predetermined form of action (e.g., writing or colouring, Figure 4.3). Creating in collaboration with other artists and residents was mentioned as the motivation to participate in the MG Festival by 75% of the interviewed artists. Around half emphasized their hopes to employ art to promote social change and make it more accessible to Jakartans with limited opportunities to directly engage with contemporary art. This kind of participation in an event in order to collaborate with others, as a

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Figure 4.3 One form of participation enacted through an artwork. Source: Photographs by Minna Valjakka

mode of working together, like Kester indicates, can be taken as one of the characteristics of the MG Festival. While on site, some of the visitors who originally came “to see what is going on”, got inspired by the evolving affective dynamics and were additionally inspired to collaborate, for instance, in painting a mural. Furthermore, because of a cross-cultural multimethod approach in the everyday living conditions, the forms and strategies of both participation and collaboration create a more intricate and multilevel processes with unforeseen results which validate Rogoff’s (2005) insights on “expanded participation”. In Jakarta these forms of participation and collaboration extended, among others, to residents offering assistance, setting up lunch stalls and sharing information. Indeed, such affective dynamics which further investigation Bishop calls for (2012, pp. 5–6) are not limited to the participation of creating a specific artwork but should be understood taking place in relation to the Festival as a whole. Working in a residential area in a cross-cultural atmosphere inspired unplanned participation also through new artworks and workshops that not only respond to the tangible and intangible features of the site but also to other artists’ works, discussions, events and even unfortunate incidents. One of the most illuminating improvised made in situ collaborations emerged when a paint bucket fell over and the female residents took up brushes to transform the puddle of paint into a painting extending onto the wall above, further to the other side of the alley and, finding more paint, to decorate their household items (Figure 4.4). As this example shows, participation and collaboration in the MG Festival are often overlapping modes of practices enhancing each other. They further correlate with the possibilities and self-representations as a participant with shifting positionalities contributing towards the crosscultural collaboration.

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Figure 4.4 Unplanned forms of participation by residents. Source: Photographs by Minna Valjakka

Together these two analytical models enable us to distinguish how many forms of participation and collaboration enacted through interventions, artworks and workshops rely on the physical presence of the people in the event, but the forms of participation as an off-site artist, a collaborator (e.g., providing financial support from abroad), a member of the media or audience of myth and memory are not bound by the same spatio-temporal modalities. They indicate how these novel artistic practices thus enable what Bala (2018, p. 3) regards as “altering the terms and conditions of participation” and in case of the MG Festival, including physical non-participation in the event itself (e.g., by walking out from the kampong through some other alley and to refuse one’s photo to be taken). While decision to participate or not to participate can be made privately or with others, it is nonetheless a prerequisite for possible collaboration which relies on some level and/or form of working together.

Accumulative affectiveness The evaluation of any kind of art project in terms of its possible value or societal transformation is an important and a challenging task. Even in relation to projects with quantifiable and tangible outcomes, but especially in art projects enriched with disparate social and cultural values, the accumulative intangible affects render clear causal attribution difficult, occasionally even impossible. Furthermore, because “art” is mainly an affective experience, it has become ever more critical to ask how it should be assessed, taking into account its possible unintentional and even negative results (e.g., Belfiore & Bennett 2010a, 2010b; Walmsley 2018). At the core in these discussions lies now the urge to extend the assessments beyond the approaches based on socioeconomic values and

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the limited perceptions of the social impact on education, employment, health, crime and economics. As to the immediate affect from the perspective of the residents and visitors alike, the responses on the MG Festival were clearly positive, emphasizing conviviality, beautification, colourfulness, social inclusion and possibilities for novel experiments. The clear majority had positive experiences about the social and engagement aspects of the project and about the artworks and interventions themselves. Their appreciation shows in comments such as “This is especially good for women and children in the kampong”, and “The best thing that ever happened!” along with repeated requests to extend the event or have a retake. When specifically enquired, some of the residents made critical remarks mainly on unexpected social behaviour, such as visitors with extensive tattoos, too much noise caused by the project and concerns for not respecting prayer times. What these comments suggest is the significance of taking into consideration the local sociocultural norms and also accepting that some might consider the activities disturbing. Yet all respondents admitted that their interest in arts had grown and they had learned new skills. Two of the most positive effects highlighted by the artists on-site was the ability to build new networks and to create and display their art in a local environment – the latter being especially inspiring for nonIndonesian artists. These experiences were summarized also by the village leader who in a post-event interview in May 2018 praised the project as a good experience and well received by the people, in particular because its educational aspects advocated new perspectives also for adults to try to understand art created for and with them. The whole project, and the inclusion of international artists, gave the kampong a lively atmosphere: it “became like one society”. The sociopolitical environment in Indonesia has entailed a great many shifting realities for artists and citizens alike. Since its emergence in the mid-1970s, contemporary Indonesian art has had a strong alignment with sociopolitical criticism, societal transformation and community based works (Morrell 2000; Turner 2005b; Spielmann 2017; Halim 1999; Supangkat 1997, pp. 65–89; Flores 2009, pp. 37–42). Given that in the 1990s unparalleled internationalization and commercialization further reshaped the Indonesian art scene (Supangkat 2005; Turner 2005b; Spielmann 2017; Spanjaard 2016, pp. 142–159), Indonesian artists have become aware of the contingencies and challenges of socially engaged art projects fully or partially supported by transnational agencies. Three interrelated trajectories explain why Jakarta provided a fruitful environment for a cross-cultural street art event in 2017. First, the lack of government support for contemporary arts and culture has inspired artists to find other forms of establishing their presence with a close interrelation to local communities (e.g., Spielmann 2017, pp. 9–15; Flores 2009, pp. 101–102, 180–181). These socially engaged aspirations extend

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beyond alternative spaces to the urban environment around the capital as bottom-up, enduring commitments. Second, as Doreen Lee (2013, p. 307) elaborates, “street art provides a democratic venue for enacting a personalized urban citizenship” after the change of regime in 1998,2 enabling Jakartans to “feel like citizens engaged in the politics of self-expression and national identification”. Because of circulation in and between physical space and digital sphere, Lee (ibid.) considers street art to be “both the cultural mouthpiece and mediatic surface for a counterpublic that is naturally situated in an urban context”. Yet as is demonstrated by the many artistic projects and aesthetic strategies, and especially by the numerous collaborations by Gardu House, ruangrupa and (multinational) NGOs in Jakarta during the past decade, the aspirations involved in street art can transcend the local and national discourses. Finally, as was explained by some Indonesian artists in interviews, Jakarta offers an inspiring sphere for artists based in more disciplined urban environments such as Singapore to engage with the urban public spaces through (un)authorized artistic practices. In this affluent Jakartan art scene with a rich record on artists and art collectives working on societal issues in the urban public space and with local communities, the MG Festival is nonetheless noticeable for three main novel features. First, it embraced a great variety of simultaneous artistic practices and other activities in an event extending clearly beyond the common focus on one format (e.g., murals) for a specific intervention in Jakarta. Second, it promoted the educational aspect and knowledge exchange through multidisciplinary workshops for children and adults alike. Third, it gave a prominent role to women artists and their transcultural collaboration including female residents. The Indonesian graffiti and street art crew, Ladies On Wall, painted their own work and collaborated on a cross-cultural mural project, Women on the Wall. Despite an underrepresentation of women artists, feminism and feminist art is by no means an unknown phenomenon in Indonesian contemporary art (see e.g., Dirgantoro 2017; Spielmann 2017, pp. 15–22). Yet female agency has seldom been displayed in the Jakartan urban environment with similar emphasis. The MG is a fruitful platform for knowledge exchange and learning new skill sets that reach beyond artistic practices to social, cooperational and organizational abilities. A direct affective potential is usually strongest among the immediate audience (including residents, visitors and on-site artists) who actively participated in the Festival, but as Lacy (1995, p. 180) has pointed out, a part of the broader audience also carries the artwork over time as myth and memory. At this level “the artwork becomes .  .  . a commonly held possibility”. In the MG Festival, the memories of the artworks, activities and the event itself continue to be reinforced, for instance, through new murals in the alley created by youths from the neighborhood and by the residents’ hope that even

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more artworks would be made. Another concrete indicator of the Festival’s cumulative impact took place on 11–18 March 2018. With support from the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, the MG enabled two representatives of the Ladies On Wall collective, along with an Indonesian cultural producer, to extend their experiences in the Brisbane Street Art Festival. As a result, in cross-cultural collaboration with two Australian female street artists, a mural was created to encourage women to be unapologetic about being women and rather be empowered, creative and fabulous. Such self-representation is a powerful statement in itself to be made by women who remain underrepresented in contemporary and street art scenes in Indonesia.

Conclusions What the two trajectories, street art and participatory art in the everyday environment, have in common is the defining characteristic of co-creation of the public spaces for and with multilayered audiences. Such a collaborative co-creation is nevertheless subjected to multiple practicalities and power relations because the public spaces are continuously contested by varying norms, conflicting aspirations and changing physical conditions. Adding to the challenges are the divergent understandings of “art” and appropriate responses to spatio-aesthetic dimensions. To understand the shifting modalities and politics of participation emerging from a multidisciplinary cross-cultural artistic project, especially with simultaneous activities in everyday environment, the divergent processes can be examined through the two analytical tools introduced. Even though they are primarily based on the observations made during the MG Festival in Jakarta, their development has directly benefitted from the longitudinal research which has enabled a gradual recognition of a great variety of forms of participation and strategies in the different cities. When set against the broader sociopolitical and cultural perspectives, the closer analysis of the transitory forms and roles of participatory agency (Figure 4.1), together with the three main variables enacted through an artwork or intervention (Figure 4.2) – form of agency (individual or collaborative work), form of production (preconceived or improvised) and main locus of production (premade elsewhere or made in situ) – facilitate a more in-depth investigation of complex modes and positionalities of participation in relation to changing affective dynamics of the art project in the urban public space. The core question for analysing any cross-cultural artistic project remains: do these parametres contribute to a hierarchic construction which renders the leading agency to “foreign” artists and places the “local” artists in a less important position, or are the forms of agency and positionalities equally shared and aimed at a horizontal power distribution and intersubjective agency? In case of the MG Festival in Jakarta, the preference

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was given to “locality” in terms of representation, and cross-cultural collaboration was promoted not only through artworks but also through other activities. Such potentiality of empowering affective dynamics is premised upon respectful and attentive interrelations between all the participants, and in practice much also depends on the willingness and ability of the organizers, collaborators, artists, residents, volunteers and visitors to engage with others. As indicated by the MG Festival in Jakarta, even amidst the challenging circumstances of (post)colonial legacies and instrumentalization of art, this kind of multidisciplinary cross-cultural street art project can make a societal contribution by transforming the everyday urban environment into a site of inspiring co-creation, which in turn enables more variety and spontaneity of participation and collaboration for the residents, volunteers and visitors. Through distributed agency and knowledge exchange, the process in itself opened up alternative ways of experiencing artistic practices. Even more importantly, because some of the artworks and interventions addressed local and global sociopolitical issues – climate change, waste, poverty, societal intolerance, freedom of the press – they provided sites to take part in sociopolitical discourses. By providing a platform also for unexpected and extended modes of (non)participation, the MG Festival in Jakarta shows the importance of further studies on these emergent modalities and politics of participation. As a result, such empowering possibilities highlight the potential of (un)authorized cross-cultural artistic practices for accumulative affects. By foregrounding the participants’ voluntary interaction with artworks and other activities of socioethical meaning, the MG Festival defines itself both as an aesthetic experience and an ethical encounter especially in the urban public space where multisensory experiences and direct collaboration are possible in ways not available in an art institution or online. Consequently these innovative artistic platforms of extended participation in daily environments are able not only to facilitate further discourses on shared issues and their local significance but also to critically reexamine what kind of sociopolitical, ideological, cultural or conceptual significance the artistic and curatorial practices might have in postcolonial multicultural urban environments. These possibilities nonetheless translate into further theoretical and methodological challenges for examining the intricate processes of participation emerging outside of the art institutional settings and extending beyond the predetermined roles of participation. In particular, if an artistic intervention is situated in a residential neighbourhood of a postcolonial urban environment, the timely questions of politics, positionalities and spatio-aesthetic dimensions (guided by, for instance, religious norms) may become even more complex than might be the case in a more supervised institutional art setting. Given the growing global financial

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and information flows, privatization of the urban public space and international competition between cities, the questions that participation in artistic projects and any study of it may address are reconfigured by the vastly divergent relationships between intended, unplanned and rejected participations and their discursive articulations in the sociocultural context of a residential community.

Notes 1 The extended research period was made possible by the financial support of the Academy of Finland (2012–2015): the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University (2015–2016); the Finnish Cultural Foundation (2016); and the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (2017–2018). 2 For a detailed examination of the cultural and political contingencies of urban (re)development in Jakarta, see Kusno (2013).

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Gablik, S 1992, ‘Connective aesthetics’, American Art, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 2−7. Hadiwinata, BS 2003, The politics of NGOs in Indonesia: Developing democracy and managing a movement, RoutledgeCurzon, London. Halim, HD 1999, ‘Arts networks and the struggle for democratisation’, in A Budiman, B Hatley & D Kingsbury (eds.), Reformasi: Crisis and change in Indonesia, Monash Asia Institute, Clayton, pp. 287–298. Jackson, S 2011, Social works: Performing art, supporting publics, Routledge, New York. Jesty, J 2018, Art and engagement in early postwar Japan, Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Jones, T 2013, Culture, power, and authoritarianism in the Indonesian state: Cultural policy across the twentieth-century to the reform era, Brill, Leiden. Kester, GH 2004, Conversation pieces: Community and communication in modern art, University of California Press, Berkeley. Kester, GH 2011, The one and the many: Contemporary collaborative art in a global context, Duke University Press, Durham. Koh, J 2016, Art-led participative processes: Dialogue and subjectivity within performances in the everyday, 2nd edn, Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, Puchong. Kraynak, J 2003, ‘Dependent participation: Bruce Nauman’s environments’, Grey Room, vol. 10, pp. 22–45. Kusno, A 2000, Behind the postcolonial: Architecture, urban space and political cultures in Indonesia, Routledge, London. Kusno, A 2010, The appearances of memory: Mnemonic practices of architecture and urban form in Indonesia, Duke University Press, Durham. Kusno, A 2013, After the new order: Space, politics and Jakarta, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu. Lacy, S 1995, ‘Debated territory: Toward a critical language for public art’, in S Lacy (ed.), Mapping the terrain: New genre public art, Bay Press, Seattle, pp. 171–185. Lee, D 2013, ‘“Anybody can do it”: Aesthetic empowerment, urban citizenship, and the naturalization of Indonesian graffiti and street art’, City & Society, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 304–327. Lee, D 2015, ‘A troubled vernacular: Legibility and presence in Indonesian activist art’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 74, no. 2, pp. 303–322. McCaughan, EJ 2012, Art and social movements: Cultural politics in Mexico and Aztlán, Duke University Press, Durham. Micro Galleries 2018, viewed 20 November, http://microgalleries.org/. Morrell, E 2000, ‘Ethnicity, art, and politics away from the Indonesian centre’, Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 255–272. Mouffe, C 2007, ‘Artistic activism and agonistic spaces’, Art & Research, vol. 1, no. 2, viewed 1 November 2018, www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html. Mouffe, C 2013, Agonistics: Thinking the world politically, Verso, London. Papastergiadis, N, McQuire, S, Barikin, A & Yue, A 2014, ‘Public screen and participatory public space’, in L Hjorth, N King & M Kataoka (eds.), Art in the Asia-Pacific: Intimate publics, Routledge, London, pp. 161–172. Radice, M & Boudreault-Fournier, A (eds.) 2017, Urban encounters: Art and the public, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal. Ramírez Blanco, J 2018, Artistic utopias of revolt: Claremont road, reclaim the streets, and the city of sol, Springer International Publishing, Cham.

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Reed, TV 2005, The art of protest: Culture and activism from the civil rights movement to the streets of Seattle, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Rogoff, I 2005, ‘Looking away: Participations in visual culture’, in G Butt (ed.), After criticism: New responses to art and performance, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Malden, MA, pp. 117–134. Spanjaard, H 2016, Artists & their inspiration: A guide through Indonesian art history (1930–2015), LM Publishers, Volemdam. Spielmann, Y 2017, Contemporary Indonesian art: Artists, art spaces, and collectors, Expanded and updated English edn, NUS Press, Singapore. Supangkat, J 1997, Indonesian modern art and beyond, Indonesia Fine Arts Foundation, Jakarta. Supangkat, J 2005, ‘Arts and politics in Indonesia’, in C Turner (ed.), Art and social change: Contemporary art in Asia and the Pacific, Pandanus Books, Canberra, pp. 218–228. Taş, O & Taş, T 2014, ‘Resistance on the walls, reclaiming public space: Street art in times of political turmoil in Turkey’, Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 327–349. Thompson, N 2015, Seeing power: Art and activism in the twenty-first century, Melville House Publishing, New York. Turner, C (ed.) 2005a, Art and social change: Contemporary art in Asia and the Pacific, Pandanus Books, Canberra. Turner, C 2005b, ‘Indonesia: Art, freedom, human rights and engagement with the West’, in C Turner (ed.), Art and social change: Contemporary art in Asia and the Pacific, Pandanus Books, Canberra, pp. 196–217. Turner, C & Webb, J 2016, Art and human rights: Contemporary Asian contexts, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Valjakka, M 2015, ‘Negotiating spatial politics: Site-responsiveness in Chinese Urban Art Images’, China Information, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 253–281. Valjakka, M 2018, ‘Translocal site-responsiveness of urban creativity in mainland China’, in M Valjakka & M Wang (eds.), Visual arts, representations and interventions in contemporary China: Urbanized interface, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, pp. 285–315. Valjakka, M & Wang, M 2018, ‘Engagement with the urban: Visual arts as a form of cultural activism in contemporary China’, in M Valjakka & M Wang (eds.), Visual arts, representations and interventions in contemporary China: Urbanized interface, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, pp. 13–31. Walmsley, B 2018, ‘Deep hanging out in the arts: An anthropological approach to capturing cultural value’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 272–291. Wang, M 2018, ‘Place-making for the people: Socially engaged art in rural China’, China Information, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 244–269.

5

Art and local communities Inclusion, interests and ownership in participatory art projects with embroiderers and billiard players Birgit Eriksson

Since the mid-20th century, the right to participate equally in art and culture has been a premise for democratic cultural policy in Europe and beyond. In spite of this, many people still do not participate in legitimate culture. At present, art institutions and cultural policies are attempting to change this through an increased focus on “citizen participation”. But what challenges and potentials does this focus entail? Building on a democratic understanding of participation, this chapter focusses on two dilemmas encountered by cultural institutions trying to engage a wider and more diverse population in arts and culture: the first is that some people are not interested in what the art institutions have to offer, and the second is the paradox artists and art institutions face when trying to design the participation of others. These two dilemmas echo challenges of participation identified in development studies (Cornwall 2008; White 2011) and aesthetic theory (Sternfeld 2013; Rancière 2009) – challenges that are linked to unequal power and to heterogeneous interests and valuation criteria. By tracing these inequalities and heterogeneities, this chapter examines how the dilemmas are dealt with in two participatory artistic projects: The path embroidered at my feet (2016) involving members of an embroidery club in Sant Llorenç de Cerdans, a small village in the Spanish Pyrenees, and War (you should have been there) (2013) involving the inhabitants of Hørve, a small village in Denmark. Based on an analysis of these two cases, the chapter discusses how participatory art projects can connect to the interests of inhabitants in rural areas, reevaluate the artistic and social aspects of cultural participation and redistribute the right to invite, include and empower others.

Equal rights, unequal interests In 1948, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights expressed a principle that eventually became a premise of democratic cultural policy: “Everyone has the right to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts” (United Nations 1948, Article 27).

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In Europe, the ambition to turn this equal right into concrete reality has resulted in various efforts to democratize culture (in the singular) by creating equal access to excellent arts. However, as is well known, repeated attempts to reduce or remove economic, geographical and physical obstacles have not resulted in everyone exercising their declared right to participate in arts and culture. As such, the “excellence and access model” of cultural democracy was supplemented by a more inclusive strategy designed to target the “expansion or redistribution of the means of cultural production” (Gross & Wilson 2018, p. 2). Cultural democracy exists in several versions, but a central expression of it can be found in UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, which states that “all persons have the right to participate in the cultural life of their choice and conduct their own cultural practices” (UNESCO 2001, Article 5). This expression combines a focus on universal rights with the acknowledgment that cultural preferences are highly diverse; and it concerns not only access and enjoyment but also practices and thereby the definitions and makings of culture. In spite of this, cultural life still does not appear to be for everyone. In Europe, the Eurobarometer survey of “Cultural access and participation” has indicated a general decline in participation in (rather narrowly defined) cultural activities. The reasons given for this decline are a lack of time and, in particular, a lack of interest (European Commission 2013a). UK studies have similarly shown that the main barriers to enjoying cultural life are a “psychological sense of exclusion or lack of interest in the arts on offer, rather than the practical limitations of wanting to participate” (Jancovich 2015, p. 2). And, even in Denmark, which has one of the highest levels of cultural participation, 50 years of surveys of cultural habits have shown that a significant part of the population plays no (or only a limited) part in the cultural contexts and exchanges examined. Danes with a low income or a low level of education and who live far from the larger cities participate significantly less than the rest of the population. In the most recent Danish survey, the main reason given for not participating in cultural life is that “it does not interest me” (Pluss Leadership & Epinion 2012, p. 329). At a more theoretical level, scholars in arts, culture and sociology have argued that the arts are losing their former privileged status. While the modern concept of art since the late 18th century has been closely related to fundamental modern concepts and values such as community, democracy, civilization, Bildung and humanity, this relationship is currently under strain (Michaud 1998; Tepper & Ivey 2008; Bauman 2011; Eriksson 2014). As the traditional hierarchies and societal value of the arts are no longer taken for granted, it is easy to turn elsewhere when wishing to engage in issues such as community and democracy. The British research projects “Understanding Everyday Participation” and “Pathways of Participation” show that many people engage in these

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issues outside of the arts. A central finding of both projects is that forms of participation that support active citizenship are widely practiced. When the researchers of “Pathways of Participation” conducted a survey that included social participation (e.g., participating in voluntary organizations), public participation (e.g., voting or demonstrating) and individual participation (e.g., helping an elderly neighbour), they were simply “unable to identify any genuine non-participants” (Brodie et al. 2011, p. 3). This finding – that all people participate or have participated in something – may be based on an unusually inclusive concept of participation, but it is supported by “Understanding Everyday Participation” and other projects that document the rich and diverse character of people’s everyday lives (Stevenson, Balling & Kann-Rasmussen 2017, p. 94) and thereby differs from the numerous surveys of participation in arts and culture that identify certain populations as non-users or non-participants.

Current conditions of participation If people refrain from engaging in the arts because of a lack of interest (and not necessarily because they cannot), this is a challenge for cultural institutions that depend on public support. Seen from a cultural policy perspective, the unequal interest in cultural life is problematic because it means that certain groups benefit neither from the common good that arts and culture are still expected to represent nor from the estimated secondary effects of being involved in cultural life, such as improved health, creativity, wellbeing and social inclusion (Florida 2002; Bishop 2012; Sørensen, Kortbek & Thobo-Carlsen 2016).1 Since the 1990s, these socioeconomic effects have been an important motivation for the widespread strategic ambition in (cultural) policy to increase participation in cultural life. The arts should no longer just be for but with everyone, and cultural institutions are increasingly expected to aim for broad citizen/user/audience involvement, particularly of groups that are not already engaged. Cultural participation is thus not only a human right but also a requirement. The above-mentioned development has resulted in what Nora Sternfeld has termed “the participatory imperative” (Sternfeld 2013, p. 1). In line with Jacques Rancière’s argument in The Emancipated Spectator (2009), Sternfeld criticizes the fact that the attempt to transform the audience into participants encompasses technologies of dominance in which the audience is expected to interact and perform as objects of representation without changing the structure of the institutions. Sternfeld’s understanding of participation builds (implicitly) on a theoretical tradition that ties the concept to a democratic redistribution of power (Arnstein 1969; Pateman 1970; Carpentier 2011a, 2011b). In this tradition, participation is defined by (some kind of) shared power and decision making, and it is a precondition for democracy. In extension of this tradition,

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Sternfeld argues that participation must involve shared decision making also about the terms of participation, decision making and representation. Participation is only interesting if it allows for change at the structural level: “Participation is not simply about joining the game, it’s also about having the ability to question the rules of the game” (Sternfeld 2013, p. 4). This ability to question or change the structural conditions of participation is often absent in cultural institutions. In fact, Sternfeld argues that institutional-hegemonic strategies frequently use participation in order to preserve rather than change existing power relations. Similarly, Jancovich has argued that, despite an explicit and strong focus in UK cultural policy on the need for wider participation, cultural institutions in the country have changed very little. Instead of understanding the problem of participation as a shortcoming in their offerings and forms of organization, these cultural institutions understand it as a problem of reception and therefore focus on new forms of dissemination or on more or less patronizing types of “audience development” (Jancovich 2015, p. 3). While Sternfeld and Jancovich both criticize the institutions for holding onto power, many art historians and professionals question the very idea that democratic participation can and should be realized in art institutions. This position is articulated, for example, in The Art of Taking Part (2017), where it is agreed that a democratic and power-oriented understanding of participation is usually absent in the practice of art museums (Jalving 2017, p. 9). Such a conclusion, however, does not lead the authors to criticize the institutions. Instead, they suggest understanding participation differently: as low-effort forms of engagement that are easy to work with and do not require a restructuring of the entire institution (Klindt 2017, p. 49) or as the affective encounter with the materiality of the artwork, which to a greater or lesser extent is present in any art experience (Jalving 2017, p. 12). They thus avoid the more radical challenges to institutional practice, including the dilemmas regarding expertise and quality that are often present in more democratic practices of participation. Rejecting the democratic aspects of participation, however, does seem to close down important questions about interest, empowerment and ownership that have been raised within discussions of participation. If we wish to take these questions seriously, instead of broadening the notion of participation, it seems more helpful to explore the potentials and dilemmas of the democratic line of thought – including how participation requires both institutions and participants to be open to change in the current institutional practice and to enable a shared ownership between parties with different and potentially opposing interests. But how can such a shared ownership be established? How can artists and cultural institutions initiate projects that become people’s own? These questions can be illuminated through a short excursion to development theory.

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Invited versus self-created participation International development projects that aim to improve the conditions of life in the poor countries of the world are intensely engaged in questions of participation and ownership. In development projects and theory, participatory development has been a key term and challenge since the 1990s. A particular challenge is how to transfer ownership of development projects from NGOs to the locals, whose general conditions the NGOs wish to improve. Responding to this, development researcher Andrea Cornwall has suggested comprehending participation as a spatial practice in order to highlight the relations of power and constructions of citizenship that permeate any site for public engagement (Cornwall 2004). She distinguishes between invited spaces and spaces that people create for themselves, and she argues that invited spaces and invited participation are usually owned and structured by the “hosts” who invite. In these spaces, power and status differences are far more significant than in most self-created spaces and groups (from a group of neighbours or women to a larger social movement). Furthermore, the self-created spaces typically consist of people who have something in common. This is far from always the case in the invited spaces, where a person might be invited precisely because he/she is different from the others – for instance because a person represents a specific group or minority. Unsurprisingly, the invitations to participate are regularly met with an assessment of “what’s in it for me?” and possibly a “no thanks” (Cornwall 2008, pp. 274–75). The problem of ownership identified by Cornwall runs parallel to that which Sternfeld detects in art institutions when she asks: ”Why should anyone be interested in taking part in a game completely invented by others?” (Sternfeld 2013, p. 1). Cornwall’s diagnosis does however seem more accurate than Sternfeld’s. Taking part in a (cultural) project invented by others is not necessarily unattractive, but it may easily become so if the project is distant from the participants’ interests and motivations and if ownership and agency are particularly unequally distributed. This is also often the case in the cultural sector, and the problem of distance and inequality seems as difficult to solve in participatory cultural projects/ institutions as in development projects. Compared with the interest in joining participatory art projects in rural areas in the rich north, one may even expect that poor residents in the global south may be more motivated to participate in NGO-driven projects about a new school, an improved electricity supply or a similar issue. The unequal ownership of invited spaces raises the question of whether there is a contradiction between a top-down artistic project design and the generation of participation in the democratic sense. Is it at all possible to transform institutionally defined projects into the participants’ “own cultural practices” from earlier, as stated in the UNESCO statement? Does it make sense to invite people to participate democratically,

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or can sharing of ownership and power only be realized in projects and spaces created and organized by the participants themselves?

Criteria of success The above questions about ownership and power are (or should be) central for all cultural institutions working with participation. How institutions answer these questions, however, varies considerably. One radical answer is to relinquish institutional ownership. This is the path taken by Jesus de la Pena, director of a cultural centre in Murcia, Spain. In an interview about citizen participation, he explains how participatory projects entail that he is not the director or curator: It’s people who are there.  .  . . But of course, when you are doing this kind of process of participation you must be really open to fail, because at the end you are in a big laboratory. . . . I really love when something fails, because then the participation is fine.2 The paradoxical idea in la Pena’s statement is that participatory processes in which democratic involvement and distribution of power is taken seriously require the directors/experts/project owners to be ready to dismiss their own governance and success criteria – to give up ownership and allow for uncertain experiments.3 The existence of diverse and potentially opposed evaluation criteria is an essential trait of participatory processes. In order to acknowledge this, theatre scholar Thomas Rosendahl Nielsen has proposed distinguishing between an expert-, a user- and a producer-centred approach when evaluating participation-based art projects (Nielsen 2016a). An evaluation from an expert-centred approach will suggest general quality criteria and evaluate based on these. An evaluation from a user-centred approach will identify the participants’ own quality criteria (which may of course also differ among participants) and assess whether and how these have been met. And, an evaluation from a producer-centred approach will identify the criteria of the producer (and possibly other stakeholders) and focus on whether and how these criteria have been met. These three approaches thus result in highly diverse evaluations, and it is essential that the researcher reflects upon the approach he or she takes. The diversity in approaches and evaluation criteria in participatory processes is also taken up by sociologist Sarah White. Based on research in international development projects and community-based participation, White has focussed on the motivations or interests underpinning the various criteria. She suggests a typology in which she distinguishes between a nominal, instrumental, representative and transformative form of participation (White 2011). A key argument in her typology is that

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each form relates to a specific set of interests, and that these interests depend on whether participation is viewed top-down, from the perspective of the project owners or producers, or bottom-up, from the perspective of the ordinary participants. For instance, nominal participation, which she identifies as a (symbolic) display of participation, is characterized by a top-down interest in legitimation (showing that a project involves citizens), while the participants’ interest is to demonstrate that they are included and have a certain status. Instrumental participation, in which participation is a means to achieve a particular goal, is characterized by a top-down wish or need for efficiency and profitability, while, for the participants, it is a necessary cost of achieving a certain goal. From the various perspectives of a cultural director, a theatre scholar and a sociologist, de la Pena, Nielsen and White emphasize the need to observe and reflect on who defines the criteria of successful participation. This becomes even more important in participatory processes with a significant cultural distance or social inequality between project owners and participants. This clearly applies to development projects in which NGOs involve poor recipients in externally defined and funded activities, but it also applies to participatory art projects that try to transgress the usual spaces of the arts and engage in more heterogeneous meetings than the consensual conversations with art lovers in galleries or museums (cf. the criticism of relational aesthetics in Bishop 2012; Miller 2016). But how can participatory projects involve people who are not usually engaged in contemporary arts? And how can they combine invited and self-created spaces, thus alleviating the previously mentioned dilemmas about inequality, interests and ownership? I will address these questions by studying the two artistic projects in Sant Llorenç de Cerdans and Hørve. I have chosen these cases for two reasons. First, they involve people who are not the usual contemporary art lovers – people who live in rural areas and often do not have high levels of income or education. Secondly, the two art projects combine invited and self-created spaces but they do this very differently and therefore also approach the previously mentioned issues of inequality, interests and ownership in ways that can illuminate each other.

Grand Tour My presentation of the project in Sant Llorenç de Cerdans is based primarily on knowledge created through Reccord, a research and action project about citizen involvement in European cultural centres. In the project, 20 selected European cultural workers conducted ethnographic fieldwork in 20 other European cultural centres in order to gather data on how cultural centres practice and understand citizen participation (Eriksson, Reestorff & Stage 2017, 2018).

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Citizen engagement is important to cultural centres because the centres combine two potentially conflicting ambitions of being a place for both artistic practice and for a heterogeneous group of local users. The challenge of involving local people in (contemporary) arts is indeed faced by many cultural institutions, but unlike the art museum, for example, the cultural centre’s raison d’être is more closely linked to the social impact of participation in arts and culture than to the preservation, exhibition and dissemination of “art in itself”.4 The artistic activity in focus in this study was organized through Nau Côclea (Nau Côclea), a small Catalan cultural centre with a strong (contemporary) artistic profile. The activity was part of the artistic programme in Nau Côclea’s annual Grand Tour, a four-week hike to visit various artists in order to experience their music, dance, visual art, poetry and other artforms in towns, rural and natural areas (Grand Tour). In August and September 2016, the tour covered more than 300 km, from Catalonia across the Pyrenees to France and back. The tour and the artistic events are open to everyone, and it is possible to hike all the way, to join for a few days or to attend a single art event. With this flexibility, the trip is ideally “a project for all types of audiences” (Grand Tour), but, in reality, most of the hikers in 2016 were highly engaged in contemporary arts and many were also employed in the cultural sector. Vassilka Shishkova from Bulgaria conducted her fieldwork as a participant observer in the first ten days of Grand Tour 2016. She collected and produced extensive data, in particular through her structured observations and auto-ethnographies and her semi-structured interviews with Clara Gari, the director of Nau Côclea and organizer of the Grand Tour. These data are supplemented by material from Grand Tour’s, Nau Côclea’s and the involved artists’ websites and Nau Côclea’s Facebook page. In 2016, Grand Tour engaged 100 artists, 229 hikers and 336 spectators to single art events. One of the ideas behind the tour is to create intense attention and communities around works of art. By integrating site-specific installations, performances and other artistic events into the tour, it is hoped that the detachment from everyday life and the mental preparation while walking may strengthen the hikers’ aesthetic sensibility. The art experience may be intensified not only by devoting more time to the individual work but also by actually moving from everyday life to the work and by sharing the impressions, feelings and thoughts that arise through the artistic events and the experience of walking: The road ran through the Alt Empordà, Baix Empordà, Garrotxa, Osona, Gironès and Selva. In each stage/node lived an artist or group of artists who had something to share with walkers. We walked about 15–30 km per day. The stages were the houses, workshops, lands, spaces of creation and inspiration of the artists. (Shishkova)5

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In many ways, the tour is an artistic project in itself, but, in this chapter, I will focus on a single part of the artistic programme: El recorrido bordado a miss pies (“The path embroidered at my feet”).

The embroiderers in the mountains The path embroidered at my feet was initiated by Laura Malinverni and Cora Bellotto, two Italian artists/designers based in Barcelona (Malinverni 2017), and developed in collaboration with the women from a weaving/ embroidery club in Sant Llorenç de Cerdans. The village is famous for its traditional textiles and Catalan espadrilles, and the women’s club is not “the typical feminine-hobby-pastime-amusement thing” (Shishkova). Together with other clubs, it used to function as a union that defended the rights and wages of the predominantly female workers who took home work from the major factories: “Their club, as well as others, is founded on the strong traditions of local syndicates and solidarity communities. You can distinctively sense the print of the solidarity unions of some very poor workers from a small village in the mountains” (Gari). At present, the club continues the regional embroidery tradition, often by assembling individual works into large tapestries. In The path embroidered at my feet, the local embroiderers met with the hikers of the Grand Tour. The artists, in agreement with the embroiderers, had asked the hikers to select and bring one object from their hike up the mountain: “Any object that we like and that represents for us personally the walking, the mountain, the Grand Tour” (Shishkova). The artists’ idea was to use this as inspiration for an embroidered insole, which, according to a Chinese tradition, brings happiness, as the sole between the foot and the ground contains the care of the embroiderer and thereby protects the wanderer (Malinverni 2017). In the morning, the hikers presented their objects to each other and made preliminary sketches of an insole. They then went to the embroidery club: “Together with the women of Sant Llorenç de Cerdans we will weave our objects into one common map of our Grand Tour” (Shishkova). At the club, the embroiderers met with the hikers and recombined and reinterpreted their objects and ideas in a prototype. The meeting is documented on Nau Côclea’s Facebook page. Photos of conversations, of the club, of working on the soles and of smiling women are accompanied by emphatically enthusiastic exclamations like “What a wonderful day”, and ”Michelle, Magui, Pilar, Marie Jose, Helene. The expert embroiderers! They really know how to!!!” (Nau Côclea Facebook, 5.10.2016, author’s translation). A later posting documents how the embroiderers visited Nau Côclea for two days in December that year. They brought a finished sole and described how they had translated objects and experiences from the hike to the embroidery, including the landscape as well as actions such as throwing stones into the stream and watching the

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concentric circles spread. Again, many happy smiles on photos and video are accompanied by enthusiastic comments such as “Almost all of us who went that day were there. And so, the project of Laura Malinverni and Cora Bellotto continues .  .  . and so, the Grand Tour continues” (ibid., 20.12.2016, author’s translation).

Co-production, experiment and reciprocity As a participatory art project, three aspects of The path embroidered at my feet are important: its co-production, its experimental character and its redistribution of power. First, the project is a co-production and an assemblage of the physical hike and the coming together of the Italian artists, the Catalan embroiderers and Grand Tour’s participants. Based on a structured observation, Shishkova writes: “We were all public and artists at the same time”, and ”we shared several conversations: on our personal symbols, on walking, on the Grand Tour, on working with your hands, on the local tradition . . . knowledge and skills were shared too” (Shishkova). The sharing on several levels is highlighted in both her observations and auto-ethnographies in which the bodily efforts and the material objects from the hike, the embroiderers’ expertise and the interpretations of the artists, embroiders and hikers are all part of the process and product. Second, the project is an open participatory experiment (or laboratory, cf. de la Pena) for which the result is not given in advance. For example, the traditional Chinese meaning attributed to the sole on Malinverni’s website seems unimportant to the other participants and is not mentioned by Gari, Shishkova or the embroiderers. If the artists’ quality criteria (cf. Nielsen) were tied to the reinterpretation of the Chinese tradition, this is replaced by the concrete bodily sensations and experiences in the co-production and co-interpretation, by the physical and material aspects of the hike and the social and cultural exchanges of the encounter. The experimental nature of the project stems particularly from the encounter and collaboration between the hikers, who are familiar with and engaged in contemporary and conceptual art, and the embroiderers, who work with traditional crafts. Gari emphasizes the distance between these two groups in an interview the day before the encounter, when she reflects on the challenges of the project: “The gap between us has to be filled somehow. We do not know what will come out of this” (Gari). Apparently, neither she nor the artists try to control the experiment, thereby enabling a participatory process with room for shared ownership, failures (cf. de la Pena) and other quality criteria than those produced by the experts’ usual preference for contemporary arts over traditional arts and craft skills (Matarasso 2007, p. 455). Third, the project offers an alternative to participatory art projects’ usual distribution of power and roles when it blurs the distinction

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between those who invite and those who are invited. The hikers from the art world acknowledge the embroidery club and its history, and they pay tribute to the women in the club by hiking up the mountain to meet them in their home village. In a structured observation in which Shishkova observes whether social inclusion takes place through the participation, she notes, “It was us, the caminants of the Grand Tour, who felt that we were part” (Shishkova). In their own club, the embroiderers are hosts rather than guests, and the art world hikers’ inclusion in their self-created space is a precondition for both their reciprocal visit to Nau Côclea and the artistic project. These three aspects – the co-production, the open experiment and the mutual invitation/inclusion – are essential to the participatory character of The path embroidered at my feet and to the participatory curating of Grand Tour. Through these aspects, the project bridged the “gap” between the art world and the locals. I will return to the character of this bridge once I have presented the next case.

New roles in Hørve The challenge of bridging contemporary arts and local villagers was also central in my second case: War (you should have been there), a site-specific, participatory performance or “performative city walk” by Matthaei and Konsorten, a German team working with performing arts and “discourse productions” (Matthaei & Konsorten 2013b). The performance took place in Hørve in Odsherred in 2013 and was part of the Danish project “Art on the Edge” (2011–14), where seven regional theatres staged performances outside the big cities. War was later staged in Vordingborg and Viborg (see Eriksson 2017). The three editions – in Hørve, Vordingborg and Viborg – differed in their site-specificity. In Viborg, the audience visited a private home, a cemetery, a stadium and a city hall; in Hørve, they visited a pub, a sports centre and a residential neighbourhood. The groups of performing citizens they encountered also differed and included among others bikers, scouts, cheerleaders and a fife and drum club (Krøgholt et al. 2016). But all editions combined site-specific characteristics with audio-recorded testimonies of a photographer, a sniper and a military chaplain, either played on loudspeakers in specific sites or listened to on personal radios while walking. These three voices thus “permeate[d] Hørve” (Matthaei & Konsorten 2013a) and the other towns with their experiences of contemporary (mainly Danish) warfare in foreign countries. But, like in their other productions, director Lukas Matthaei and his Konsorten invited the local inhabitants to take part in “engineering situations” (Matthaei & Konsorten 2013b). Instead of working with a script and professional actors, they aim to blur the “lines between production, prepared material and reality” and the “distinction between player and spectator” (ibid.).

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War is thus highly site-specific and depends on local citizens. In this study I focus on the first edition in Hørve and draw in particular on an interview with instructor assistant Sanna Albjørk (Albjørk 2016). According to Albjørk, the artists needed 50 locals to realize the project, yet only eight citizens attended the initial information meeting and, out of these, only four wished to participate.6 However, interest in and recruitment for the project increased when she and the scenographer later sought the locals in their motorcycle club and inn and played billiards with them – and lost. From here, the commitment spread through “someone who knew someone”, building on the trust that was established when the artists “just came and hung out” (Albjørk 2016, p. 88), when they were not superior and when the tasks were tangible (for example, running up a flag): “Standing there, and creating a relationship by being present and showing your interest is crucial. What people then will contribute to is surprising” (ibid., p. 86). For the locals in Hørve (and in Viborg), what seemed to matter was not the thematic aspect of the performance (contemporary warfare) but rather joining and contributing to the event as such (ibid., p. 87). This imposed some demands on the producers. From the three editions of War, Albjørk observed that people are very generous once you have reached out to them and won their confidence, but she also remarked that this process can be demanding for the producers, who must become emotionally attached to, take care of and spend time with the participants and be open to ”what can happen with the people you have involved” (ibid., p. 89). She emphasizes the ethical obligation that is part of using the participants’ stories and dedication – the basic but not always recognized reciprocity when ”You are here for us and we are here for you” (ibid., p. 90). It could be argued that the obligations Albjørk mentions are relatively common social conventions. When she says that it is necessary to “talk with the contributors beyond practicalities” (ibid., p. 90), to ”spend time on people, even if you do not know if you can use the material” (ibid., p. 89) or to ask how it went after the performance, she implicitly reveals how reductive and instrumental participatory art projects can be. Or, understood on a more structural level, how resource intensive it is to work with citizen involvement and how badly this corresponds with the conditions of many cultural producers (cf. Nielsen 2016b). It is also worth noting that, in Hørve, the participants repeatedly resisted their preassigned roles or identities: First, the local residents opposed the role of invited and silent listeners when they did not come to the information meeting. Second, they opposed their role as inferior or invited participants when they changed attitudes after the producers had shown their inferiority (by losing at billiards), asked for help (for example, asking to borrow the premises) and recognized the locals as more than contributors to a performance project. Third, they opposed

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the instrumental participation (cf. White) by offering their engagement and resources and requiring time and reciprocal engagement from the producers. Finally, they opposed the hierarchy of arts and community by wanting to participate and contribute without worrying about the theme or specific details of the performance – simply by emphasizing other aspects of the project than the work invented by others (cf. Sternfeld). What they found important was primarily the tangible, physical and social interaction. Using the terminology of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2003), it can be argued that they insisted on a presence culture building upon the bodily and spatial dimension instead of a meaning culture building upon interpretation and hermeneutics. Replacing an often highly hierarchical meaning culture with a (potentially) more equal presence culture (where “we are there for you, you are here for us”), they opposed a traditional expert approach to the arts and made it clear what mattered to them. Insisting on this throughout the project, they made War participatory not only in the sense of being part of a social community but also in the political sense of refusing the identities assigned to them (Rancière 2009).

Art and social life Both The path embroidered at my feet and War took place in rural areas, where, according to numerous surveys, the so-called non-users of arts and culture are most prevalent. In an interview, Gari reflects on the challenges involved when making projects that involve rural communities: People in the rural settlements consider these groups of artists to be strange, extra, to be different people. I think our efforts in the beginning were not in the right direction. We were trying to assimilate them somehow, to connect directly with them and this does not work. I mean that you have to learn – and this is very difficult – to build a relationship and enhance participation by respecting those differences. You are not a peasant and they are not interested in contemporary art somehow. (Gari) Gari’s experience is that the local people’s motivations for participating in cultural activities are often more social than artistic. Her cultural centre, Nau Côclea, is located in the village of Camallera with 500 inhabitants, and the villagers’ participation in the centre’s activities depends on her participation in the local community and is motivated rather by gratitude and solidarity than by artistic interest: One thing is to be a good citizen and to be part of the community, another thing is to find a way in which those people might get

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Gari highlights three aspects that are central to the two participatory arts projects I have analysed. First, as artist or organizer, one has to engage in (and not simply acknowledge) the interests of the locals. In The path embroidered at my feet this happened by focussing on the traditional craft and by showing an interest in the aesthetic as well as the social and political dimension of the embroidery and embroidery club. This interest was displayed in the hike up the mountain to the village, the cooperation was manifested in the co-produced sole and the mutual exchange was enabled through reciprocal visits. In War, the reciprocity worked differently. War was only vaguely motivated by a specific interest in the local village or community. It is true that Hørve is the village “where the Danish military draws the largest number of recruits for its foreign war” (Matthaei & Konsorten 2013a), but this statistical fact alone did not particularly encourage the locals to participate in a performance about war. Their engagement emerged only after they had established a relationship and trust with the foreign artists. The villagers initially contested their assigned roles as invited guests and as instruments for the art. They thereby demanded an interest and recognition from the artists/producers, which can be understood as both a common social etiquette and an ethical obligation. The fact that Albjørk and her colleagues accepted this – and that Matthaei playfully liked to include the local sites and interests (Albjørk 2016, p. 88) – can explain why, despite initial difficulties, the participatory experiment did not fail completely. Second, both projects opposed the hierarchy of the aesthetic over the social dimension. In the Catalan project, the aesthetic and social experience intertwined in the function of the embroidery club but also in the hike and in the sharing of material input, knowledge and skills in the collaborative work. In Hørve, the citizens initially declined the importance of the artistic project. In line with Gari’s assessment of the motivations of the locals in Camallera, Hørve’s inhabitants seemed to prioritize the social aspects over the artistic projects invented by others. This, however, did not mean that the sociality was unaffected by the artistic project. According to Albjørk, the locals were (surprisingly) happy to take part in the project even if they had only made small contributions such as running up the flag (ibid., p. 87). In both cases, collaborating on the artistic projects generated new social relations and new exchanges about what was important and meaningful to the participants – exchanges that would not have existed without taking part in co-creating a material object or co-engineering performative situations (cf. Matarasso 1997, pp. 77–80).

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Thirdly, the reciprocity of including or being included was central in both projects. As argued by Cornwall, participatory processes unfold differently in invited and self-created spaces. The Catalan project recognized this from the outset, whereas in Hørve, the difference became manifest when the locals initially declined the invitation but later responded to requests for help with a “we can figure it out” (ibid., p. 87). In several ways, they reversed the deficit model. They did not accept the role of being in need of an externally defined art project (with all its implicit ideals of empowerment and community building). They preferred to be hosts instead of visitors and to provide instead of accepting help. They thereby gave tangible content to the question posed by Sternfeld and Irit Rogoff: “Who is able to include who, and what gives them the right to think that they can make that decision?” (Sternfeld 2013, p. 6). The question of who is able to include whom, and in what, involves ownership and power. This question is essential to the challenge introduced in the beginning of this chapter – the unequal use of and interest in publicly funded arts and culture – and to all kinds of invited participation. It applies just as much to participatory art projects, which tend to have a less well-defined aim, as it does to participatory projects in, for example, urban planning or development. The aim of a participatory project may be to create a work of art (as in the two cases described in this chapter), but in such cases it is often unclear what exactly will motivate the participants if they do not already belong to the segment of frequent users of arts and culture who seem to be motivated by their acquired cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu 1984). The frequent cultural users often have enough trust in the art world and its agents to be willing to participate in “games” invented by artists or arts institutions. They (or we) will appreciate the games and give them the special attention that arts often require and that projects like Grand Tour try to promote. Other people may however have less reason to believe that the art games are worth the effort. They will rarely seek out the cultural institutions by themselves and will often decline invitations into them. The path embroidered at my feet and War accepted this by not taking place in Nau Côclea’s or Odsherred Theatre’s physical space. Instead, the artists/ producers showed that they found it worth the effort to visit the rural villages with their clubs and communities – the self-created spaces of people who already participate in various local communities and projects.

Conclusion If participatory art projects and institutions make the effort to visit participants’ self-created spaces, if they pay attention to the interests of the participants, if they create open experiments where the roles are not predefined and if they accept that the arts for many people is less important than sociality and citizenship, then they discard a significant part of

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the ownership and power inherent in inviting and designing participatory projects. The ambition of involving others in participatory cultural projects may appear patronizing in itself – particularly if the aim is to empower or transform the participants in ways defined and designed for by the project-organizer and owner. But the analysis of The path embroidered at my feet and War illustrates that it is possible for participatory projects to support more unpredictable meetings that challenge the usual distribution of power in projects with invited participants. What it does not show, however, is what this participatory approach does to the art projects as art. In the present study I have not tried to establish the artistic quality of the projects. I have discussed this elsewhere for War (Eriksson 2017), replacing the focus on local citizens’ participation with the site-specific staging of voices of firsthand witnesses of war. A similar focus is dominant in other “expert writings” about War (Krøgholt et al. 2016) – most likely because this staging is aesthetically powerful and unfolds unsettling dilemmas about “real warfare” and our representations of it. In this chapter I have done something different. Drawing on Nielsen’s distinction between an expert-, a user- and a producer-centred approach to evaluations of participatory art projects, I have focussed on the conflicts or gaps between the user and the producer approach and in particular on how the producer can meet the user’s interests. I have argued that this requires giving up designing the participation of others, just as it may require including and even prioritizing other criteria than those of aesthetic quality. This, of course, can easily lead to dissensus, disappointments and worries that process and sociality will displace product and “art”. However, it can also be argued that artistic processes like those described in this chapter enable an art-specific kind of sociality and participation – one in which the meaning is not given in advance. Without the art projects the local people would not have engaged in how to make sense of the artistic processes that in themselves tried to make sense of (particular aspects of) their world. We probably cannot, as de la Pena did, conclude that participation succeeds if a project fails. But perhaps we can say that, if a project evolves in exactly the same way as the producer or institution intended, citizen participation was scarce – at least in the democratic sense where participants can change the rules of the game: where they have the possibility of inviting others, of opposing their predefined roles and of redefining what it means to participate in the life of a community that is always both cultural and social. Saying this, I do not argue that all artworks should be open to this type of participation – but if participatory art projects are not, it could be worth finding a different name for them.

Notes 1 The press release about the previously mentioned Eurobarometer is an example of the close connection between seeing culture as “a source for personal

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fulfilment, creativity and joy” and as “an engine for jobs and growth” (European Commisssion 2013b). The interview, conducted by Sabine Engelhart 28.9.2016, is part of the data generated in Reccord, as follows. This is also argued in Irit Rogoff (2005). The European Network of Cultural Centres, which participated in the Reccord project, defines its core value as “cultural equality, interculturalism, democratization and active citizenship through participation in cultural and artistic activities” (European Network of Cultural Centres). Throughout this chapter, I use ‘Shishkova’ to refer to quotations from Shishkova’s own observations and auto-ethnographies, and ‘Gari’ to refer to Shishkova’s interview with Clara Gari. Similar challenges were faced in Viborg when only five people (two elderly women and three school teachers) attended the first meeting (Albjørk 2016, p. 88).

References Albjørk, S 2016, ‘At tage hånd om deltagerne’ (interview by Ida Krøgholt & Erik Exe Christoffersen, 2013), Kunsten ude på kanten, Peripeti, special issue, pp. 85–90. Arnstein, SR 1969, ‘A ladder of citizen participation’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, vol. 35, pp. 216–224. Bauman, Z 2011, Culture in a liquid modern world, Polity Press, Cambridge. Bishop, C 2012, Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, Verso, London. Bourdieu, P 1984, Distinction, Routledge, London. Brodie, E, Hughes, T, Jochum, V, Miller, S, Ockenden, N & Warburton, D 2011, Pathways through participation: Summary report, viewed 14 December 2017, http://pathwaysthroughparticipation.org.uk/resources/summaryreport/index. html. Carpentier, N 2011a, ‘The concept of participation: If they have access and interact, do they really participate?’, Communication Management Quarterly, vol. 21, pp. 13–16. Carpentier, N 2011b, Media and participation: A site of ideological-democratic struggle, Intellect, Bristol & Chicago. Cornwall, A 2004, ‘Introduction: New democratic spaces? The politics and dynamics of institutionalised participation’, IDS Bulletin, vol. 35, no. 2, New Democratic Spaces? Cornwall, A 2008, ‘Unpacking “participation”: Models, meanings and practices’, Community Development Journal, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 269–283, viewed 14 May 2018, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsn010. ENCC, European Network of Cultural Centres, viewed 14 December 2017, https://encc.eu/about. Eriksson, B 2014, ‘Mellem kommunikation og kreativitet: Deltagelse som æstetikkens missing link?’, K&K – Kultur og Klasse, vol. 118, pp. 35–50, viewed 10 October 2018, https://tidsskrift.dk/kok/article/view/19834/17468. Eriksson, B 2017, ‘Are we really there, and in contact? Staging firsthand witnesses of contemporary Danish warfare’, Peripeti, vol. 27/28, pp. 30–40. Eriksson, B, Reestorff, CM & Stage, C 2017, Final project report: Reccord – Rethinking cultural centres in a European dimension (2015–2017), viewed 7 December 2018, https://encc.eu/index.php/resources/database/reccord-research-final-report.

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Eriksson, B, Reestorff, CM & Stage, C 2018, ‘Forms and potential effects of citizen participation in European cultural centres’, Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 205–228. European Commission 2013a, viewed 1 May 2019, http://ec.europa.eu/commfront office/publicopinion/archives/eb_special_399_380_en.htm#399. European Commission 2013b, viewed 1 May 2019, http://europa.eu/rapid/pressrelease_IP-13-1023_en.htm. Florida, R 2002, The Rise of the creative class: And how it’s transforming work, leisure and everyday life, Basic Books, New York. Grand Tour, viewed 14 December 2017, www.elgrandtour.net/?lang=en. Gross, J & Wilson, N 2018, ‘Cultural democracy: an ecological and capabilities approach’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, pp. 1–16, viewed 13 August 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2018.1538363 Gumbrecht, HU 2003, Production of presence: What meaning cannot convey, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Jalving, C 2017, ‘Introduction’, The Art of Taking Part: Participation at the Museum: Arken Bulletin, vol. 7, pp. 5–17, viewed 14 December 2017, www. arken.dk/bulletin/. Jancovich, L 2015, ‘The participation myth’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, pp. 1–15, viewed 14 December 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10286 632.2015.1027698. Klindt, M 2017, ‘When and how do we participate?’, The Art of Taking Part: Participation at the Museum: Arken Bulletin, vol. 7, pp. 35–54, viewed 14 December 2017, www.arken.dk/bulletin/. Krøgholt, I, Kuhlmann, A, Christoffersen, EE, Hansen, LE & Nielsen, TR 2016, Kunsten ude på kanten, Peripeti (special issue). Malinverni, L 2017, viewed 14 December 2017, www.lauramalinverni.org/2017/ 02/el-camino-bordado-a-mis-pies/. Matarasso, F 1997, Use or ornament? The social impact of participation in the arts, Comedia, Stroud. Matarasso, F 2007, ‘Common ground: Cultural action as a route to community development’, Community Development Journal, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 449–458. Matthaei & Konsorten 2013a, War (You should have been there), 1st edn, viewed 19 November 2018, http://matthaei-und-konsorten.de/en/projekte/war-youshould-have-been-there/. Matthaei & Konsorten 2013b, About M&K, viewed 19 November 2018, http:// matthaei-und-konsorten.de/en/uber-mk/. Michaud, Y 1998, ‘The end of the utopia of art’, in J-M Schaeffer (ed.), Think art: Theory and practice in the art of today, Witte de with Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. Miller, J 2016, ‘Activism vs. antagonism: Socially engaged art from bourriaud to bishop and beyond’, Field, vol. 3, pp. 165–183, viewed 14 December 2017, http://field-journal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/FIELD-03-Miller-Activ ismVsAntagonism.pdf. Nau Côclea, viewed 14 December 2017, http://nauCôclea.net/?lang=en. Nau Côclea Facebook group, viewed 14 December 2017, www.facebook.com/ search/top/?q=nau%20coclea. Nielsen, TR 2016a, ‘Deltagelsens kvalitet eller deltagelsens kvaliteter?’, Kunsten ude på kanten, Peripeti, special issue, pp. 132–134.

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Nielsen, TR 2016b, ‘Netværksæstetik som kunst og -organisationsform’, Kunsten ude på kanten, Peripeti, special issue, pp. 73–78. Pateman, C 1970, Participation and democratic theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Pluss Leadership Epinion 2012, Danskernes kulturvaner 2012, Kulturministeriet, Copenhagen. Rancière, J 2009, The emancipated spectator, Verso, London. Rogoff, I 2005, ‘Looking away: Participations in visual culture’, in G Butt (ed.), After criticism, Blackwell, Malden, pp. 117–134, viewed 14 December 2017, https://kvelv.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/irit_rogoff_looking_away_partici pations_in_visual_culture.pdf. Sørensen, AS, Kortbek, HB & Thobo-Carlsen, M 2016, ‘“Participation”: The new cultural policy and communication agenda’, Nordisk Kulturpolitisk Tidsskrift, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 4–18, viewed 14 December 2017, www.idunn.no/ nkt/2016/01/participation__the_new_cultural_policy_and_communication. Sternfeld, N 2013, ‘Playing by the rules of the game’, CuMMA Papers, vol. 1, viewed 14 December 2017, https://cummastudies.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/ cummapapers1_sternfeld.pdf. Stevenson, D, Balling, G & Kann-Rasmussen, N 2017, ‘Cultural participation in Europe: Shared problem or shared problematisation?’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 89–106, viewed 1 May 2019, DOI: 10.1080/10286632.2015.1043290. Tepper, SJ & Ivey, B (eds.) 2008, Engaging art: The next great transformation of America’s cultural life, Routledge, New York & London. UNESCO 2001, Universal declaration on cultural diversity, viewed 14 December 2017, http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13179&URL_DO=DO_ TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html. United Nations 1948, The universal declaration of human rights, viewed 14 December 2017, www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/. White, S 2011, ‘Depoliticizing development: The uses and abuses of participation’, in A Cornwall (ed.), The participation reader, Zed Books, London.

Part II

Digital media and technology

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VR – the culture of (non) participation? Reframing the participative edge of virtual reality Anna Nacher

On a warm, sunny day in September 2017, I entered the familiar room at the OK Centre in Linz, where the Prix Ars Electronica 2017 Cyber Arts exhibition was on display.1 The corner where the VR installation by Nonny de la Peña and Emblematic Group, Out of Exile (awarded in the category of Computer Animation/Film/VFX), was presented could be spotted right away. It was marked by a long queue of interested audience members waiting for the chance to experience the 13-minute long story of a violent incident based on the account of David Ashley Pierce, facing the extreme hostility of his own family, intolerant of his sexual orientation. Having waited for 20 minutes or so, I could finally grab the HTC Vive HMD and immerse in the virtual rendering of the real-life story. As the violent events unfolded I could feel the growing uneasiness that countered the narrative provided in the description of the installation. I was supposed to be put “inside the story”, but instead it felt more like being a cultural tourist thrown in the middle of unmanageable situation, yet watching it from afar, despite the illusion of “being there”. After 13 long minutes my doubts and tension had not diminished; I was wondering if this could have been the artists’ real aim – to confront the audience with the feeling of helplessness instigated by their inability to react in an environment which was deliberately framed as the illusion of the real, in part thanks to the cutting-edge CGI solutions based on photorealistic videogrammetry holograms. Would it be different if it allowed for interaction with the narrative or the option of taking sides and intervening? Does participation simply mean the typically crafted interactivity within the experience and enhanced consumption of the content, in other words, highly charged emotional reaction causing the bodily stress responses? What qualities would be necessary for VR’s critical (emancipated) spectator (Comolli 2009)? All the questions boiled down to the problem of virtual reality’s participative edge. I started wondering: Where is the VR’s participatory culture? And by “participatory culture” I mean not only the user’s emotional engagement but first and foremost the productive aspect, the ability to negotiate the set of agencies offered by the apparatus and the content provided.

94 Anna Nacher In the end I re-articulated my questions: What if we turn the table and start reframing the current shape of virtual reality (VR) from the perspective of participatory culture? While working on this problem I had in mind both Henry Jenkins’ seminal definition, recently highlighted by the authors of The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and Bjarki Valtysson’s remark on the complexities of contemporary participatory culture in which technology provides the space for a set of enhanced agencies (including non-human ones), coined at the Cultures of Participation Conference in Aarhus in April 2017. Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Henderson Jacobs (2013) recall the popular explanation offered by Henry Jenkins, to whom participatory culture first and foremost connotes relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of information mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. (Jenkins et al. 2009, p. 7, cited in Delwiche and Henderson Jacobs 2013, p. 3) Leaving aside the long tradition of understanding “participatory” aspects in the arts, which sometimes paradoxically reinstates the borders separating the artists from the audience (Bishop 2012), it is in this light that I consider the artistic interventions chosen for my analysis: as the participatory culture emerging within the broad spectrum of VR practices, framing the user as engaged, yet reflexive. In the age of forced connectivity, “platformed sociality” (van Dijk 2013), and datafied audience participation contributing to lucrative, yet often opaque and unpredictable business models, I seek a conceptual revision which acknowledges the necessity of thinking participation outside digital semiocapitalism (Berardi 2009). Delwiche and Henderson introduce the four phases of the participatory culture studies, of which the last one is aptly defined as “ubiquitous connections”. It certainly calls for further inquiry, something that due to obvious constraints cannot be fully addressed in this chapter. However, in a world increasingly based on automated procedures and algorithmic culture, the code-based agencies inscribed within the wider socioeconomic mechanisms of the nascent platform of capitalism’s power regimes (Srnicek 2016) should also be investigated. The following discussion is an attempt at such a change of perspective, where the very basis of cultural participation is ensured by the reflexivity of spectatorship/use. Therefore I approach the primary problem of this chapter as a twofold effort. I would like to reframe the concept of VR through seeing it from the perspective of its participatory potential, addressing at the same time the development of various forms of machinic agencies, including the interface and the instances of software-based automated image production, on a pair with human agency. To limit the scope of such a complex

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endeavor, I will focus on VR’s “technicity” in order to address the evolution of human-machine relationship, both in the reception/manipulation of imagery and its production. I am mostly interested in how to define meaningful spectatorial participation beyond emotional response. I will analyse VR art projects that employ a slightly different strategies to undermine the phantasmagoria of perfect computer-generated, 3D optical illusion of displaced presence.

Reframing VR – introducing new perspectives In reframing VR from more participative angle, allowing the spectator to negotiate the confines of enhanced emotional and perceptual response as projected by the apparatus, I have decided to divert somewhat from the already established lines of research focussing mostly on intratextual analysis carried out in almost exclusively aesthetic terms. Instead, I consider VR as an umbrella concept covering the set of internal differences rather than as a unitary technology (and precisely denoted experience) defined from an instrument-centred perspective. Therefore I propose that more attention should be paid to the variety of devices, platforms and practices coalescing under the general label of VR. Scholarly reflection on VR has broadened exponentially over the last few years after a milestone of sorts was reached in the years 2014–2016, when a whole range of easily accessible, affordable devices hit the global market of consumer electronics. In 2016, there were 80 million such devices available in the global market (Dooley 2017). This has been accompanied by endless discussions on the quality of VR experience in the popular and the commercial press, with expectations tied to even higher frame rates and screen resolution. The dominating discourse has been formed, where the preference is given to flawless immersion enabled by the cutting-edge technical solutions and significant computing power (the latter being increasingly problematic due to the energy consumption patterns in the age of climate crisis). Research questions have tended to focus on the problems related to the possible daily use of VR, the quality of multisensorial simulation of real-life locomotion in the large-scale interactive virtual environments, advanced three-dimensional simulation and above all, issues concerning realistic visual and haptic perception and interaction (Steinicke 2016). This discussion, however, rarely transcends VR’s aesthetic qualities: its representational fidelity and multisensory immersive potential – despite the solid tradition of critique of the ideological value of the apparatus in the context of visual production. Despite skillful and insightful acknowledgment of the history of moving image and the current (failed) promises of full sensorial illusion (Ross 2018), the question of VR’s ideology has not been addressed in a sufficient way. Leaving aside the often referenced pioneering stages of research on VR, suffice to say that focus has recently

96 Anna Nacher broadened exponentially to include the narrative and presentational potential within the broad category of entertainment (including gaming) (Bucher 2017), cinematic VR (Elsaesser 2014; Murray 2016), the vast area of VR use in the arts, including enhanced performative forms, like theatre and dancing (Smith 2018) and – drawing particularly significant attention in the last few years – nonfiction virtual reality and 360º journalism (Bohrod 2018; Daniel 2018; McRoberts 2018). This last area is where the seminal discussion on the potential of VR as “audience’s emotional involvement in current events” (de la Peña et al. 2010, p. 298) has emerged. It became an almost habitual way of conceptualizing the benefits offered by VR after Chris Milk, in his 2015 TED talk, coined the famous phrase that VR could become “the ultimate empathy machine” (Milk 2015). It has also contributed to further occlusion of the ideological functions of the VR apparatus, forming a kind of conceptual screen, often preventing the interrogation of VR’s techno-cultural mechanisms. In my pursuit to conceptually reframe virtual reality’s participatory edge, I want to refresh some propositions of the cinematic apparatus theory. In doing so I follow Thomas Elsaesser’s observation that “Classic texts have to be read and re-read: they have to be put in dialogue with contemporary practices, and benefit from being re-assessed in a wider conceptual framework” (Elsaesser 2011, p. 33). I must admit then that the apparatus theory’s critique of ideology is preferred here over its famed psychoanalytical approach (Heath & De Lauretis 1980; Rosen 1986). What I find particularly useful – as one of the proposed building blocks for the robust critical theory of VR – is the analysis of the projected ideologically laden role of the spectator and the way s/he is interwoven with the apparatus. However, it needs to be paired with the criticism of the interface as cultural-technological phenomenon – as “a material and technical format that juxtaposes the operational with the representational” (Andersen & Pold 2018, loc. 549). Far from seeing technology as an autonomous and self-contained agent, I follow the suggestion to “understand devices as constitutively situated in networks of assumptions, habits, practices and modes of representation that extend well beyond instrument-centered definitions of technology” (Lastra 2000, p. 62). Such a perspective also implies the necessity of effectively bridging the analysis of the VR’s content and imagery and its material and technical circumstances yet leaving enough conceptual space for open-ended dialogue between two domains, often mediated by the instability of users’ practices. The time could not be more appropriate for such an endeavor: a cultural moment when technical solutions for VR still proliferate, building up on previous waves of artistic encounters with the format, is precisely the fortuitous moment to trace the possible cultures of participation, often disguised as artistic practices and experimentation with the apparatus and the presentational conventions, technical dead-ends, mistakes and

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failures. Because, as we are reminded by Adrian Mackenzie, Bruce Bennett and Marc Fursteanu, the “technicity” of infrastructures, institutions and media is easier to grasp when “the value and meaning are still being contested” (Bennett, Fursteanu & Mackenzie 2008, p. 2). In line with the recent reevaluation of the early cinema as “kineattractography” (Gaudreault 2011), one could safely assume that ours is similarly a moment of “VR-attractography”, with various apparatuses and modes of audience engagement still in play. Therefore, in reframing VR from the perspective of meaningful audience participation at large, I build on the assertion of Stephen Heath (considered as the element of film theory’s basic tenets). In his original phrasing, it is cinema that does not exist in the technological and then become this or that practice in the social; its history is a history of the technological and social together, a history in which the determinations are not simple but multiple, interacting, in which the ideological is there from the start – without this latter emphasis reducing the technological to the ideological or making it uniquely the term of an ideological determination. (Heath 1980, p. 6) I argue for a similar case in the context of VR, albeit with necessary corrections addressing the conditions and circumstances of software-based and automated production of digital imagery as well as the data-driven logic of semiocapitalism (Berardi 2009) and the socioeconomic and cultural changes it has been effectuating. Heath outlines the complex relationships of ideology and technology, where any ideological value is produced only with the cooperation of (at least partially) willing subject, an active spectator (Comolli 2009) – the assertion that again provides the ground for the theoretical impulse to reclaim some elements of the cinematic apparatus theory for the critical investigations of VR. Based on this I see the culturally, economically and socially produced phantasmagoria of flawless immersion effect, instigated by the high-tech processes of powerful computation as VR’s major ideological lure. Such fantasy can almost be traced back to the origins of the computing technology, with its early dreams of disembodied human consciousness uploaded to the system as a stream of mathematical symbols (Hayles 1999).

Beyond intratextual analysis, towards VR’s media ecology Virtual reality is first and foremost a dear offspring and precious fantasy of digital culture that has been materializing since the late 60s through a set of experiments in the then nascent field of art and science and as such

98 Anna Nacher relies heavily on advanced computational processes, CGI and volumetric capture. Thus the insightful observation that it builds on the capacity of panoramas, dioramas, widescreen cinema, IMAX, and 3D cinema to fulfill peripheral vision (. . .) as well as the theme park attraction, Sensorama and 4D’s cinema’s ability to add additional sensory cues. (Ross 2018, p. 1) This kind of understanding VR as yet another form of the screen practice should be handled with care. It should be accompanied with another equally important genealogical line of development: computing technology enabling the current state of various VR practices. The plural noun is necessary here, if only for the sake of the variety of technical standards and platforms (including the simplest and cheapest ones as well as the non-HMD based spatial VR, like CAVE or Deep Space). Oculus Rift, Play Station VR, Google Daydream View and HTC Vive are the main contenders to the title of the most advanced consumer VR provider. Simultaneously, virtual reality content has been employed on a much broader scale in many real-life applications: from healthcare-related to instructional, educational and even culinary. No less interesting developments have also been seen among independent video game producers and in the new media art scene (which quickly embraced the Oculus Rift early developer kit) – both at the level of hardware and software design and in content production. The process also contributes to the emergence of meaningful participatory culture. The Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR), designed as a developer kit, Unreal (game engine) and Three.js (the open access interactive 3D JavaScript library and API) support both the customization of the VR tools and more advanced forms of experimentation. Yet shedding some light on consumers’ real-life choices and practices reveals an entirely different landscape, countering the widespread fixation on the phantasmagoria of perfect, high-tech simulation. It seems that the relative simplicity of the experience and ease-of-use are preferred to the dream of the ultimate immersive experience. Based on 2017 estimates, Google Cardboard remains by far the most popular headset on the market, with 10 million units sold by March 2017 (Dipane 2016; Singleton 2016). This figure is probably boosted by the distribution of 1 million of Google Cardboards accompanying the launch of the highly acclaimed New York Times VR story The Displaced, which was awarded the Entertainment Grand Prix at the Cannes International Festival in 2016. Obviously, focussing on numbers alone without paying sufficient attention to the more detailed ethnographic research on user practices does not merit any general statement, but it does provide sufficient grounds to divert

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attention from the excessive focus on an idealized, flawless and hightech immersion. All of these elements prompt the revisiting of my understanding of VR as an umbrella term and the necessity of employing theoretical tools capable of grasping the network of intricate human-computational agencies involved in its production. It is only then that the edge of participative VR can unfold on a level deeper than one limited to enhanced emotional reaction.

Decentring definitions The industry-driven emergence of virtual reality these days – as both technology and content – is, as I have already mentioned, often occluded by the sort of ideological fog, with the focus on the relative novelty of the experience, its seamlessness and the smoothness, the quality of simulation and the technology’s affective potential. A recent example of such discourse is provided by Paul Rubin’s popular book, announcing VR as “the biggest technological revolution since the smartphone” (Rubin 2018, p. 3). The focus here is on the billions of dollars invested by the biggest companies and VR defined as a state “when your brains is so fooled by a virtual experience that it triggers your body to respond as though the experience were real” (Rubin 2018, p. 4). This is the core assumption producing the ideological fog enveloping VR, where a critical response from the user and reflexive participation are precluded by the way the experience is shaped and discursively framed. Yet understanding VR as an umbrella term requires taking into account the broader media ecology of the nascent VR that has already been described (including popular consumer genres, like ubiquitous photospheres, and the popularity of nonfictional, journalistic content, usually designed for the simplest consumer grade devices) and addressing the wide spectrum of experiences and practices founded on the 360º panorama view. The latter constitutes the very basis of VR experience, often enhanced with spatial and tactile components, grasping the digital objects and (in some of the most technically advanced environments) tactile sensations. The intention “to install an artificial world that renders the image space a totality or at least fills the observers entire field of vision” (Grau 2003, p. 13) is crucial here. The site of VR ideology’s production is fixed to a situation where any definition focuses first and foremost, often almost habitually, on a state of ideal immersion, understood mostly as “characterized by the diminished critical distance to what is shown and increasing the emotional involvement in what is happening” (Grau 2013, p. 13). Nevertheless, the differences in scope, intensity and quality of the immersive experience when it comes to the various technical equipment, as well as the nature of the artworks I will reflect on later, demonstrate

100 Anna Nacher that the “other” VR, where participation is conceived through critical and reflexive reception, is not only possible, but – considering the general conditions of digital culture – also necessary. It requires that the popular, lo-fi, imperfect cardboard solution is not seen as a diminished, poorer version of the “real” or fully immersive, high-tech VR but embraced instead as one of its multiple incarnations, on a pair with non HMDbased spatial virtual environments designed for use by multiple viewers (CAVE and Deep Space). Therefore, the assumption that “Within VR representational systems . . . the dual visibility is lost when the user dons HMD and is completely ungulfed by visual and audio fields that appear to surround them” (Ross 2018, p. 2) could be slightly modified – VR representational systems constitute a wide spectrum of varied modes of engaged spectatorship based on stereoscopic optical illusion and should not be limited to the binarism of immersive versus non-immersive. As Grau reminds us, there is not a simple relationship of ‘either-or’ between critical distance and immersion; the relations are multifaceted, closely intertwined, dialectical, in part contradictory, and certainly highly dependent on the disposition of the observer. (Grau 2003, p. 13) The contradictions stand out particularly clearly when the sensory deception mode is juxtaposed with or otherwise disturbed by the epistemic deception, in other words when seeing muddles believing. This gets complicated even further. Although – and this might be the most important lesson to learn from the apparatus theory – cinematic realism is the effect of illusion and the product of representational conventions, VR’s realism is produced along entirely different lines than those prevalent in the traditional representational media. As Elsaesser points out, ‘reality’ in VR is no longer identified with the index, trace and reference, but with a total environment: it thus is a function of a coherence (theory) of truth, rather than a correspondence theory. (Elsaesser 2014, p. 298) Equally important is the fact that VR is a computer-generated, operational modelling system experienced in real time, incorporating its human user into a dense web of a constant data processing and computation, where both image production and our bodily movements within the field of vision participate in the “continuous actualization of networked data” (Hoelzl & Marie 2015, loc. 146) considered “nothing but the moment of network access” (Hoelzl & Marie 2015, loc. 218), based on feedback mechanisms and requiring constant reciprocal actions between the user and the system. How is the human user incorporated in this field, if we

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exclude (or move to the background) his/her emotional reactions? If we consider VR a systemic image and a dynamic computer simulation in real time, in which data processing has to be fast enough to enable the illusion of presence, then the fact that “human sensory physiology sets the frequency” (Hinterwaldner 2017, loc. 542) becomes crucial for the very understanding of what “real-time” means (but, of course, not for the time order typical for/of computation itself, with its microtemporalities imperceptible for humans). This in turn informs the way in which the human subject is intertwined with the virtual environment on the basic level of its construction. In the case of computer simulation, it is based on the microtemporal calculation performed by the computer, which also constitutes the fact of “real-time”. The notion of the systemic image coined by Inge Hinterwaldner (2017) is aimed precisely at studying the computer simulations in all their technicity but avoiding the purely functionalist understanding of the system, favoring instead the concept by which inclusion of the user’s interactions and reactions is possible, if not necessary. Such a process vanishes from the radar, if the sole (or major) point of interest is limited to the VR’s immersive and experiential potential.

Decentring VR VR, however, becomes increasingly decentralized with the recent wave of independent art projects that often openly interrogate or subvert the industry-led dominance of high-tech VR and immersion as the sole mode of user engagement. How the current phase of technology relies on the history of artistic experimentation (Dixon 2006) is a fascinating story in itself but cannot be fully addressed here due to the constraints of a single chapter. Suffice to say that considering the variety of ideas, technical solutions and formats, this genealogy points out to the possibility of further decentralization of the concept, including correction of existing gender biases (Cox, Sandor & Fron 2018). The creative energy of VR has not vanished after the milestone of 2014– 2016, when the field became less focused on experimentation with the technology and more attentive to forms of interrogation. There is a wide spectrum of art practices in the field, with some remarkable examples interrogating both VR as a media technology and the narratives dominating the content produced by entertainment industry, which, again, often poses the question of distributed agencies (humanmachinic). For the last ten years, Mez Breeze, an independent artist and scholar based in Australia, has been exploring both augmented and virtual reality through her concept (and platform) of Augmentology 101, often in cooperation with Andy Campbell. Breeze, who is a pioneer in virtual narrative design, proposes the concept of “virtual reality literature” (Breeze 2018) to enrich the standard mainstream VR experience

102 Anna Nacher with poetic practices, for example in the VR poem Our Cupidity Coda (2017). Other strategies employed by artists seek to challenge conservative identity politics, like in Queerskins: A Love Story by Ilya Szilak and Cyril Tsiboulski, an immersive and interactive installation presenting the complex relationship of a devoutly Catholic woman and her gay son who had succumbed to AIDS.

Towards a participatory mode of overlapping realities Independent VR art projects abound, yet I would like to devote more attention to artworks that both enact the meaningfully participative, critical and engaged modes of spectatorship in VR and disentangle its definition from the concept of immersion or make it deliberately problematic, uneasy or perceptibly superficial. Marc Lee and the team’s (Antonio Kleber Zea Cobo, Florian Faion, Jesús Muñoz Morcillo) 10.000 moving cities – same but different (2010–present) already seems paradoxical at first glance. The project was started as a net-based interactive installation, gradually incorporating VR (as well as AR and mobile app currently available for Android and iOS). With the use of HTC Vive HMD goggles, the user can explore the city upon selection of a location from a mapping interface. The cities – graphically represented as generic, abstract and standardized – hint at the globalized character of today’s metropoles. After the city is chosen, the user-generated content is retrieved in real time from several sources, including news and social media platforms such as YouTube, Flickr or Twitter. Along with the user walking around and flying through the cubes representing the city’s buildings, the content is projected onto the buildings’ facades, with accompanying respective urban soundscape played through headphones. Every time the city is requested for exploration its new representation is created out of the dynamically changing content of social media feeds, as the data circulating the internet is in constant flux. Yet it is not the illusion of transparency that becomes the main point of focus. The experience consists of more than one layer of paradoxes – the virtual environment saturated with content harvested from social networks in real life constitutes just one of them. The textual ribbons of informative content from real communication networks, laid over the visual surface of documentary clips from the real city streets, subscribe to the strategy of “hypermediacy” (Bolter & Grusin 1999), which can be also understood as the medium’s tendency driving its self-reflexivity, and which in turn leads to the user being more aware of the “technicity” of the medium. Interestingly enough, Bolter and Grusin (1999) connotate VR as such with the logics of transparent immediacy. Marc Lee’s artwork is, nonetheless, about more than just a particular aesthetic juxtaposing the faculties of sensory and epistemic deception.

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The VR version of 10.000 cities – same but different is grounded in a situation where media technologies constitute networks or hybrids that can be expressed in physical, social, aesthetic, and economic terms. Introducing a new media technology does not mean simply inventing new hardware and software, but rather fashioning (or refashioning) such networks. (Bolter & Grusin 1999, p. 17) It is not only about conceiving the world in which the general fantasy mode of VR is invaded by communicative and informative scraps of the real world. The user’s attention is in fact directed both at the exigencies of networked, data-based, algorithmically controlled communication, typical of the vast networks of today’s digital culture and to the conditions of his/her own participation in those processes. At the same time, the agencies responsible for crafting such networks are, if not fully revealed, at least hinted at as repeated encounters indeed bring dissimilar results and different content from social media. In a way, the user is confronted with his / her own communicative practices in the vast networks. These practices are crafted by and based not only on data sets describing the content of communication, but also on metadata giving quite precise information on locative and temporal contexts of communication acts. Therefore a user is projected as one of agencies interwoven into the dense communicative universe, and the mode of reception is designed as reflexive rather than primarily immersive. Yet reality in this case is conceived of not as a correspondence to the outside world but rather as a function, to borrow Elsaesser’s phrase, of a “total environment” of urban communication (Elsaesser 2014, p. 298). A number of real-time orders of systemic images are in this case layered one onto another: the “real-time” of the spatial calculation, or the computing of the movements of the user, is complemented with the “realtime” computational, automated harvest of data circulating in the networks and finally with the “real time” of social media feeds – with the increased chance of incongruences and miscalculations. Hence possible errors, undermining the ideology of VR’s immersive transparency even further, are inscribed into the very ontological basis of the installation. No wonder then that glitch aesthetics offers another fruitful strategy employed to demystify the conditions of VR as systemic image and also in terms of image production. It has been successfully explored by Scott Rettberg, who since 2010 has been producing horizontal panoramic photos and 360º panoramas for a future electronic literature project (work in progress). Rettberg has been sharing the images with his prospective audience as uploads to Google Photos, the photo-sharing service initiated by Google in 2015. Rettberg started collecting 360º panoramas created with

104 Anna Nacher an iPhone app, including images where, for example, a part of the human body is multiplied or disjointed from the rest of the body, or the movement of subjects in the streets becomes erroneously codded as the set of subsequent units, much like in Marey’s chronophotography. The collection also consists of 204 photospheres, uploaded as content for Google Street View. The effect is a direct consequence of the typical process of smartphone panoramic photography, where stitching the consecutive elements together is done automatically by the software. It has since been partially replaced by the photospheres produced by 360º cameras, following Ricoh Theta’s camera launch in October 2013. Normally, such pictures would be deleted as failed attempts at capturing the sense of immersion in the surrounding environment. The phenomenon is, however, also illustrative of three types of aberrations present in the popular platform which have been identified as 1) The spatio-temporal situation of the image capture; 2) The accidental or purposeful movements of the human photographer; 3) Bugs or limitations in the hardware of software of the smartphone, local software, or cloud-based application used to create the image. (Rettberg 2018, p. 17) Here, too, it is particularly interesting that the bugs and limitations of the software and cloud-based services in the end reveal the systemic character of the 360º panoramas as simulations, as well as the operation of wider communicative networks, with different layers of real-time temporal orders mentioned before. Rettberg himself highlights the hybrid nature of his undertaking, based on the process of automated, software-based image production where the role of (human) photographer has also incorporated the exigencies and intricacies of the code, as performed by the application working with the cloud-based sets of data. As emphasized by the artist: The process involved in producing each of these types of artifacts with a smartphone differs and in each case involves strange bodily interaction with the device, as well as complex algorithmic manipulation of the image by software, aspects of which are entirely beyond the control of the photographer. (Rettberg 2018, p. 15) What if foregrounded again is the systemic nature of 360º digital panorama, and hence the underlying mechanism of their production, normally hidden from view and/or occluded by the ideology of immersive reception. Based on the multiple feedback loops and countless instances of sophisticated calculations and data exchanges, the effect they produce is prone to unpredictability – or, as summarized by Rettberg, who likens the process to the behavior of poetry generators: “even as I capture them,

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I do not know what to expect of them until a stitching algorithm finishes assembling them” (Rettberg 2018, p. 16). Rettberg’s work in progress also hints at the possibility of reframing VR’s participatory culture from yet another perspective, rarely acknowledged by the researchers of high-end virtual reality in its high-end tech and commercial incarnations: those of popular VR and quasi VR practices. It is worth remembering that the majority of consumer-generated VR content of today consists of various forms of photospheres and 360º panoramas, produced both as photographs with consumer grade smartphones and as video with omnidirectional 360º cameras. They circulate within the Google ecosystem of joint databases, creating one of the most potent and influential media platforms today, dominating the global internet. The experience has been described by Jill Walker Rettberg as one where “The photographer is invisible. The human must become like a machine to make a sphere. . . . We have become sensors for the machine” (cited in Rettberg JW, 2016). This is yet another way of interweaving human and non-human components in VR’s participatory culture, where user-generated photospheres found on Google Maps Street View are one of the major genres. The example may provoke some controversies around whether (and to what extent) such content can be convincingly categorized as virtual reality, but considering it here is nevertheless in line with the already explained approach to employ VR as an umbrella term for a range of related forms: the photospheres and 360º panoramas can be seen as examples of virtual reality understood as a wider continuum of modes of representation and ways of engaging the audience. Rettberg’s work in progress is then symptomatic of aesthetic responses to images that are produced as a result of machines observing and processing the world. The overlapping realities concerned are those of human intelligence and aesthetic sensibility with those of artificial intelligence and what might be understood as algorithmic and sometimes accidental aesthetics. (Rettberg 2018, p. 12) Scott Rettberg also developed another VR artwork which can be considered an example projecting the participating user beyond the immediacy of immersive reception. Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project was produced in 2014 in collaboration with Roderick Coover, Daria Tsoupikova, Mark Partridge, Mark Baratta, Lance Long and Arthur Nishimoto. It is a 3D narrative cinematic VR experience, originally conceived for CAVE 2 of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Chicago. It presents the stories of violent behavior and at the same time offers some insight into the post-traumatic trauma experienced by American soldiers – often very young and inexperienced – who were ordered to engage in torturing prisoners. The testimonies gathered by John Tsukuyama communicate the story of a difficult struggle of coming

106 Anna Nacher to terms with what happened during military service. According to Rettberg, the purpose of the project was “to promote the reasoned consideration of the problems generated by using torture as an interrogation tactic” (Rettberg 2019, p. 198). Due to the highly sensitive nature of the subject of the artwork, the creators decided to employ actors reading the transcribed interviews rather than use the actual recordings. Such a Brechtian gesture further estranges the spectator from the content, yet it provides a required considerate and compassionate distance enabling better understanding of the complex psychological situation in the battlefield. Through combining the elements of visual art, documentary, hypertext and gamelike environments, the VR experience again proposes “a total environment” (Elsaesser 2014). The individual user interacts with selected objects within the virtual environment, which triggers the consecutive narrative strands. Each time the next “chapter” in the story opens, the walls of a domestic space fall away and the scene transforms into an unspecified desert landscape where the story from the transcript is presented, denying the possibility of full immersion in either environment, and also symptomatic of the already mentioned effect of “hypermediacy”, directing users’ attention to the familiar interfaces and making them visible and perceptible objects of conscious and critical participation in the operation of the artwork. The installation is far from the primarily affective “empathy machine”, also due to the fact that, as Anne Karhio emphasizes, the visual representation of space effectively produces the disjointed narrative layers that contribute to spectators being made “uncomfortably aware of the entertainment industry’s commercial exploitation of armed conflicts” (Karhio 2017, p. 355). Both graphically and conceptually, Hearts and Minds is a conscious play with the mode of immersion – here seen as typical of both VR environment and gaming – juxtaposing “the operational with the representational” (Andersen & Pold 2018, loc. 549).

Conclusions Why is it important to dedicate so much attention to these interfaces? Lori Emerson, in her seminal book Reading writing interfaces (2014), points out the dangers of the lack of criticism towards how interface is designed and shaped. VR’s immersive quality is partially built on the fact that the frame of the well-known window of the graphical user interface vanishes altogether, making users further detached from whatever lies “behind the glossy digital interface” (Emerson 2018). But the vanishing interface also demonstrates a wider cultural shift whereby the human-computer interaction undergoes a crucial transformation – with computation becoming spatial and ambient, according to Andersen and Pold (2018): users now interact not so much with individual computers, but with “networks of data” floating in “intelligent software systems” (loc. 822). The consequence of this is the vanishing of the interface into computational and communicating objects, surfaces and spaces. It “seems to transcend perception, it

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is omnipresent”, and thus “becomes a metainterface” (Andersen & Pold 2018, loc. 835). This is the primary reason for the prior examination of VR’s participatory edge in the creative practices that seek to cognitively enhance users’ participation in the conscious apprehending of the ideology of affective immersion in virtual environments. Seen from the double perspective of screen-based practice and the effect of advanced computation in the age of vanishing interfaces, the ideology of virtual reality is foregrounded first and foremost in projecting it as a highly immersive and affective, graphically seductive experience. However, it can be successfully interrogated, instigating at the same time more critical and emancipatory modes of audience engagement that go beyond the rhetoric of “the ultimate empathy machine”. Such an approach could inspire a shift in how VR content is conceptualized: not so much as cutting-edge, high-end and high-fidelity, graphically impressive simulated worlds that are technologically dependent on the entertainment industry but rather as a wider array of different practices, technologies, devices and formats. Such a reframed concept of VR allows for the inclusion of less spectacular forms of engagement with new type(s) of content and points to the overlapping realities of systemic images: mathematically born yet fused with the living bodies and their relationship with the simulation technology.

Note 1 Based on the research project supported by National Science Centre Poland (“The aesthetics of post-digital imagery: between new materialism and objectoriented philosophy”, 2016/21/B/HS2/00746).

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Hinterwaldner, I 2017, The systemic image: A new theory of interactive real-time simulations, trans. E Tucker, MIT Press, Cambridge. Hoelzl, I & Marie, R 2015, Softimage: Towards a new theory of the digital image, Intellect, Bristol & Chicago. Jenkins, H, Clinton, K, Purushotma, R, Robinson, A & Weigel, M 2009, Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago. Karhio, A 2017, ‘Space and landscape in Hearts and Minds: The interrogation project: Uncomfortable proximities’, Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, vol. 3, no. 33, pp. 350–363, viewed 10 February 2019, Ejournals database, DOI: 10.4467/20843860PK.17.024.7794. Lastra, J 2000, Perception, representation, modernity: Sound technology and the American cinema, Columbia University Press, New York City. McRoberts, J 2018, ‘Are we there yet? Media content and sense of presence in non-fiction virtual reality’, Studies in Documentary Film, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 101–118, viewed 8 February 2019, Taylor & Francis database, DOI: 10.1080/ 17503280.2017.1344924. Milk, C 2015, How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine, TED2015, online video, viewed 25 September 2018, www.ted.com/talks/ chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine. Murray, J 2016, Not a film and not an empathy machine, immerse, no. 1, October, viewed 25 February 2019, https://immerse.news/not-a-film-and-not-anempathy-machine-48b63b0eda93?gi=a1c57ec32469. Rettberg, JW 2016, ‘How do algorithms see? Machine vision in camera apps’, presentation at the seminar Visual Technologies, Place, and Space, University of Bergen, 22 April. Rettberg, S 2018, ‘Place and no place: Reflections on panorama, glitch, and photospheres in an aesthetic imaginary shared by humans and machines’, Notre Dame Review, online, Winter/Spring, viewed 28 September 2018, https://ndre view.nd.edu/assets/267984/place_and_no_place_panorama_glitch_and_pho tospheres_rettberg.pdf. Rettberg, S 2019, Electronic literature, Polity Press, Cambridge & Melford. Rosen, P (ed.) 1986, Narrative, apparatus, ideology: A film theory reader, Columbia University Press, New York City. Ross, M 2018, ‘Virtual reality’s new synesthetic possibilities’, Television & New Media, online first, pp. 1–18, viewed 28 February 2019, SAGE Publication database, DOI: 10.1177/1527476418805240. Rubin, P 2018, Future presence: How virtual reality is changing human connection, intimacy, and the limits of ordinary life, HarperOne, San Francisco. Singleton, M 2016, ‘Google has shipped over 5 million cardboard headsets’, The Verge, 27 January, viewed 25 August 2018, www.theverge.com/2016/1/27/ 10842438/google-shipped-5-million-cardboard-headsets. Smith, S 2018, ‘Dance performance and virtual reality: An investigation of current practice and a suggested tool for analysis’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 199–214, viewed 24 February 2019, Taylor & Francis database, DOI: 10.1080/14794713.2018.1509256. Srnicek, N 2016, Platform Capitalism, Polity Press, Cambridge & Melford. Steinicke, F 2016, Being Really Virtual. Immersive Natives and the Future of Virtual Reality, Springer, Cham. van Dijck, J 2013, The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media, Oxford University Press, New York.

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Photo-sharing as participatory surveillance Clare Southerton, Maja Sonne Damkjær and Anders Albrechtslund

Introduction: Digital images as part of family connectivity in Denmark Recent debates surrounding digital photos have emphasized the increased possibilities of how these are sorted, shared and stored, both online and offline (Davies 2007; Mendelson & Papacharissi 2011; Lasén 2015; Schreiber 2017). There has been a shift from pre-digital photographs, which were seen as objects to be preserved, packaged and framed (see Sontag 1977), to less tangible social artefacts serving more immediate communicative purposes (Lobinger 2016). The overall question that guides the research reported in this chapter is this: How do parents describe, perceive and reflect on the role of digital photo-sharing in everyday family life? The more general ambition of our study is to significantly improve our understanding of the consequences of the deep infiltration of technology into contemporary family life. We report from a qualitative study of how Danish families describe and articulate the role of these digital technologies in their everyday lives. Denmark is characterized by one of the highest penetration rates of internet as well as mobile devices (Elkjær, Mittet & Tassy 2017), especially amongst children (Mascheroni & Ólafsson 2016), and family relations rely on democratic ideals and parental attitudes tend to be liberal (Brito et al. 2017), in general and in relation to children’s technology use (Mascheroni & Ólafsson 2014). We examine how Danish parents integrate digital devices into their lives and seek to understand their perceptions of their own technologically enabled practices. While many questions have been raised about the commodification of digital social interactions and the data they generate (Birchall 2017; Tufekci 2014; Van Dijck 2014), we argue that photosharing described by parents in our study can be understood as a form of participatory surveillance. As we will go on to discuss, the concept of participatory surveillance explicates the interconnection between digitally embedded social practices like social media sharing, online observation of others and smartphone photography and surveillance (Albrechtslund 2013). Our findings trace the ways parents navigate the taking and sharing

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of digital photographs of their family. We argue that, though parents do not articulate their practices as surveillance, using this framework can yield insight into contemporary forms of surveillance that operate in intimate spaces, such as the family. Though surveillance has had a largely negative connotation, participatory surveillance, as we will discuss, identifies the ways surveillance practices like tracking others and seeking information about others without their awareness, can be important parts of contemporary digitally enabled sociality. We argue that the digital and networked photograph affords photo-sharing practices in the immediate moment of capture that encourages parents to anticipate and manage the shifting audiences of their image. These practices also afford a conceptualization of the ambiguities of future audiences and contexts of the digital photograph, which we explore through our participants’ discussions of the way they store their photos. Photo-sharing involves both watching others and the anticipation being watched, as part of connective and social practices.

Literature review Changing understandings of surveillance Our study contributes further knowledge to established debates examining nature of surveillance in contemporary society, in which social media plays an integral role in everyday interaction. As the practices of sharing personal information become embedded in routine practices, scholars have argued that understandings of surveillance must be adapted as surveilling becomes a horizontal rather than vertical practice (Albrechtslund 2008). The term “participatory surveillance” describes the way communication and identity performance on social media are anchored in surveillance practices (Albrechtslund 2013). The use of social media is characterized by the mutual sharing, tracking, lurking etc. of activities, whereabouts, opinions and other personal information within a network of “friends”, “followers” and “connections”. While some users1 certainly share more than others, most interactions on social media platforms are enabled by surveillance in the sense that participation depends on users accessing and divulging personal information. The focus on participation highlights the role of users in sharing data about themselves as a way to engage in the social and playful aspects of social media culture. In other words, surveillance can also be part of a conscious or even empowering strategy of sharing (Koskela 2004). This surveillance framework challenges dominant narratives within academic and popular discourse that depict those under surveillance as passive victims of repressive power structures, as it points to the many ways in which surveillance facilitates social interaction and subjectivity building (Albrechtslund 2008). Further, as Albrechtslund and Lauritsen (2013) argue, participation is

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characteristic of surveillance in many everyday contexts, not only emerging contexts enabled by digital technologies. Rather it is a quality that must be understood in order to account for the nuanced and multifaceted relations that constitute moments of surveillance. Many scholars interested in the role of social media in the changing nature of surveillance argue that contemporary norms have shifted to create a demand and normalization of sharing personal data (Tufekci 2014; Van Dijck 2014). Van Dijck (2013) contends that the underlying logic of platforms like Facebook, in which personal data has a high value to the business, have in turn put a value on the practice of sharing. Further, Birchall (2017, p. 13) characterizes contemporary life as in a state of shareveillance “in which we are always already sharing”, and, particularly online, data sharing has become a pervasive social expectation such that we cannot conceptualize sharing as a conscious choice but rather it is an integral part of digital subjectivity. As social media platforms increasingly host much of our daily interaction, participation involves the normalization of sharing of data and the aggregation of that data for profit and power. Surveillance and the networked family In the context of the family there are new forms of connectedness facilitated by information communication technologies (ICTs) and social media (Jamieson 2013; Wajcman, Bittman & Brown 2008), but at the same time these practices reconstitute family life in ways that complicate privacy (Lupton, Pedersen & Thomas 2016; Sinanan & Hjorth 2018). The forms of surveillance, such as geo-location tracking and social media “stalking”, now taking place within close relationships have been termed “social surveillance” (Marwick 2012) or “intimate surveillance” (Leaver 2015). Leaver (2015, 2017) argues that surveilling practices undertaken by parents to monitor their children are normalized by their embeddedness in contemporary networked culture and have become associated with “good” and “responsible” parenting ideals, though, as Clark (2013) notes, these values and practices are shaped significantly by socioeconomic background. While social media and digitally enabled data sharing have contributed to the conditions in which these norms have formed, we also note that these changing forms of surveillance cannot be separated from the social conditions in which they appear (Jansson 2015). Given the demand to share, photo-sharing by parents must be understood within the context of competing normative demands on parents. “Sharenting”, a term used to refer to parents sharing information about their children and about their parenting online, has become controversial in recent years, decried in popular discourse as narcissistic and dangerous (see for example: Coughlan 2018; Philby 2017) with parents often characterized as ignorant of privacy risks (Minkus, Liu & Ross 2015). However, other recent studies suggest parents are aware of their position

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as guardians of their children’s privacy (Ammari et al. 2015; Wagner & Gasche 2018), and, rather, as Blum-Ross and Livingstone (2017) argue, sharenting involves parents negotiating tensions of the relational and now “networked” parent identity within these concerns. Blum-Ross and Livingstone (2017) contend that the performance of a parental identity may increasingly demand the presentation of their life with their children, such presentations largely now occurring online, while they must also demonstrate responsible parental behaviour in posting images deemed appropriate by dominant social norms. Further, Damkjær (2018) argues that parents’ attitudes towards sharenting differ in accordance with the values, norms and aesthetics that shape their communicative orientation as parents. Sharenting then is embedded in contemporary parenting practices and forms part of how parents construct their identity and the identity of their family. The digital photograph as a communicative practice As social media sharing has become mainstream, the meanings and practices associated with photography have also shifted. Most notably, the increased number of photographs now taken, the ease of taking candid photographs (afforded by smartphone photography), and the greater freedom of children in the family to take their own photographs (Sarvas & Frohlich 2011). Digital photographs in their shareability and networked relations are increasingly understood as communicative acts as well as representational objects (van Dijck 2008; Lobinger 2016; Zappavigna 2016; Schreiber 2017). Scholars have argued that image-sharing on social media involves the curation and constitution of one’s life and identity through (self)representation, with images that are shared operating as part of impression management strategies as well as the maintenance of relationships (Davies 2007; Mendelson & Papacharissi 2011; Lasén 2015). Schreiber (2017, p. 145) argues that “visual sense-making”, defined as “what is perceived as beautiful, interesting and worth photographing, showing”, and communication through visual elements like emojis, memes and other images demonstrates the ways the visual constructs sociality at the same time as it is constructed by it. Networked images also now operate within what Lobinger (2016) calls “phatic photo-sharing” practices, in which the meaning of the image itself becomes far less important and it is rather the pleasure of connectivity, the sharing of the visual itself, that is significant. There are some continuities in social practice associated with the photographic object and the emphasis on the transformation of digital technologies have obscured some of these persisting practices, as Keightley and Pickering (2014) argue. While analogue photography produced a potentially “fragile” object that must be stored and protected (Sontag 1977), the storage of digital photographs can also be a precarious process with the formlessness of the object introducing new fragilities like

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corrupted files or other forms of data loss. Furthermore, the sharing of photos is, of course, by no means new and has been an integral part of personal photography since its analogue beginnings. Lobinger (2016) argues that many digital photo-sharing practices continue to retain elements of storytelling in which the images act to support meaning making as they are often used to accompany and enhance a narrative. The shifting conditions of photographic practices as they have become digitized, easily shareable and editable, as well as the persistence of existing meaningmaking practices within visual culture, constitute the conditions in which contemporary family photo-sharing emerges. The affordances of digital photo-sharing In the context of increasing normalization of sharing and the embeddedness of digital photo-sharing in parenting practice, we examine how parents undertake and interpret these practices. In order to do so, we draw on the concept of “affordances” here to conceptualize how parents make use of and perceive the capacities of digital photographs, social media platforms, mobile devices and other objects that participate in photo-sharing cultures. The term, coined by James Gibson (1986) conceptualizes both what is made possible and what possibilities are closed off by certain material arrangements. Contemporary interpretations of the term have been influenced by the work of design scholar Donald Norman (1990) and sociologist Ian Hutchby (2001), who both integrated an understanding of the users’ perceptions of the affordances into the theory. More recently, Davis and Chouinard (2016) have argued that affordances must be understood not only in terms of their perceivability to subjects, but they also situate affordances in relation to the social conditions of the subject. Broadly, considering the affordances of a technological object attends to both what the materiality of the practice inclines towards and how this interacts with the social conditions the subject-object relation occurs within. Though term “affordance” has been widely interpreted, we will draw on the concept to refer to the practices and actions that technologies either constrain or enable – and to address how these “possibilities for (inter) action” are perceived and adopted by users in specific social contexts. We draw on danah boyd’s (2010) theorization of the affordances of social networking sites to conceptualize the specific affordances of the networked digital image and the different social media environments it is embedded in. boyd (2010, p. 46) argues there are four affordances that are significant parts of social media platforms: the persistence of information once it is shared, its replicability, the scalability of the audience of content that means potential visibility is great and the searchability of this content once it is digitized and part of the network. These affordances can be seen in the ways images have been transformed in their digitization and participation in social media networks.

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It is important to examine the capacities of the devices digital images are produced by, as well as the digital images themselves. Given the widespread popularity of smartphones, with current estimates suggesting up to 85% of photographs are now taken on these devices (Richter 2017), there are affordances particular to the smartphone that warrant discussion here. The concept of “communicative affordances” has been developed by Schrock (2015, p. 1235), who proposes a typology of affordances for smartphone devices (among other mobile media technologies) that considers their portability, availability, locatability and multimediality. Similarly, an understanding how families perceive, reflect and negotiate between various photo-sharing practices must consider the affordances of the social media platforms and apps through given that “their algorithms, codes and interfaces are an intrinsic part of our communicative practices” (Schreiber 2017, p. 144).

Case study: Digital parenting and the networked image This study of the changing role and perception of photo-sharing practices in families has been conducted as part of the project Childhood, Intimacy and Surveillance Practices (ChIP) at the Centre for Surveillance Studies, Aarhus University.2 The ChIP project explores the motivations, negotiations and implications of surveillance practices in the intimate contexts of everyday life from the perspective of the users. For the purpose of this project we identify intimate contexts as close relationships such as between parents and children, or between partners. The aim is to improve our understanding of the changes and challenges associated with the deep infiltration of technology in interpersonal relations. The geographical context of our work is Denmark, a country in the Global North with 88% of households owning a smartphone and 93% of the population having access to a computer with the internet (Tassy, Nielsen & Jakobsen 2018). Methodically, ChIP is organized as case studies comprising of semi-structured qualitative in-depth interviews and observations in two different social contexts: (1) in families with school children and (2) among adolescents at school. Data and data collection This chapter draws only on empirical data from the in-depth interviews, whose case unit is families with children living at home. This broad limitation enabled an exploratory examination of how different technologies were adopted into everyday parenting and family practices as well as relationships within and beyond the family. The study’s 17 cases were selected consecutively based on virtual snowball sampling via Facebook (Baltar & Brunet 2012) using the researchers’ personal profiles and the research centre’s official page. In order to identify and select information rich cases we used a purposeful sampling technique based on maximum

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variation. Maximum variation sampling is used for the purpose of documenting variations and identify important common patterns that cut across variation (Patton 2002, p. 235). This sample is not intended to be representative of the Danish population, but rather our findings are intended to offer insight into the lived experiences of interrelations between technologies and everyday family life and the quality of those experiences. Though there were themes that were apparent across our sample, we emphasize that it is not our intention to make claims that are generalisable but rather to explore the qualitative questions posed in this chapter. As criteria for case selection, we chose variation by geographic location and children’s age. This resulted in a varied set of cases in relation to family structure (nuclear, divorced, blended), geographical context (urban, suburban or rural) and family stage (preschool children, school children, teenagers). However, the cases were rather homogenous in terms of socioeconomic status, as most of the parents held a higher education degree and had fulltime jobs. All but one interview was carried out in the families’ homes (one was conducted at a participant’s workplace). This allowed for a rich, contextualized conversation about the technologies in the family environment which was supplemented by photos of the technologies in the home to record information exactly what kind of devices were used (e.g., brand) as well as to provide a memory aid for researchers during analysis. Most interviews were conducted with both parents (or caregivers) in the household and in some cases children participated as well. The semi-structured interviews focussed on how the families used technologies to coordinate everyday life, practice care and stay connected. Concretely, the families were asked to describe how they used the technologies for these different purposes. The interviews were transcribed and systematically coded using Nvivo 12 based on recurring ideas, issues and key concepts emerging across cases. In particular, the analysis focussed on the parents’ experiences with, motives for and attitudes towards photographing and social media practices. The quotes we use in this chapter have been translated from the original Danish, which posed challenges as they contain everyday language, slang and nonverbal expressions (face, body etc.) in the context of the interview situation. Here, we have tried to convey the tone and meaning of the quotes as precisely as possible. All participants have been pseudonymized to comply with research ethics.

Analysis Affording connection and social performance in the present While there are many affordances of digital communication technologies, firstly we examine those that shape the ways parents participate

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in surveillance practices in the present by focussing on the contextual affordances of different photo-capturing devices and social media platforms. By referring to the present, we emphasize the “in the moment” capacities of technologies that are perceived and negotiated by parents. These affordances inform how parents share photos of their children and how they reflect on what their children share, and their everyday practices involved negotiation with various capacities directed towards connection through surveillance. The present capacities for connection afforded by digital devices and platforms form part of the motivations and desires that facilitate the photo-sharing practices the parents in our study describe. The use of photo-sharing via MMS or Instant Messaging-services (WhatsApp, iMessage, Messenger etc.) for immediate purposes was a common practice among the families in our study, across variation in family structure, geographical context and family stage. Often these practices had a functional, an emotional or a phatic purpose e.g., a child would send a photo of a scratch for her mum to see, so she could evaluate the severity of the wound and offer comfort and support while being at work, or a parent would send everyday photo updates (of a sleeping child or a family meal) from the home to the geographically dispersed partner, friends or extended family. The capability of synchronous communication with a specific person or a specific group of people was perceived as the primary affordance of these visual exchanges. They were particularly used to foster connectedness between family members and shared participation in a geographically dispersed family life. Moreover, sharing photos of one’s children was also perceived as a parental obligation, as denoted by Maria, a 35-year-old pregnant mother with a university degree, when she described the photo-sharing practices related to her toddler girl: “I often share photos of my daughter on request”. Different social media platforms were perceived by participants to have different affordances, and as a consequence, they evaluated the kinds of intimacies and audiences that were produced through each site. Moreover, their perceptions of the affordances of different social media platforms were adjusted over time. This must be seen in the light of the platforms’ “perpetual beta” state (Musser & O’Reilly 2006), as they are continuously modified to foster user engagement as part of a business model that encourages constant acts of personal disclosure from users (van Dijck 2013). At the same time, processes of technology adaptation by users occur as they “domesticate” the technologies and this appropriation is shaped by flows of socially constructed discourses, norms and values (Silverstone & Haddon 1996). The affordances of different platforms are rarely perceived in isolation, and many of our respondents used a range of different social media services for similar practices – according to how they perceived their affordances in relation to others, and their ability to connect with specific individuals or groups. Maria reflected on this when

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asked about how she used different communication tools and platforms for photo-sharing: The way we use Facebook has changed. At least I feel in my circle [of friends] that Facebook is no longer the platform/social medium. Instagram is the new thing, also because it is so visual. Well, sometimes you post a picture [on Facebook], but mostly if it’s ceremonial – weddings or baptism or something like that, right? Then you might post a picture on Facebook. Or if something special happens in your life, right? But otherwise you . . . I mainly use Facebook as a stream, a news stream. . . . All in all, I do not share much on Facebook. Well, I probably use Instagram more because it visualizes your everyday life. (Emphasis added) The quote reveals a difference in the perception of the “meaning space” and “aesthetic quality” of the two platforms (Facebook and Instagram), despite both platforms affording the sharing of digital photos to a network. Instagram’s interface is primarily constituted by images that can easily be taken and modified via the apps’ different tools, filters and effects (text, tone, AR-selfie-filters etc.) and therefore encourages the user to instantaneous and spontaneous photo shoots and sharing with their followers, as well as to view, curate and creatively engage in their own self-presentation as well as others. In contrast, Facebook’s “News Feed” layout connects shared photographs to “newsworthy” events and urges its users to share milestones by adding “Life events” to their timeline (e.g., marriage, the birth of a child, the loss of a loved one etc.) The participant establishes contextual differences between the platforms based on their affordances and through their sharing practices. However, these processes also include a consideration and negotiation of the perceived social values and norms associated with the use of a specific platform in their social network, e.g., when Maria explains why “in her circle of friends” Instagram has taken over the role Facebook used to play as the preferred medium for everyday photo-sharing. Parents use photo-sharing as part of the performance of their identity, which incorporates their identity as a parent (Blum-Ross & Livingstone 2017), and they manage this performance through cultivating different contexts and audiences on different platforms. Our participants described using features of the platforms, like privacy settings, or management of which content they shared on which platforms, to curate the performance of their identities and manage their audience. A good example was provided by Kristen, a 36-year-old woman with a vocational education degree and mother of an 8-year-old girl, when she and her husband were reflecting on their photo-sharing practices and what they found appropriate to share. Kirsten described changing the privacy settings on photographs

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posted on Facebook of her 30th birthday party that included a stripper, as well as advising her young cousin to do the same in a similar situation in order to avoid inappropriate disclosures: There was another time when my cousin put a picture up. It was either her or a friend who put it up. I remember that I told her – she is not very old – I told her “remember that the rest of the family can see this”. And it was something about a party with alcohol in some forest, right? It was bordering to what I think is not suitable for Facebook, especially when one’s mother and father are there, right? Here Kristen identifies the way the social media platform affords the visibility of these images; while the digital image affords other means of identification through its relationship with these platforms in the form of tagging, searchability and, more recently, facial recognition. She describes photo-sharing practices in which she undertakes self-surveillance of her social media identity performance by anticipating her audience and altering her privacy settings to manage the impression she makes on others, especially by conforming to perceived social norms about appropriate behaviour in a family context. The user’s perception of the specific platform’s affordances and functionalities is often coupled with what is considered “public” versus “private” and the scale between the two. What participants considered appropriate to be shared was highly subjective. However, despite variation, a pattern of social norms regarding acceptable motifs emerged. The most prominent concerned “child-nudity”. While many parents felt that sharing photos of naked children, was clearly inappropriate, some emphasized the importance of their children not feeling that nudity was abnormal. These parents negotiated this influential social norm by referring to their own childhood and asserting that it was natural and innocent for small children to run around naked. They felt it was acceptable to share photos of naked babies and toddlers as long as they were depicted in a natural setting, e.g., the beach or a bathtub. Despite this, only a few had actually shared naked photos of their children regardless of their age. When the parents argued why they refrained from picturing nudity they often referred to the affordances of platforms. Most notably, the scalability and invisibility of the audience of social media sites were commonly identified, being that the audience could be significantly large and ambiguous when compared with photo-sharing that occurred over MMS, for example. These affordances were also at the fore when the parents’ argued why they abstained form sharing photos of their naked children, as the reach and audience of these photos could potentially violate the privacy of the child. These implications were exactly what Gitte, a 38-year-old woman with a university degree, referred to when she, a mother of two small

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children and stepmother of a teenager, reflected on the photo-sharing practices of extended family members, specifically her mother-in-law: It makes me jump when I find out that my mother-in-law has, for example, shared pictures of my children [on Facebook] without talking to me about it first, e.g. has shared a picture of my daughter sleeping with her dress over her stomach for example. I don’t like that. It goes beyond my limits because I don’t know who the recipient is. Here, Gitte identifies the way images shared on social media platforms afford a significant reach, which she feels uncomfortable with. Further, she points to one of the new obligations of “digital parenting”, namely being the guardian of one’s children’s privacy and digital footprints. At the same time, she identifies the conflicting norms surrounding what is appropriate to share, who is entitled to share what and diverging expectations in relation to asking for consent before sharing photos of others. Future potentials in present sharing The future affordances of digital images, the potential uses or new contexts in which they could emerge can remain opaque, and thus the photo-sharing practices of parents demonstrate an awareness of present audiences of the images while retaining a sense of their potential. The affordances of the digital image facilitated participants perceiving future potential uses of the images, that then shaped their use of the image in the present as parents attempt to anticipate both the possible benefits and harms their digital photographs may yield. For example, the searchability of digital photographs and their persistence online in many different contexts, including unanticipated ones, meant some parents consider the ways images of their children might reappear in the future. This can be seen in a discussion between Katrine and Karsten who are the parents and foster parents of four girls between 4 and 15 years old. Katrine and Karsten hold professional bachelor’s and a vocational education degrees, respectively: KATRINE, 44 YEARS OLD:

But I’m like, you have to think about when the children get older, what’s out there [on social media] KARSTEN, 46 YEARS OLD: That’s the point, right? Because it never disappears! It’s not fun if you are an 18-year-old, and you start searching, and so suddenly you’ll find a picture of yourself naked online, right? As this discussion illustrates, the futurity of the image and, in particular, its ambiguous affordances reconfigure participants relations to it in the present. Far from being ignorant of this potential, parents perceived future affordances, such as the longevity, searchability and shareability of the image making it possible for their children to find the photo as an

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adult, as part of their encounters with photo-sharing technologies like the digitally networked photograph and social media platforms. These affordances, though not yet formed, played a role in the decisions they made about what images they shared and did not share. Beyond influencing the sharing practices of participants, the perception of future affordances of the digital image also influences their storage. While the storage of photographs for the future is certainly not new (Sontag 1977; Rose 2010; Keightley & Pickering 2014) digital images come with new challenges given their intangibility and shareability (van Dijck 2008). To return to an example Gibson (1986) uses: while a tree branch affords a holder to grasp, the digital photograph, lacking physical form, affords its user far less of a firm grip. Our participants discussed with some visible uncertainty the many digital storage spaces and locations their photographs were kept while attempting to ascertain the solidity of the files, which represented their photographs. Maria reflected on the uncertainty afforded by digital photographs when asked to describe how she shared and stored her family photos: I just think it’s just something you can get so completely panicked about. What if Dropbox suddenly deletes it all? It is something that is so anxiety-provoking in our society when everything becomes so digital. I mean, thinking about that backup option all the time, right? And we need to make sure that it’s secure and yes that we have some kind of control. Well, it is a kind of ambivalence in our lives, right? You try to manage it in one way or another in your family because you do not want to lose it. And you hear about those stories where people’s house burns down, right? But. What about the external hard drive? Well, maybe we’re probably such a little over-security check freaks right here because we almost backed up and added an extra backup to my in-laws and something like that? That’s then at least we’ve got the pictures. . . . Well they may not be completely updated, but we update them every six months or something, right? But we try because things are a little insecure in our society in general. Maria identifies the intangibility of digital images, despite their replicability and thus their ability to be “backed up”, and describes feeling anxious and unsure about the safety of her family photos. The shift between the physical and digital image therefore also implies an alteration of our perception of trust and control, as we must replace personal trust and a tangible feeling of control with faith in an automated system beyond our control. The concern of the loss of images was also connected to the sheer volume of photographs taken, as the multimediality of the smartphone devices affords easy capture of images. As Lisbeth, a 33-year-old mother holding a university degree, described when talking about how she handled the photos of her 2-, 4- and 6-year-old children: “I have the

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[printed] photo albums to browse through. For me, pictures on the phone are lost in the shuffle”. While the ease of digital photography through smartphone devices allows many more images to be taken, participants retain a sense of discomfort with wasting images. In our interviews, some emphasized that they were aware of the positive future potential of the images and the value they could offer to help them remember significant moments in their life. As Maria describes: I have thought about sharing. Sometimes it is just as much about sharing with yourself. Sometimes I don’t care about ‘likes’, because that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I store them [the pictures] somewhere because there is so much content in your life – you take so many pictures, you have to remember so many things – and everything seems to blend together. So, [sharing pictures online] is also about having a memory of good times. Here Maria perceives the future affordances of the digital networked digital image, and this anticipation of this value informs current photosharing practices, in which she describes sharing the image “with yourself” as a method of retaining the image for the future. We note here that the image remains “networked” because of its movements through digital networks to arrive back to the recipient – even if this is the same as the sender – and the data that this movement creates. Other participants described the value of photo-sharing as a way to document their children growing up for the child to see later on. Emma, a 41-year-old mother and stepmother of four with a university degree, had an Instagram account for her 3-year-old daughter created when she was born. Emma described the account as a “time document to show how she’s growing up”. The persistence of the digital image, which she identifies, affords this future potential in which the images can offer the child a detailed account of their formative years. Here we see continuities with pre-digital photostoring practices, as the values and motivations for storing images for the future persist, though modulated by new platforms and technologies. However, the photos’ layers of “paratexts” (comment and likes) that are afforded by the platform add new meaning to this continuing practice, as the followers’ responses highlight the relational network and the shared participation in the child’s life story.

Discussion: Participation and digital photo-sharing So far we have examined the motivations, conditions and negotiations surrounding our participants sorting and filtering their images for sharing and their storage of digital photographs. From these practices we can observe that these sorting, sharing and storing practices demonstrate

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some of the ways that the changing affordances of the digital photograph are perceived and employed by parents in their families to connect. While there are certainly many practices of photo-sharing that have persisted since before the spread of digitization, the digital and networked photograph possesses specific affordances that shape the way it is shared. As we have argued, parents in our study identified the shareability, persistence, replicability and scalability of the digital photograph, and these affordances impacted their inclinations to share both in relation to the moment of sharing in the present and how they felt their acts of sharing may impact the future. The audience – both the articulated and the imagined – becomes a crucial orienting object for parents, both in their relations to the present and the future when it comes to photo-sharing. The digital image and its associated networks increasingly make invisible and future audiences and contexts more ambiguous, and our participants reflected on this as a concern for decisions they made about sharing images of their children. At the same time, social media platforms become increasingly complex social ecosystems in which participants use the affordances of the platform for self-representation and identity curation through sharing. In these spaces, contexts and audiences become more specific as parents described the kinds of sharing appropriate and encouraged on each platform. As parents regulate and modulate their social media presence, they undertake self-surveillance (Rettberg 2014; Lobinger 2016). The multiple, conflicting and sometimes ambiguous audiences of the digital image presents a challenge for parents which at times, as in the case of future uses of the image, may not have a clear solution. Our data suggests that parents who share photos of their children are cognizant of the future affordances of the digital image, which they expressed in their discussions both for potential positive and negative uses of these images. Parents identified the ambiguity of future uses of the digital photograph and these potential dangers made possible by the persistence of the image, while also expressing their uncertainties around attempting to ensure this persistence through backing up their digital photographs to preserve the positive potentials of the image. The transformation of the digital photograph to something more intangible can be seen here in the way that parents attempted to make sense of this ambiguous object, seeking to make it more solid. Complicating these perceived future affordances that open the digital photograph up to potentially unintended audiences are the immediate desires to share and, indeed, the functional purposes that sharing serves for parents. Given what our participants have revealed about how they mobilize the affordances of different social media platforms and different forms of photo-sharing, we can see these practices form part of the performance of individual, parental and family identities. Certainly, these performances also raise important questions about the privacy of

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children. Parents now are faced with new responsibilities, new forms of labour related to managing their own and their families and their children’s data double (Haggerty & Ericson 2000). Sharing pictures of their child involves contributing information about them to systems of surveillance both in the moment of sharing and for potential future uses. However, the pleasures of connectedness and participation cannot be ignored when we attempt to make sense of motivations to share. Indeed, understanding everyday surveillance demands attending to the ways in which actors involved participate in these processes and the conditions that contribute to their participation, as well as their motivations to do so (Albrechtslund & Lauritsen 2013). These participatory practices vary in the degrees in which they are voluntary, as there may be significant kinds of social obligations to do so, as we have discussed with regard to the contemporary social conditions in which sharing is both normal, expected and largely unproblematic (van Dijck 2013; Birchall 2017).

Conclusion Understanding photo-sharing as a form of participatory surveillance allows consideration of parents’ motivations to share, which are embedded in sociocultural practices of connection and identity construction. Parents experience photo-sharing as both an obligation, both as others expect the parents to share family life, as well as an important part of their parental identity work (Damkjær 2018). At the same time, our data reveals playful but also serious work, which entails continuous relational dilemmas connected to digital parenting. This work involves managing tensions between attempting to preserve a child’s right to privacy (see also: Ammari et al. 2015; Wagner & Gasche 2018), while parents seek to retain their expressions of their online parental identity (Blum-Ross & Livingstone 2017) and chaperoning what others might share about the family and the child. This cycle of surveillance of networked others and self-surveillance, and the consideration imagined and possible future audiences render parents spectators of data doubles. Privacy within the family is no longer constrained and contained by spatial borders, but by the fuzzy, networked, online contexts that require continuous labour to negotiate and navigate. Parents draw creatively and competently on the affordances of social media platforms and devices to manage their audiences and selfrepresentation, attempting to establish different contexts and draw on social norms from these contexts to determine what to share. The ease of capturing images, facilitated by the affordances of devices like smartphones, contributes to the “overload” of photos parents now have access to, while continuing practices surrounding the value attached to family photographs means that sorting and storing practices are particularly important. The affordances of the digital image to be replicated and to

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persist was perceived by parents, and these affordances informed the kinds of images they chose to share and how they thought about storing images. The future affordances of the digital networked photograph, perceived by parents to be somewhat opaque, generated some anxieties around the stability of both the image itself and its possible contexts. Through image storage practices, participants sought to affirm the digital image as solid and tangible, while their sharing practices revealed its dynamic and changeable qualities. Participation in these micro-level practices is rooted in the pleasures of visibility, connectedness and intimacy, providing insight into the complex conditions in which parents share intimate information and images of their children. Simultaneously, given social media saturation, participation is not simply voluntary and these parents’ accounts reveal the nuances and labour of digital parenting, in which they consider both present audiences and the more ambiguous futures when they share.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Dr Ask Risom Bøge for contributing to the preparation and completion of interviews for this project and Ellen Fruekilde for transcribing interviews. Our thanks also go to the two peer reviewers for their helpful comments on this manuscript.

Notes 1 We use the term “users” here to describe people who are engaged with social media platforms and in sharing practices. As we will go on to describe our fieldwork and findings, we will also refer to the parents in our study as “participants”. For the purpose of this study, participants refer to those who were part of our research who may also be users. However, when we refer to users we may be speaking more broadly beyond the experiences of our research participants only. 2 More information about the Childhood Intimacy and Surveillance Practices (ChIP) project can be found on the project website: http://projects.au.dk/chip

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Medialities of participation in sound art Vadim Keylin

Sound and participation Audience participation, engaging the listeners into the soundmaking process is a strong thread running through much of sound art practice. The issues of interactivity and participation feature prominently in the statements and works of many sound artists, from the Baschet brothers and Max Neuhaus, who originated the artform in the 1950s and 60s, to contemporary practitioners. Yet neither sound art, nor participatory art discourses seem to accommodate for participatory sound art – not in the least because of their divergent subject matter. On the one hand, the sound art discourse is dominated by the issues of materiality of sound and the phenomenologies of listening. The participatory art discourse, on the other hand, largely confines itself to social and political matters bypassing the material. At the same time, participatory sound art, being situated at the intersection of these two trends, brings them together, emphasizing the connection between the material and the social. Thus, in this chapter I investigate how this connection is realized in various sound art practices and how the sonic materiality of these artworks facilitates and organizes participation. To illustrate the particular character of participatory sound art, let us consider an example. Vocal Migrations (2012) is an installation by the British artist Kathy Hinde designed to let the participants experience how bats orient themselves in space through echolocation. In the gallery space, Hinde built a paper labyrinth for the visitors to navigate while blindfolded. To help them find their way, the artist provided them with mobile devices, which served as a prosthetic echolocation system. Moving through the labyrinth, the participants had to vocalize constantly, while the devices transformed their voices in relation to the positions of nearest walls and other people. In order not to run into each other or a wall, the participants had to rely solely on listening to the sounds their devices made. While the importance of participation for Vocal Migrations is obvious, situating the work in the context of contemporary participatory art proves difficult. The theories of participatory art are largely predicated

130 Vadim Keylin on Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics and its blatant disregard for materiality of the artwork, even though later researchers are quick to distance themselves from his ideas (Bishop 2012, p. 2). For Bourriaud (2002, p. 107), art objects in contemporary world have no intrinsic aesthetic value and serve only as a catalyst for a certain kind of sociality. The true matter of relational art is the system of relations emerging between the participants as a result of this sociality of art. Furthermore, the current discourse on participation in contemporary art is largely formed by the positions of two scholars – Claire Bishop and Grant Kester – and their heated debate in late 2000s. Briefly summarized, their conflict can be described as that of the ideal of collaborative art developed in horizontal interactions of the participants and pursuing social goals (Kester 2011) versus the idea of provocative, antagonistic participation that offers the participants a first-person experience of social inequalities (Bishop 2012). For all their differences, both Bishop and Kester retain this idea of participatory art as realized primarily in forms of social interaction. Even though Bishop criticizes Kester and the kind of art he champions for forgoing the artistic, she still finds it necessary to define participatory art as an artform that engages its audience as a group and “appropriate[s] social forms as a way to bring art closer to everyday life” (Bishop 2012, p. 1). This puts participatory art in opposition with interactive art, which for Bishop implies a one-on-one interaction between the individual viewer and the artwork and its materiality (Bishop 2006, 2012, p. 1). It is easy to see, how neither this dichotomy of participatory versus interactive art, nor Bourriaud’s idea of materiality as merely a catalyst for sociality fit Vocal Migrations. On the one hand, it does involve groups of participants and social interactions between them – in the form of listening and soundmaking – which are necessary to successfully navigate the labyrinth. On the other hand, the experience of these interactions seems rather far removed from the social forms of everyday life – unless it is the everyday life of bats. Moreover, Vocal Migrations is unquestionably a piece of sound art – that is to say, sound is essential to how the installation operates. The blindfolding is an obvious giveaway, shutting off visual perception and refocussing the experience on the sonic and haptic modalities instead. The way the participants interact with the space and each other – the way they participate in the artwork – is, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, through listening and nonverbal soundmaking. Furthermore, sound in Vocal Migrations has an aesthetic quality to it as well, as the voices of the participants mix together into a kind of musical improvisation. While Hinde’s work may be a rather radical case, stripping the installation of its visual aspects by way of blindfolding the participants, the emphasis on sound and sound perception is characteristic of sound art in general. In their comparative review of the sound art discourse, Andreas Engström and Åsa Stjerna (2009, p. 13) note that “[t]he expression ‘sound

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as an aesthetic category’ is emblematic for the English literature on sound art”. Similarly, having analysed massive amounts of sound artworks in an attempt to distill the defining features of the artform, Laura Maes and Marc Leman (2017) conclude that “[s]ound forms the starting point of a sound artwork”. However, when it comes to works like Vocal Migrations, the sharp focus on “sound-in-itself” may also become a limitation. As critics such as Douglas Kahn (2014) or Seth Kim-Cohen (2009) note, the phenomenological distillation of sound art experience to that of reduced, or acousmatic, listening leaves out its rich social, political and discursive entanglements. At the same time, both Kahn and Kim-Cohen take it a bit too far in trying to bring sound art into the fold of mainstream contemporary art discourse. As Maes and Leman (2017) point out, there is an important difference between a piece of sound art and “a piece of art that has sound as an accidental feature” – a distinction largely lost in Kahn’s and Kim-Cohen’s projects. It is telling that both scholars felt the need to invent alternative terms – “sound in the arts” (Kahn 2014, p. 333) and “non-cochlear sonic art” (Kim-Cohen 2009, pp. xx–xxi) respectively – as deemphasizing the media specificity of the artform leads to its identity dissolving in the broader contemporary art context. Therefore, rather than trying to bridge the two discourses together, my aspiration in this chapter is to offer an idiosyncratic perspective for thinking participation in connection with sound. Three principal premises feed into this perspective: • • •

mediality of a sound art situation necessarily frames the participatory processes happening within this framing makes moot the distinction of interactivity and participation the way this framing takes place is through the relationship of affordance

On the most basic level, mediality can be understood as a set of typical traits constitutive of a given medium. In the context of media theory, a shift from “medium” to “mediality” represents a discursive turn from emphasizing the nature of various media to the way they operate (Jäger, Linz & Schneider 2010). More importantly, however, “[t]he term ‘mediality’ . . . indicates that cultural artefacts and communicative processes are fundamentally organized by media” (p. 12). This last point is particularly important for considering participatory art, as it emphasizes, contrary to Bourriaud’s and Bishop’s claims, the comprehensive influence that the materiality of artistic medium exerts on participation. Thus, applied to sound art, “mediality” refers to the way the diverse material components – sonic, visual, haptic, spatial – converge with participatory processes into a holistic aesthetic experience. But it also emphasizes the importance of these components in facilitating and directing

132 Vadim Keylin participation, as they both delimit the field of possible interactions and provide the means for interactions to occur. Sound plays a central role in this process. In the context of a sound artwork, the participants actions are ultimately aimed at either producing or modifying sound (as in Vocal Migrations), or producing an individualized listening experience (as, for example, in Max Neuhaus’s sound installations discussed in the following section), or both – and this particularity necessarily retroactively informs these actions. In other words, while the participants’ interactions with the work and each other determine how the work will sound, this sound – and the general sound centredness of the experience – exerts a significant influence on what the participants can and chose to do. For this reason, the approach that forcefully divides interactivity – and with it mediality – from participation cannot be used to analyse participatory sound art. A more suitable figure can be found in a seemingly unrelated field that nevertheless also deals with sound-based interactions – video game sound. In her book Playing with sound, Karen Collins (2013) offers a view of interactivity and participation that emphasizes continuity and media specificity instead. She classifies the sound-based interactions into four categories: physical interactions refer to the most straightforward kind of interactivity wherein physical input like pressing a button directly results in producing a sound. These are closely tied to multimodal interactions that happen between different perceptual modalities – sonic, visual, haptic etc. Interpersonal interactions occur between the players, both in the context of the game (if it is a multiplayer game) and outside of it. Finally, sociocultural interactions refer to game-related sonic practices in a wider cultural context, such as performing cover versions of in-game songs or using the game’s soft- or hardware for music creation. All of those are underscored by psychological or cognitive interactions that emphasize the agentic character of perception (Collins 2013, pp. 8–11). Participatory sound art is arguably a more diverse media than video games, which makes the distinction between different kinds of interactions less clear. For example, in Vocal Migrations the participants’ activities can be classified at the same time as physical (as they are using their voices to produce sound), multimodal (as the sound interacts with the spatial structure of the labyrinth) and interpersonal (as they communicate their position in space and learn of the positions of others through sound). However, this model underscores several important points about participation in sound art. First, the concept of cognitive interactions recognizes perceptual actions (such as listening) as a form of participation, bringing them on equal footing with expressive actions (such as soundmaking). Second, multimodal interactions reveal the mechanisms, through which the participatory processes converge with the material aspects of the work – in other words, how both the participants’ actions and their sonic result constitute a single aesthetic experience. Finally, sociocultural interactions problematize the boundary between a participatory

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artwork and its context: which participants’ actions should we consider as belonging to the artistic experience and which belong to the artwork’s afterlife? Should, for example, posting a video or audio recording of one’s experience with Vocal Migrations still constitute a part of the work? As the subject of this chapter is the connection between mediality of sound art and participation, I will limit the discussion to interactions directly facilitated by the material aspects of artworks. The mechanism of this facilitation can be analysed through the idea of affordance. Introduced by psychologist James Gibson (1979), the term affordance refers to the qualities of an environment or an object that frame, but do not determine, the possible actions that can be performed on it. In later years, the affordance theory has been widely adopted in design studies (Norman 1988, 2013) and technology studies (Gaver 1991; Hutchby 2001), particularly as a way to counter both technological and social determinism. Applied to sound art, the affordance theory highlights the connection between the materiality of the artwork, on the one hand, and the participatory processes – and ultimately the political aspects of the artwork – on the other hand. Affordances of a sound artwork are defined by its material and structural aspects, and in turn determine the possibilities for participants interactions with and within the artwork, whatever their scale and type. Thus, affordance also emerges as the missing link that connects the social and the aesthetic aspects of participatory sound art. In other words, it ties together the other two concepts mentioned in this section – mediality and interactions. In the following sections, I analyse sound artworks from the perspective of their mediality, affordances and interactions they facilitate, categorizing them into three environment types: local, networked and augmented. The first section focusses on works, existing purely in physical space and relying primarily on mechanical ways of soundmaking. My goal in this section is to show how physical space and primarily corporeal ways of interaction allow for more immediate experience and strengthen social ties between the participants. Section 2 concerns networked environments – environments comprising a number of local spaces connected by media technologies. The most obvious example of networked environments is the internet; however, networking can also occur by analogue means, like e.g., phone lines. In analysing these works I focus on connectivity afforded by the networked environments and how it can be used to overcome certain barriers (spatial, institutional) for participation. The material for the last section includes works that can be broadly described as augmented, as they overlay a virtual sonic plane over physical, often public, space. My analysis of these works is concerned primarily with how participatory processes are affected by the dual, physical-virtual character of the environment and the meaning-making structures that stem from it.

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Local environments Of the three environment types delineated in the introduction, local is the hardest to define, but I also have to start with it, as it is the “default” type against which other, more specific kinds of environments (networked, augmented) take shape. I am using the term “local” to describe these environments to stress that they are not technologically extended in any way. In other words, local environments refer to definite continuous spaces that do not have other, physical or virtual, spaces connected to them through telematics communication channels – or if they do, such connections are not presented as part of the artwork and the aesthetic experience. The space in question can be of any scale – a gallery room or a whole city – however, the participants must have the ability to traverse the whole of it physically. Sound artworks that do not have any sort of digital components and rely only on mechanical means of interactivity are the most obvious case of a local environment. However, such environments are not exclusive of digital elements altogether. Various sensors, sound-generating and controlling technologies can be part of local environments as well. For example, Peter Vogel’s Sound Walls are a series of wall-mounted sculptures that play electronic sounds in response to the visitors’ movements. However, despite their digital character, these works contain the sound control, sound generation and playback in the same physical space and thus should be classified as a local environment. Therefore, the important conditions for defining local sound art environments is that listening and soundmaking should be conducted in the same physical space, and listening should not require personalized mobile devices. Sound artworks in local environments can be situated between two “poles” exemplified by the practices of sound sculpture and soundwalk. Sound sculpture was originated by the French sculptors Bernard and François Baschet in mid-1950s, when they started exhibiting their experimental musical instruments in galleries and museums and allowing the audience to play them instead of professional musicians. This decision has in turn affected the design of sound sculptures and their soundmaking affordances, as the brothers moved away from the traditional Western musical scales and ways of playing to the more free-form and intuitive types of interactions (Baschet & Baschet 1987, pp. 111–112). Soundwalking is associated with the Canadian acoustic ecology movement and was particularly developed, both theoretically and in artistic practice, by Hildegard Westerkamp, who has been working with this format since late 1970s. Westerkamp (2007, pp. 49–50) defined soundwalk as “any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment”. It is worth noting that while they are traditionally conceptualized as silent performances of listening, in practice they include a great deal of both conscious and unconscious soundmaking, as the participants’ bodies interact with the environment.

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Sound sculptures and soundwalks delimit the range of sound art practices in the local environments, as they emphasize two principal components of such artworks. While sound sculptures focus on separate physical sound sources, which could be situated in any space, soundwalks instead explore specific acoustic spaces, whose sonic content at the moment of performance is largely uncontrolled by either the artist or the participants. However, most sound artworks in local environments take the form of sound installations, which can be regarded as a middle ground between the two practices, as they emphasize the interplay between the sound sources and their spatial distribution. Max Neuhaus, who originated the sound installation genre, wrote of his practice: Traditionally, composers have located the elements of a composition in time. One idea, which I am interested in, is locating them, instead, in space, and letting the listener place them in his own time. (Neuhaus & des Jardins 1994, p. 34) In such cases, listening itself becomes interactive, as the participant decides the order and compositions of sounds to listen to. Local environments possess two principal qualities that are reflected in the affordances of sound artworks situated therein, even when they are as diverse as sound sculptures and soundwalks: continuity and immediacy. Continuity means that the spaces where such works happen are not segmented into discrete sites (as happens with networked environments) or overlaying planes (augmented environments), which makes these spaces freely traversable for both sound and participants. As the example of the Baschets’ sculptures shows, the locality of the exhibition affords a musical dialog between the audience members. A sound produced by one participant fills the room and necessarily reaches the ears of another, prompting a response. At the other end of the spectrum, in practices that rely on creative listening rather than soundmaking, continuity allows the participants to traverse the space and reconfigure their spatial relations with the sound sources. In other words, simply walking through the space, the participants of soundwalks create personal compositions from sounds supplied by their surroundings. This affordance of continuity reflects Neuhaus’s intention behind the sound installation – to place the sounds in space instead of time for the listener to recompose them. For him, this was the difference between sound installation and music; however, the same operation can be applied to music as well. A classic example of this is Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet (2001). The sound material of the work is a composition by Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis. Cardiff dismantled the motet into separate parts, each assigned to a single loudspeaker, so that the listeners could move inside the piece, experiencing harmonic relations as structures of space. By spatially distributing a musical piece she imbued the

136 Vadim Keylin listeners with an agency to compose their personal reading of it, which they are normally denied in a musical context. While space can transform sound, sound, traversing and filling the continuous spaces of local environments can also transform them. For example, Traffic Mantra (1991) by the artist duo O+A (Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger) was a sound installation at the Trajan’s Forum in Rome. The artists used ancient Roman amphorae, found on site, to filter the extraordinarily noisy soundscape of the Forum and played the results back on the site. Their approach can be described as “sonic recycling”: the installation gathers the acoustic “trash” of accidental participants and turns it into harmonious tones, making the ambiance of the space more inviting (Belgiojoso 2014, pp. 64–65). The reinvention of public space, in turn, encourages social encounters between passers-by (Föllmer 1999). This transformative potential can be regarded as political. In her article “Sound art and street life”, Christabel Stirling (2016) recounts the situation around Catalina Pollack’s sound installation Phantom Railings (2013). Pollack installed movement sensors on the fence of a public park, which produced sounds of stick hitting metal railings whenever someone passed by. The work prompted noise complaints from employees of nearby Senate House and was vandalized one night by homeless people sleeping in the park. According to Stirling, this shows sound’s potential – or, in terms of this chapter, affordance – to articulate “the existence of resilient personal, social, and cultural differences” that shape the contemporary city. She cites the political theorist Chantal Mouffe’s belief that “the social world . . . consists of conflicts that cannot be suppressed, and for which no rational solution or consensus would ever exist”. Making these conflicts explicit, sound art in public spaces makes the inhabitants reassess their claims to the city (Stirling 2016). The second aspect, immediacy, refers to the fact that in local environments the participants, sound sources and sounds are all physically present in the same space. Consequently, the affordances of sound artworks in local environments have a stark corporeality to them – in other words, the interactions they afford are necessarily physical first and foremost, even when there is also a multimodal or interpersonal component to them. Such artworks do not have depersonalized interfaces but rather translate the physical gestures and movements into sonic experiences. This immediacy is most evident when the participants’ bodies are themselves sound sources, like in Vocal Migrations discussed in the previous section. Nevertheless, the corporeal connection holds even when the gesture in question is minimal, like in Harry Bertoia’s sound sculptures. These sculptures made of multiple colliding metallic rods require only that the listener sets them into motion initially. However, this initial gesture exerts a direct influence on the character of the rods’ movement, while the tactile experience of touching them makes evident the materiality of sound. Even in the sensor-based works, like Phantom Railings, the sound’s speed

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and direction correspond to the speed and direction of the listener. At the same time, the relationship between movement and sound is reciprocal: as the participants’ actions effect sonic result, the sounds produced also influence further movements. Peter Vogel’s Berlin Sound Wall played techno music for the listeners to dance to, in turn their dance moves, registered by light sensors, defined what music was played. The corporeal and immediate character of sound art in local environments helps dispel the aura of elitism associated with “high art”. Playing a sound sculpture or an interactive sound installation does not imply an expectation of virtuosity, while listening to environmental sounds finds aesthetic value in the mundane. On the other hand, the corporeal character of such works, their insistence on primarily physical interactions, may also become exclusory, for example, for participants with physical disabilities. With their emphasis on immediate accessibility and dialogical, horizontal interactions, sound artworks in local environments a potentially powerful tool of music therapy and special needs education, as has been shown by the Baschets’ practice of the 1970s and 80s. For example, from 1975 to 1978, they participated in the Guggenheim Museum programme “Learning to Read through Arts”, which at that time was aimed at ghetto children who did not have access to regular schooling, and they later organized similar programs in France and other countries. These approaches broadly fall under the category of community music therapy. This branch of music therapy “addresses mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion” as a socially engaged therapeutic practice (Trondalen & Bonde 2012, p. 51). As Tia DeNora (2013, pp. 83–96) points out, collective music- and soundmaking can help the participants develop a number of social skills in a safe and aesthetically pleasant setting, which can be later used in their day-to-day life. A special therapeutic setting, however, is essential to the practice; thus, I do not claim that all sound art in local environments has a therapeutic effect – but affords it under the right circumstances.

Networked environments Networked environments, which could be also called distributed or telematic, are characterized by the flow of information between several physical locations connected through technological channels. The most obvious example of those is the internet. The advancement of broadband internet services in the early 2000s led to the emergence of musical and sound art practices that built upon the network connectivity. Analysing such practices, Alvaro Barbosa (2003, pp. 53–54) claimed that the internet should be regarded as a new type of “acoustic community” (Barry Truax’s term – see Truax 1984) with its own collectively created soundscape. An example of an online acoustic community would be

138 Vadim Keylin Auracle – an online sound installation launched in 2004 by Max Neuhaus together with Fellows of Akademie Schloss Solitude Jason Freeman, C. Ramakrishnan and Kristjan Varnik. The authors described this project as “a voice-controlled, networked sound instrument” (Freeman et al. 2005, pp. 221–222). Auracle allows its users, wherever they are located, to play a software synthesizer together over the internet using their voices as a control mechanism. The application analyses the vocal input, translates it into control data and distributes this data to all the users connected to a current session. The received data in turn is used to define the parametres of sound synthesis. Neuhaus and his collaborators thus classified Auracle, after Alvaro Barbosa, as a “shared sonic environment” – “openly shared spaces [where] members of the on-line community can participate in a public event by manipulating or transforming sounds and musical structures” (Barbosa 2003, p. 57). Moreover, social interactions on the internet are not limited to sonic environments. The everyday usage of social networking sites generates massive amounts of data, which could be mined and sonified. One of the most prominent examples of this approach was the online installation #tweetscapes by Anselm Venezian Nehls and Tarik Barri. The project ran from 2012 to 2015, and it translated the activities of the German Twitter segment into an audiovisual stream. Each tweet posted by the users, as long as it could be identified as coming from Germany, caused a distinct sonic and visual event. The characteristics of sound and visual effects were determined by the content of the tweet, while its geotags determined the location of event in the stereo acoustic space and screen space – which represented the map of Germany – respectively. The artists categorized it as both a sonification project – “a representation of data through sound” – and “a never-ending interactive composition, performed 24/7 by Germany’s Twitter users” (Nehls & Barri 2012). These #tweetscapes emphasize the fluidity of boundaries between interactions happening within and outside of a sound artwork. Some – likely most – of the participants may not have intended for their posts to be fed into the sound installations, if they were even aware of its existence. Moreover, the participants’ sociocultural interactions – e.g., their reflection on the artwork posted on Twitter – may have been once again appropriated by #tweetscapes and pulled back into the participation circuit. The ethics of such appropriation of participation can be also put into question, as #tweetscapes collect and the data produced by Twitter users and present it to the artwork’s audience without the producers’ consent. Aside from the internet, the flow of sonic information can be organized through analogue means like radio or telephone as well. For example, Neuhaus described Auracle as the next step in his Broadcast Works project from the 1960s and 70s – a series of radio shows where he mixed and broadcasted in real time the calls listeners made to the studio. At the same time, new mobile technologies bring with them new networking

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protocols, like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Thus, the practices discussed in this section are better characterized by Franziska Schroeder and Pedro Rebelo’s notion of “distributed sounding art”. According to Schroeder and Rebelo (2017), three aspects form the core of distribution: assignment (“parts or fragments of an entity are allocated to groups or individuals according to a particular process or intention”), transport (“dislocation of an entity . . . across two or more locations”) and sharing (“a distribution of resources . . . while certainly implicating human agency and notions of reciprocity”). These three aspects form a framework that allows the researchers to analyse the whole continuum of distributed sound artworks irrespective of the technological means of distribution. Finally, the spaces that are connected into a networked environments can be of vastly different scales and types. Benoît Maubrey’s Speaker Sculptures are large-scale installations in public spaces build of loudspeakers and often modelled after existing buildings or building types. Most of the sculptures were connected to phone lines or other types of networks, allowing the participants to speak or play music through the sculptures. This shows how networked sound art environments can connect the public space, where the sculpture is installed, to a multitude of private spaces, where the participants are located. Analysing the examples above as a whole, a certain continuity of networked environments and their affordances emerges, as well as some functional differences between the digital and analogue ones. The similarities stem from the fundamental principle of connectivity, irrespective of the technological base. Network expands the space and time of sound artworks, allowing them to accommodate for larger amounts of participants than any given physical space would. Such works do not necessarily require the participants to be physically present, which potentially affords participation to people that would not be able to engage with the work otherwise. At the simplest level, the network allows to overcome distance. It can also afford access to performing in public space from the safety of the private one, like in Speaker Sculptures, or, like in Auracle, provide the opportunity for collective musicmaking to people too socially anxious to try this in a physical setting. However, the network may also create barriers, as its accessibility relies on technologies that may be themselves inaccessible to people who cannot afford them or lack technological literacy. While both digital and analogue networks connect spaces, the nature of information flows is vastly different between the two. Digital networks can transmit any type of information, which may then be transformed into sound, while analogue audio channels typically only transmit sound. Therefore, the participants’ voices constitute the majority of sonic material in analogue networked sound art, particularly when phone lines are used. The exceptions here are the works that transmit sounds from public spaces, like Maryanne Amacher’s City Links: Buffalo (1967). In this work,

140 Vadim Keylin the sounds from five microphones installed in the streets of Buffalo were broadcast in real time by the local radio station for 28 hours. While the majority of the sounds that composed the work were not vocal in nature, they were still produced by the unwitting participants in the context of their immediate surroundings, not with the means of the work. Digital networked environments, on the other hand, present the participants with some sort of graphical UI for their soundmaking. For example, in Chris Brown’s Eternal Network Music (2003) the characteristics of the synthesized voices were determined by the user moving their mouse. Auracle is a rather peculiar case in that regard as its input method relies on the user’s voice; however, it is not transmitted but rather analyssed and broken down into control information for sound synthesis. Other input options include sharing the user’s sound files, like in later Speaker Sculptures, or relying on the data provided by social media, like in #tweetscapes. Network mediation, whether it manifests as synthesis algorithms, sound filters or merely latency and mixing, means that the soundmaking process in networked sound art lacks the immediate corporeality of works in local environment. The connection between the participants’ actions and their sonic result is often unobvious or even obscured by mixing techniques (Broadcast works) or complex synthesis algorithms (Auracle). This connection is even more unobvious to other participants, who can only hear the sounds produced but cannot observe soundmaking actions. Moreover, while the network connects spaces, it also separates actors, as listening and soundmaking in such works often happen in different spaces. The spaces in question can be different physical sites, like the private and public spaces of Speaker Sculptures, or different websites, like in #tweetscapes, which uses Twitter for input and its own site for output. In turn, this separates participants and listeners into two functionally different, if potentially overlapping, groups. In Speaker Sculptures, for example, the off-site callers cannot hear the sonic output of the sculpture, while the on-site listeners may not have the phone number for it. Similarly, in #tweetscapes only German Twitter users provide data for sonification, which anyone could listen to, but these participants may not even be aware of the existence of the work and their role in it. At the same time, the dislocation of actors and processes across different spaces provides an affordance of its own – an affordance for asynchronicity. That is to say, participation in such environments does not have to happen at the same time and space as its sonic result. In its simplest form it can be realized as an asymmetric connection like that of Speaker Sculptures, where the sounds are transmitted from private spaces to the public but not the other way, providing a more controlled and comfortable environment for the callers who otherwise might become overwhelmed by the rich soundscape of the sculpture and its urban context. Other works implement temporal asynchronicity. For example, in Jason Freeman’s Piano Etudes (2005) the participants do not provide

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sounds but contribute to a modular score for live performance. Atau Tanaka’s Prométhée Numérique/Frankenstein Netz (2003) was an online installation presenting a “living data-organism” composed of text, sound and image files “fed” to it by the participants, to which it replied in SMS messages demanding more (Tanaka n.d.). The material collected this way was then used in a live electroacoustic performance. Such works allow the participants to choose not only the site of their participation but time as well.

Augmented environments The term “augmented reality” is generally defined as “a real-time direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment that has been enhanced/augmented by adding virtual computer-generated information to it” (Carmigniani & Furht 2011, p. 3). While the original idea of augmented reality referred specifically to the introduction of virtual images into one’s normal vision field (Caudell & Mizell 1992, p. 660), later literature expanded the concept, applying it to all human senses, including hearing. The “virtual” in augmented reality is also not necessarily equated with “computer-generated” but can generally refer to information not normally available to human senses without technological means (Carmigniani & Furht 2011, pp. 3–4). Finally, sensory information may be removed rather than added as well – a technique some researchers dubbed “diminished reality” (Azuma et al. 2001, p. 34). Therefore, in this chapter I am using the term “augmented (acoustic) environment” to refer to an environment that overlays a virtual acoustic space (accessed through some kind of technology) onto a physical one, either merging with or overwriting the original soundscape. As noted earlier, the virtual elements of the augmented acoustic environments do not have to be computer generated, and the technology used to access it does not have to be digital. In fact, Max Neuhaus’s original sound installation Drive-In Music (1968) can be considered an example of an augmented environment, as its sounds have to be accessed through the listener’s car radio. A more pronounced example is Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks – a series of soundwalks employing wireless headphones that implement the principle of electromagnetic induction to translate the electromagnetic disturbances in the environment into sound. The sources of such disturbances can be manifold: from ATMs and antitheft gates to power cables and cars. Designing an Electrical Walk in a given city, Kubisch first scouts the city herself, noting musically interesting spots. The audience members are then given a set of inductive headphones, a suggested route containing the previously discovered listening points and allowed to explore freely (Tittel 2009, p. 61). Though substituting the original soundscape with an electromagnetic one would technically classify the acoustic environment of Electrical Walks as “diminished”, the

142 Vadim Keylin experience of the artwork is not just a listening experience; it is necessarily multimodal. Thus, as a whole, the participants’ reality can still be thought of as augmented as their visual and haptic perception of space is extended through the virtual sonic plane. While not necessarily digital, the technologies used in augmented sound art environments do have to be mobile and personalized, as simply broadcasting the sounds into the environment would make them part of the soundscape and would not create a separate acoustic plane. That is not to say that such works necessarily have to be headphones based. Kaffe Matthes has, since 2012, produced “bicycle operas” – pieces that involved making music through cycling, using “streets as scores” (Matthews 2017). The principal instrument of these projects is the sonic bike – a bicycle outfitted with loudspeakers and a microcomputer that is programmed to play sounds from a bank of preloaded samples based on GPS data and cyclist’s speed. The sounds played by sonic bikes are broadcast into the environment, however I still classify Matthews’ works as belonging to augmented environments for two reasons. First, each sonic bike’s loudspeakers have limited sound volumes, thus creating a local acoustic space around them that exists on a much smaller scale than the space of the work as a whole. Second, the sounds played by an individual bike depend entirely on its position, direction and the cyclist’s speed and are not affected by the actions other participants. This makes the acoustic environment of an individual participant highly personalized despite the public character of the sonic playback. The affordances of augmented sound art can be situated along two primary axes. The first axis concerns where the sounds are coming from – whether they are placed in the environment by the artist, or they already exist there but are not accessible without the use of technology. In the latter case, the sounds may be real-time sonifications of other features of the environment, as in Electrical Walks, or come from a variety of special microphones used to access normally inaudible sounds. For example, in Iain Armstrong and Annie Mahtani’s soundwalk in Ponta Delgada in 2017, both hydrophones and contact microphones were used to augment the listening experience. Such practices afford the participants an extended perception of the environment, stirring curiosity and encouraging exploration. On the other hand, practices that place sounds into the environment extend the environment itself. While sonic bikes are a technology specific to Kaffe Matthews’ practice, many artists use smartphones’ GPS tracking capabilities to achieve similar effect. For example, Teri Rueb’s soundwalks take the form of smartphone apps that overlay the space with narrated stories, musical sounds and field recordings to achieve a condensed sense of place. Another interesting example is Mark Shepard’s Tactical Soundgarden Toolkit (2006), which turns this principle upside down, allowing the participants to introduce the sounds into the virtual environment. Shepard’s project invokes the practice of guerilla gardening,

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inviting the users to “plant” sounds in various locations, hear sounds planted by other users and, if they wish so, “prune” them, changing the sound’s parametres. Augmented reality artworks with artist-authored sound material afford the same kind of creative listening as sound installations and soundwalks. However, keeping the sounds hidden in the virtual plane, waiting to be activated by the participants, instead of openly broadcasting them emphasizes the listeners’ agency and makes the whole process of re-composing more tangible. At the same time, it also affords unpredictability and experimentation, as the character of the sounds cannot be discerned from their location beforehand. In a sense, such works can be compared to augmented reality games like Pokemon Go, where instead of catching rare monsters the participants uncover sounds that are hard to access. Several of Matthews’ sonic bike rides are titled “pedaling games”, emphasizing this playful approach to exploring the virtual acoustic space. The other axis is the way sounds are accessed: through headphones or loudspeakers. Headphones constrain the virtual components of the work to the listener’s private space, leading to a more personalized experience. Outside the realm of sound art, this is exemplified by the phenomenon of silent discos – dance parties that are largely silent to an outsider as the participants dance to the music played only through their headphones. The headphones also cut off the natural soundscape, substituting it fully with the virtual one, which affords greater immersion and stronger perspective change. On the other hand the advantage of loudspeakers is that broadcasting sounds into the environment encourages interpersonal interactions, both with other participants and passers-by. The experience of such works is therefore more social, even though such interactions are not always necessarily friendly as publicly broadcast sounds might provoke antagonistic reactions. Space plays a primary role in the affordance structure of mobile sound art. The sonic overlay over the existing urban space makes the participants’ interactions necessarily multimodal, as every action occurs at both the physical and the virtual planes. Kaffe Matthews (2017) uses the metaphor of “streets as scores” to describe the role of existing architecture and other actors in directing the listener’s experience. While such works allow the participants to create their own compositions out of spatially distributed sounds, this compositional process is heavily influenced by the spatial structures already in place, as well as the established rules of traversing it. This relationship between spaces and sound is subverted in Janet Cardiff’s soundwalks, for example The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (1999). In this work it is the sonic material that directs the participants engagement with and movement though space, creating a dissociation between the two perception channels (LaBelle 2015, pp. 223–224). Augmenting either the participants’ perception of space or the space itself, mobile sound art encourages reassessment of the role and character of the space (particularly urban and public space). Ksenia Fedorova

144 Vadim Keylin (2016, pp. 46–47) links locative media sound art to the discipline of critical cartography, which seeks to “engage political and social underpinnings” behind spatial structures. At the same time, this reliance on space carries an exclusory potential. To become a participant in mobile sound artworks one has to have access to the public space, which may be denied to them e.g., by disability. The opportunities for participation may be further limited by requiring a certain skill (e.g., biking), or certain income level (e.g., works for smartphones).

Conclusion The overview of sound art practices from the perspective of their participatory affordances reveals how different types of interactions necessarily arise in response to the medialities of the artworks. This perspective also underscores the continuity between individual and collective interactions, typically described in terms of interactivity-participation dichotomy in the participatory art discourse. A sound artwork may afford both oneon-one and interpersonal interactions, within or outside the immediate context of the work. Propagating the space, sound reaches out to others and calls for a response (LaBelle 2015, pp. xi–xiii), meaning that sound art experience is always both intimate and social. A sound sculpture player necessarily shares the sounds she invokes from a sculpture with other audience members, inviting them to a musical dialog, while a sonic bike rider does not just collect the sounds on her way, but broadcasts them onto the streets, prompting social encounters. The categorizzation of participatory sound art into three environment types that I performed in this chapter reflects the different qualities of sound propagation in these environments. This in turn stipulates the similarities in the kinds of interactions afforded to the participants. Sound art in local environments relies on the continuity of its spatial structure and immediacy and corporeality of its sound-producing and listening mechanisms to encourage the participants to interact with the works (physically) and each other (socially). Networked sound art, on the other hand, employs the network’s ability to connect spaces and actors over various barriers, both physical and institutional, to create participatory structures that would be impossible in local environments, for example, due to entry barriers. Augmented environments introduce a new sonic layer to the existing sites, enhancing the participants’ perception and making them engage deeper with the site and its natural, cultural and social aspects. In other words, the affordance perspective brings to the foreground the materiality of the sound artwork in relation to the participatory processes that it facilitates. Far from being merely a catalyst, as claimed by Bourriaud’s theory and the participatory art discourse after it, the artwork reveals itself as a prominent actor. Participation in sound art does not just happen

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by the virtue of the artist relinquishing control, nor is it fully directed by the artist as in antagonistic forms of participatory art heralded by Bishop. It is instead negotiated between the participants’ intentions and motivations and what the artwork – through its materiality – affords them.

References Azuma, RT, et al. 2001, ‘Recent advances in augmented reality’, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 34–47. Barbosa, Á 2003, ‘Displaced soundscapes: A survey of network systems for music and sonic art Creation’, Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 13, pp. 53–59. Baschet, F & Baschet, B 1987, ‘Sound sculpture: Sounds, shapes, public participation, Education’, Leonardo, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 107–114. Belgiojoso, R 2014, Constructing urban space with sounds and music, Ashgate, Farnham. Bishop, C 2006, ‘Introduction: Viewers as producers’, in C Bishop (ed.), Participation, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 10–17. Bishop, C 2012, Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, Verso Books, New York. Bourriaud, N 2002, Relational aesthetics, Les Presses du reel, Dijon. Carmigniani, J & Furht, B 2011, ‘Augmented reality: An overview’, in B Furht (ed.), Handbook of augmented reality, Springer, New York, pp. 3–46. Caudell, TP & Mizell, DW 1992, ‘Augmented reality: An application of headsup display technology to manual manufacturing processes’, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, IEEE, Kauai, HI, pp. 659–669. Collins, K 2013, Playing with sound: A theory of interacting with sound and music in video games, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. DeNora, T 2013, Music asylums: Wellbeing through music in everyday life, Ashgate, Farnham. Engström, A & Stjerna, Å 2009, ‘Sound art or klangkunst? A reading of the German and English literature on sound art’, Organised Sound, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 11–18. Fedorova, K 2016, ‘Sound cartographies and navigation art: In search of the sublime’, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 44–59. Föllmer, G 1999, ‘Klangorganisation im öffentlichen Raum’, in H de la MotteHaber (ed.), Klangkunst. Tönende Objekte und klingende Räume, Laaber-Verlag, Laaber, pp. 191–227. Freeman, J, Varnik, K, Ramakrishnan, C, Neuhaus, M, Burk, P & Birchfield, D 2005, ‘Auracle: A voice-controlled, networked sound instrument’, Organised Sound, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 221–231. Gaver, WW 1991, ‘Technology affordances’, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press, New York, pp. 79–84. Gibson, JJ 1979, The ecological approach to visual perception, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA. Hutchby, I 2001, ‘Technologies, texts and affordances’, Sociology, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 441–456. Jäger, L, Linz, E & Schneider, I 2010, ‘Preface’, in L Jäger, E Linz & I Schneider (eds.), Media, culture, and mediality, Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, pp. 9–16.

146 Vadim Keylin Kahn, D 2014, ‘Sound art, art, music’, Tacet, vol. 3, pp. 329–347. Kester, GH 2011, The one and the many: Contemporary collaborative art in a global context, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Kim-Cohen, S 2009, In the blink of an ear: Toward a non-cochlear sonic art, Continuum, London. LaBelle, B 2015, Background noise: Perspectives on sound art, 2nd edn, Bloomsbury, New York. Maes, L & Leman, M 2017, ‘Defining sound art’, in M Cobussen, V Meelberg & B Truax (eds.), Routledge companion to sounding art, Routledge, London. Matthews, K 2017, The multiple lives of bicycles, viewed 13 September 2018, www.kaffematthews.net/project/the-multiple-lives-of-bicycles-2017. Nehls, AV & Barri, T 2012, #tweetscapes, viewed 28 October 2018, http:// heavylistening.com/tweetscapes/. Neuhaus, M & des Jardins, G (eds.) 1994, Max Neuhaus: Sound works. Vol. 1: Inscription, Cantz, Ostfildern. Norman, DA 1988, The design of everyday things, Doubleday, New York. Norman, DA 2013, The design of everyday things: Revised and expanded edition, Hachette, London, UK. Schroeder, F & Rebelo, P 2017, ‘Distributed sounding art: Practices in distributing sound’, in M Cobussen, V Meelberg & B Truax (eds.), Routledge companion to sounding art, Routledge, London. Stirling, C 2016, ‘Sound art/street life: Tracing the social and political effects of sound installations in London’, Journal of Sonic Studies, vol. 11, viewed 23 May 2018, www.researchcatalogue.net/view/234018/234019. Tanaka, A n.d., Prométhée Numérique/Frankensteins Netz, viewed 20 June 2018, http://ataut.net/projects/promethee_numerique/PrometheeNumeriqueFrank ensteinsNetz.pdf. Tittel, C 2009, ‘Sound art as sonification, and the artistic treatment of features in our surroundings’, Organised Sound, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 57–64. Trondalen, G & Bonde, LO 2012, ‘Music therapy: Models and interventions’, in R MacDonald, G Kreutz & L Mitchell (eds.), Music, health, and wellbeing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 41–62. Truax, B 1984, Acoustic communication, Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood, NJ. Westerkamp, H 2007, ‘Soundwalking’, in A Carlyle (ed.), Autumn leaves, sound and the environment in artistic practice, Double Entendre, Paris, pp. 49–54.

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The participatory patient Exploring the platformed multivalence and public value of cancer storytelling on social media Carsten Stage

Being patient The word “patient” originates from “patience” and pacient (Old French) and pati and patientem (Latin), which mean “submission/submissiveness”, “endurance”, “suffering”, “passivity” and “a willingness to wait”. Being a patient thus suggests sitting in waiting rooms in order to be treated, resting in the confines of the home or being more or less temporarily contained within institutions of endurance (e.g., hospitals) separated from the routines of social life and labour. The sociologist Talcott Parsons has argued that, in modernity, severe illness activates a set of behavioral norms, or even a “sick role”, that imply the diagnosed person should withdraw into the private sphere while he/she finds and respects medical authority and endures treatment before returning to public life once cured (Parsons 1951). Patienthood is thereby linked to the private sphere and being an object of medical scrutiny (Foucault 1963), but it is also linked to care (Mol 2008), social invisibility, a temporality of slowness and non-agency. Or at least this is what being a patient has meant in the past. I would like to argue that expectations and practices are currently changing as the patient role is reconfigured in accordance with larger cultural, institutional and technological transformations. Now patients increasingly demand to be seen and understood as individuals – and engage in various forms of activism and mediated storytelling to express their personal understanding of what their illnesses mean to them (Frank 1995; Rose 2006) – but they are also increasingly expected to feel individually responsible for becoming (or even better: staying) healthy (Mol 2008; Rose 2006). The current interest in “patient participation” across a range of disciplines is embedded in this ambivalent cultural transformation, where patients simultaneously confront and are expected to confront the passivity linked to a traditional understanding of the sick role. This shows that the reconfiguration of the patient as “participatory” does not only express a desire to democratically empower patients but also resonates with larger neoliberal processes of effectivization and individualization.

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In this chapter I will focus on and discuss cancer patients’ social media practices as a particular type of patient participation. The concept of “the participatory patient” was coined and defined by Jackie Stacey in her influential book Teratologies – A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997), in which she suggests that a new generation of cancer patients is under development: The desire for information, and the confidence to access it, is often the privilege of those with certain educational histories, and race and class backgrounds, but also belongs to a new generation of what I call “participatory patients”. On the whole, my parent’s generation, for example, have far less inclination to be put in the picture. They are happier to leave it to the medical experts and to avoid the burdens and responsibilities such knowledge might demand. But those of us who have been influenced by the information cultures of the last twenty years are more susceptible to the desire to know and to the fantasies of knowledge as power. (Stacey 1997, pp. 3–4) Following this line of thinking, the participatory patient is a certain type of patient characterised by an increased desire for visibility, by a noncompliant attitude towards being treated purely as a medical object and by having a fantasy of “knowledge as power” – the idea that knowing and continuously researching your body will also guarantee subjective agency and your ability to act on illness in constructive ways. New information technologies are crucial for understanding both the rise and practices of these participatory patients. To “act on” your own health requires information and knowledge of the body and illness that can be accessed and shared outside the medical system. The participatory patient of today is thus also often a patient able and willing to engage with his or her own biology through mediated health resources on the internet and social media; e.g., patient forums, homepages of medical organizations, medical apps, patient blogs and profiles and citizen-led crowdfunding for treatment or research (e.g., on platforms like Youcaring or Justgiving) (Orgad 2005; Høybye et al. 2010; Lupton 2016; Stage 2017). The empirical material for this article will comprise a case study of the cancer storytelling project of the Swedish-Brazilian patient Fabian Bolin (born 1987), who is now in remission from cancer. I will focus on the different storytelling platforms used and created by Bolin and on an online interview with him from May 2018. I selected Bolin’s case in order to exemplify the changing cultural and technological dynamics related to serious illness in an age in which digital media are becoming increasingly integrated in all dimensions of life. Examining this case also makes it possible to discuss the larger cultural implications and dilemmas related to evolving participatory illness and media practices, which are likely to

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become more salient as the number of digital natives increases in the future. Before using this case, I obtained Bolin’s informed consent. By taking the field of media and cultural studies as my point of departure, this chapter seeks to move beyond the relatively instrumental approach that “health communication” research often adopts to social media. This approach has, to a large extent, stayed within a discourse of therapy and patient empowerment and thus been interested in social media as a channel for exchanging knowledge about illness or as an environment for establishing interpersonal support. Its implicit goal has often been to “introduce, adopt, or sustain a health and social behaviour, practice, or policy that will ultimately improve individual, community, and public health outcomes” (Schiavo 2014, p. 9). Despite the obvious importance of understanding the potential health benefits of social media communication, the one-dimensionality of this approach tends to neglect the manifold and ambivalent cultural roles of social media: e.g., how social media works according to logics that can marginalize certain patient groups (e.g., older patients), how social media can contribute to making media literate patients hyper-visible, how social media can quantify cancer experiences due to the constant measuring and “scoring” of processes or how social media can motivate the formation of cancer micro-celebrities within the digital attention economy. Such an instrumental approach thus often overlooks how the particular affordances of social media “mould” (Hepp 2012) patient practices and their production of platform values (Gerlitz 2016). It also neglects to consider how these practices resonate with larger cultural health discourses of “biomedicalization” that stress the importance of individual health responsibility and self-monitoring (Clarke et al. 2003; Lupton 2016). In order to further acknowledge and discuss health communication contributions I will begin this chapter by presenting this strand of digital research, which primarily approaches a cancer patient’s social media participation as a process of potential empowerment. I will then present alternative theoretical approaches to cancer patients’ use of social media from media and cultural studies, focussing on the concepts of “in/visibility” and “multivalence”. Having discussed these approaches, I will present my analysis of the Bolin case study, which focusses on the multiple forms of value produced by Bolin’s project, where marketplaces and safe spaces for peer support seem to merge, and also on potential clashes between the multiple values produced by storytelling platforms and “public value” (Dijck, Poell & Waal 2018).

Digitized patient participation Quantitative and qualitative research in health communication has shown that the internet is becoming an important part of living with cancer. Cancer is among the most “commonly searched health topics on the Internet”

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(Nguyen & Ingledew 2013, p. 662), and it is established knowledge that cancer patients in a Western context increasingly use the internet to find information about diagnosis, prognosis and treatment related to specific types of cancer and side-effects (Aadland & Lykke 2015; Castleton et al. 2011; Maloney et al. 2015). As mentioned earlier, an extensive amount of this research has also focussed on the potential health benefits of the internet and social media for cancer patients and has thus approached digital media with the question: How do cancer patients use digital media, and how can digital media use empower patients? This type of research primarily understands digital media as potential resources for accessing personal or medical knowledge, for individual creativity and for interpersonal interaction, and it resonates with a techno-optimist line of participation research in media studies that also stresses how digital technologies enable forms of user-driven citizenship not gated by institutions or authorities (Benkler 2006; Bruns 2008; Jenkins 2006). A vast amount of health communication knowledge concerning cancer patients’ engagement with different (closed) support groups and (public) social media has been generated over the last 20 years. Trends in research interests seem to have followed the historical introduction and cultural salience of particular platforms. Research from the late 1990s to around 2005 focussed on support peer groups, email lists, websites and message boards (Hardey 2002; Høybye, Johansen & Tjørnhøj-Thomsen 2005; Sharf 1997). Then research on cancer blogging increased (Heilferty 2009; Keim-Malpass, Baernholdt, et al. 2013; Ressler et al. 2012), followed by a still flourishing interest in the strategic health potentials of social networking sites (SNSs) like Facebook (Bender, Jimenez-Marroquin & Jadad 2011; Erfani, Abedin & Daneshgar 2012) and Twitter (Sugawara et al. 2012; Tsuya et al. 2014), and content communities like YouTube (Foley et al. 2015). The research mentioned earlier often focusses on specific groups of cancer patients, but across the material there is also an interest in measuring the percentage of platform users within the group, the various types of content searched for or shared on social media, user motivations for engaging with media and the potentially therapeutic, peer-supporting and de-isolating potentials of social media. For example, the content on cancer blogs has been shown to be predominantly experiential and opinionbased rather than being focussed on medical knowledge (Chiu & Hsieh 2012; Kim & Gillham 2015), which allows for new peer relations and experiences of regaining a sense of control (Keim-Malpass, Albrecht, et al. 2013; Ressler et al. 2012). A study of patients who read and write illness cancer blogs more actively (Chiu & Hsieh 2012) identified that such active participation is based on multiple and converging reasons: to create a sense of biographical continuity and emotional relief, to cope with the anxiety of dying, to diminish social isolation and to find “lived knowledge” instead of abstract medical knowledge. The studies of cancer

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communication on SNSs referenced earlier support these findings and emphasize that emotional and peer support are also salient features of this type of cancer communication. Social media as cultural machines of in/visibility Following these results, the participatory patient, actively deploying digital technologies during illness, seems to be configured as an empowered patient who uses the internet and social media as resources to cope with an existential crisis. While these findings are clearly important and valid, a problem with simply equating digital media with patient empowerment in this techno-optimist approach is that it often fails to sufficiently acknowledge the wider cultural context, power differences and the experiences of different patient groups. Quantitative health communication research has actually validated this objection by identifying an important digital divide (gender, age, education, ethnic and income based) in the use of internet resources during cancer (Høybye et al. 2010; Littlechild & Barr 2013; Ziebland et al. 2004). This finding underlines the ambivalence of social media platforms as arenas for patient participation and, I would argue, calls for further research on how social media should also be understood as ecologies of “in/visibilization”. “Visibility” can be understood a metaphor for knowledge, public awareness and affective political presence (Brighenti 2007; Ranciére 2000; Thompson 1995). Platformed storytelling on social media paradoxically both produces and suppresses public knowledge about life with illness. This is because those bodies and experiences that resonate well with the affordances of the platform are allowed to rise to the surface of public attention (and perhaps even go viral), while other bodies and experiences (e.g., those of elderly patients with rare diseases) are allowed to remain unnoticed. In this way, platforms, users and stories constantly produce “in/visibility” due to the uneven circulation of types of patient bodies and groups (e.g., the heroic cancer survivor versus the invisible minority patient) and the intense social visibility of cancer compared with other illnesses. With this in mind, we should not only understand the participatory patient’s social media practices as processes of coping with illness and making illness socially visible but also as involved in more complex cultural processes of distributing attention and non-attention. To acknowledge this, my approach to patient participation on social media is not based on theories from health disciplines or health communication but is instead primarily informed by the vast amount of research on participation in media studies and cultural studies/theory. In this field, the participatory potentials of the internet and social media have been highly contested – and increasingly problematized – over the last decade (Jenkins 2006; Carpentier 2011b; Dijck 2013). If we take a media and

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cultural studies approach, “patient participation” on social media could thus refer to processes as different as: (1) patients interacting with or producing media content (e.g., telling illness narratives) (Bruns 2008; Jenkins 2006); (2) patients engaging in forms of mobilization, connective action and soft structures of political engagement (e.g., health hashtags [#fuckcancer]) (Bennett & Segerberg 2012; Papacharissi 2015); (3) patients participating in mediated processes of decision-making about issues that they are not normally able to affect (e.g., regarding treatment, medicine or research projects) (Carpentier 2011b); (4) patients using social media to adapt to biopolitical expectations of being a vital, happy and responsible citizen engaged in health issues (Mol 2008; Stacey 1997); and (5) patients contributing free and affective labour on platforms that promote their own ability to foster democracy and participation (Fuchs 2014; McCosker 2013; Terranova 2000). What is implicitly at stake in these different definitions and discussions are often various understandings of whether “participation” can occur through mere communication or whether it needs some element of substantial user creativity, whether participation can be used to describe social processes of collaboration or whether it should be reserved for activities with a political purpose or even reallocations of power and whether participation should be understood as positive or as a problem in itself. Multivalent and performative platforms All the five definitions of patient participation above can be used to analyse the Bolin case – and his different participatory patient practices – but I also wish to introduce a sixth and less-used approach to media participation, which has been developed in digital media and platform studies (Gerlitz 2016; Gerlitz & Helmond 2013; Gerlitz & Lury 2014), studies of material participation (Marres 2012) and the growing field of valuation studies (Adkins & Lury 2012; Heuts & Mol 2013). This approach understands social media platforms as performative technologies that “materialize” certain forms of user behavior as forms of participation that contribute to multiple and sometimes contradictory forms of “valuation”. The core idea is that social media transform “media usage” into “valuable participation” by offering a complex technological infrastructure that is itself participative (Gerlitz & Lury 2014) by enacting affective relations and extracting sellable knowledge through particular, and often hazy, procedures. This approach thus focusses on the performative relationship between value, participation, and social media and begins with the premise that “values” should not be understood as static qualities of phenomena in the world but rather as produced through performative processes of social and political negotiation, particular measurement strategies and forms of mediation. For example, a social media cancer story does not have inherent value but gets its value – is valuated – though

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its circulation on social media platforms. And the concept of “multivalence” is used in this research tradition to highlight the multiple values created simultaneously because “social media platform data is created to be multivalent (Marres 2009; Gerlitz 2012), that is to speak to more than one value register at the same time” (Gerlitz 2016, p. 21). When a patient for instance shares a cancer story on Facebook – and it is liked by his or her followers – multiple forms of value are potentially enacted: affective psychological values linked to the act of narration, social values linked to collective support and empathy, attention value linked to, e.g., pushing the like button, which registers the like but also distributes the content further in the network (Gerlitz & Helmond 2013), and economic value linked to various forms of datafication. By focussing on “multivalence” when investigating media participation, it is possible to stress (1) how media use on social media platforms are engaged in multiple forms of (more or less contradictory) value production and (2) that these platforms in themselves are participatory agents that turn various forms of media practices into value on different registers (Marres 2011). On this line of thinking, participation can thus refer to both the user’s media practice/communication and the platforms’ active modeling of social processes – a definitional ambivalence that highlights how such a research approach is interested in precisely this issue of how media use is turned into participation in multiple forms of value production through the participatory intervention of platform logics and procedures.

Fabian Bolin’s WarOnCancer.com The Swedish-Brazilian cancer patient Fabian Bolin (born 1987) received a degree in business studies from Stockholm School of Economics in 2011 and then worked as a venture banker in London for a brief period. In 2013, he decided to change profession and become an actor. In 2015, at the age of 28, Bolin’s new life course was disrupted as he was diagnosed with leukemia. He made his first blog post and public Facebook status about his illness on 5 July 2015 – two days after he received the diagnosis and on the day of his first chemotherapy treatment. The blog post and status received an immense response and was the beginning of what Bolin refers to as a “social movement” of patients fighting cancer. As a follower of multiple cancer profiles and organizations on social media this was also the moment I discovered Bolin as a potential research case and began following his illness process, which created a range of interesting organizational inventions and transformations over the following years. Bolin soon after his first post realized a potential to create a patient community around cancer storytelling with himself as a leading figure: about a month or two after my diagnosis my blog had more than 200,000 monthly readers along with thousands of messages from

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This revelation stimulated Bolin (and his friend Sebastian Hermelin) to establish an online blogging environment, so, in 2016, he launched WarOnCancer.com, where other patients could also share their stories in individual blogs interlinked within a public of storytellers (making it possible, for example, to search for bloggers with a particular form of cancer). The platform also sold various forms of jewelry to raise money for cancer organizations. It grew rapidly and, according to Bolin, 150 bloggers began sharing stories about 40 types of cancer within a few weeks. Like other cancer bloggers – e.g., Stephen Sutton (UK), Jessica Joy Rees (US) and Rosie Kilburn (UK) – Bolin exemplifies an illness and social media practice that turns the previously privatized patient into a highly visible social mobilizer who attracts public attention and affective responses and converts affect and attention into economic transactions (e.g., by collecting money for charity). Bolin is thus an example of what I have elsewhere called a “biological entrepreneur” (Stage 2017) – a type of cancer narrator on social media characterized by (1) being an entrepreneurial spirit of project making and value creation, (2) creating collective affect among followers, (3) communicating illness experiences in (or across) social media and (4) stimulating large-scale public engagement in the illness narratives. Furthermore, Bolin is a young and white cancer patient with a strong network of entrepreneurial partners and an established status as a media celebrity, which conditions him socially as a more likely trigger of social attention and mobilization. Bolin is thus clearly a participatory patient in the sense described by Jackie Stacey. He expresses a desire for visibility during illness, he denies medical de-subjectivation by engaging in processes of public selfnarration, and he understands (narrative) knowledge of his illness and treatment as a road to mastering his existential crisis. He also uses social media in a participatory way according to many of the already mentioned media theories by producing and circulating media content and by mobilizing other patients through their personal stories and use of hashtags (e.g., #waroncancer). He furthermore incarnates the desired subject position within a discourse of patient involvement by fighting intensely to restore vitality on both personal and collective levels (Mol 2008; Rose 2006; Stage 2017). In 2017, WarOnCancer.com was re-launched, but this time as a hybrid between (1) a social network site with personal profiles, the opportunity to follow other profiles and a news feed with the most recent updates (boyd & Ellison 2007) and (2) a blogging platform based on sharing longer individual stories in reverse chronological order (Rettberg 2008).

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It could also be argued that WarOnCancer.com resembles Tumblr and that the platform incorporates elements from Instagram stories and crowdfunding sites like Youcaring.com by making it possible for users to donate money to patients and thus help them through the financial problems often related to becoming severally ill. Last but not least, the platform is designed to collect and sell data about the users to improve health services. On the platform, it explains: WarOnCancer is a digital health company on a mission to solve the mental health problem for everyone affected by cancer. By uniting across borders, we are working towards building an infrastructure where our members can contribute their data to the larger cancer ecosystem, and hence play an essential part in accelerating healthcare and improving research. (www.waroncancer.com/about) The exact transactional model for collecting and selling data is not fully explicated on the platform. Bolin, however, explains the concept further in our interview: We’re currently working in a co-creation partnership with six pharmaceutical companies and one hospital in order to build the patient data infrastructure on top of the WarOnCancer platform. Pharmaceutical companies are primarily interested in two things: finding patients to enroll on their clinical trials and subsequently having the patients report outcomes whilst participating in a clinical trial. The healthcare is interested in both PROM (patient reported outcome measures) and PREM (patient reported experience measures) in order to deliver better and more patient-centered care. (interview, May 2018) When asked more precisely how the platform would extract knowledge from the users’ practices, Bolin replies: We won’t gather data from the stories themselves but rather have patients participate in surveys. Hence they will be fully aware of that the data will be used by our partners in healthcare and pharma. All transactions will be fully transparent and made visible to the patient so that he or she can track the impact. Research shows that patients are very willing to share their data, as long as they understand why. We are giving them the why . . . but the key is transparency and to always prioritize the thing that matters most to us: empowering people affected by cancer. We’ll only sell data if we think it will empower the patient/member, for instance by recruiting a patient into a clinical

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Bolin is invited to give motivational speeches in a range of contexts – e.g., in companies and at health conferences – and, in 2018, he was appointed the top medical technology influencer by the Swedish Medtech Magazine. According to the platform’s homepage, ten people are currently employed in the company, but – at the time of writing – the service allowing users to share stories is temporarily blocked due to the launch and test of a mobile app. Despite this delay, since 2015, Bolin’s storytelling project has undergone a swift process of “corporatization” (Dijck 2013) and “platformization” (Plantin et al. 2018). The project moved from a phase of individual storytelling in 2015 to a phase of community storytelling in 2016 and to a third phase of corporatized storytelling in 2017 – and, as such, it offers a condensed image of the wider historical movement of social media, which initially focussed on enacting interpersonal communication and relations but then began to turn user behavior into forms of multivalent participation. The most recent WarOnCancer platform will not only produce therapeutic or relational value but will also generate data to stimulate health innovation/progress and economic value to fund the company. WarOnCancer has thereby transformed from a personal story and affective community into a multivalent platform that “materializes” cancer storytelling as a potential form of participation in health innovation. This also implies that narratives of lived patient experience – which have often been understood as attempts to oppose purely medical approaches to patienthood (Frank 1995) – are now also shared on the platform with the goal of producing medical data and thus to support the further medicalization of the patient body. Another criticism of Bolin’s project could be that Bolin simply harbors and harvests (Bruns 2008) the affective labour of users by creating a large community of patients who are also interesting for medical partners, thus encouraging medical partners to pay for access to the platform. While this criticism is relevant it is also somewhat simplistic, as Bolin seems to focus on establishing a relatively transparent relationship between patients and partners and denies using the platform for built-in advertising. If this is – and remains – the case, the platform offers patients a space to interact and invites them to contribute to health innovation, which they can always refuse (Carpentier 2011a). In this way, the platform on the one hand epitomizes the problematic tendency of turning evermore infrastructures of communication into machines of data collection (Dijck 2013; Plantin et al. 2018) but on the other hand does so in a more transparent and invitational way, where users only contribute if they opt in.

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By analyzing Bolin’s platform in terms of multivalence, it is clear to see how Bolin’s platformed storytelling does not only produce economic value but enacts different forms of valuation: the psychological affective value of narrating and sharing illness, the social value of building a community, the political value of hearing subjective and noninstitutionalized approaches to illness, the economic value of aggregating and selling data, and the innovation value linked to analyzing this data. The WarOnCancer.com platform is actually founded on the coarticulation of these different forms of value production as being noncontradictory. For example, an article written by Microsoft about Bolin and his co-founder states: The founders soon noticed that their platform had a value beyond being simply a community. They saw the value of the data that started to accumulate on the platform. Their hope for the future is that their data can help health care institutions to understand their patients better, and give value to the pharmaceutical industry. (https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2018/02/05/ one-mans-waroncancer-inspired-millions/) Here we can see a rhetoric of non-contradictory or “smooth” multivalence at play – it is seemingly possible to help patients, healthcare institutions and the industry on the platform simultaneously. Moreover, if the ideals of transparency and invitational participation in health innovation are maintained as core meta-values on the platform, it is arguably possible to combine these registers in an ethically viable way. However, one problem is that these orders of worth do not always converge smoothly from the perspective of the user. After the platform was launched, and before it was closed down to await the app release, the level of user activity was relatively low. This is perhaps due to the platform offering a – potentially confusing – combination of a safe space to share existential crises and a marketplace for providing valuable data to medical partners. For many years online platforms have succeeded in disguising possible contradictions or antagonisms between concurrent value registers. However, recent data scandals, such as the Cambridge Analytica case, have led to an increased awareness of potential antagonisms between orders of worth – or between the multiple values created through platform mechanisms and the inherent values of democratic societies. This increased cultural awareness of conflicting value registers might be one of the reasons why the more recent platform of WarOnCancer.com was relatively inactive compared with its earlier status as a pure blogging community. However, in our interview, Bolin offers another explanation. He claims that the platform is only a test version and therefore has not been promoted sufficiently to attract a larger audience than the current

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2000 members: “Once the app is launched, the real work begins”, Bolin remarks (interview, 2018). Bolin nevertheless also acknowledges that this new logic of multivalent datafication, which connects storytelling to health innovation, can be experienced as more complex than simply creating or reading a blog post and that it therefore represents a potential obstacle to the success of the platform: The pitfalls is the increased level of complexity. A blog portal is simple and basic. You go in, you write and you leave. The same for readers. You receive a link to the blog post, you read and that’s it. We’re creating a whole new behavior with WarOnCancer. In essence a platform for you to build your network, get in touch with the industry, follow people and their journeys or share your own. (interview, May 2018) The co-articulation of personal, social and industrial value production thus risks motivating a range of confusions, anxieties, and questions that disturb the intended seamless co-existence of different orders of worth. For instance: Who exactly gets what out of turning social relations and “connectedness” into economically valuable data or “connectivity” and whose interests are supported through this transformation (Dijck 2013)? This question reveals an analytical weakness of the concept of multivalence: it is well-suited to understand how different forms of value co-exist on social media and thus to acknowledge their valuation complexity and to identify potential tensions. But multivalence, as a concept allowing us first and foremost to outline “layers” of value production, is less strong when it comes to discussing the overall, political or cultural effects of particular multivalent platforms and how these platforms affect societies in general. Following Dijck, Poell and Waal we must thus complement the focus on multivalence with an interest in “public value” in order to be able to ask more fundamental questions like: To what extent do the multiple values created by social media platforms support or disturb “the common good”? Or in relation to WarOnCancer.com: To what extent is the privatization and corporatization of health data on the platform at odds with “public values” linked to, e.g., independent health research and innovation, equal right and access to treatment independent of your disease, health data privacy or patients’ right to avoid corporate medicalization when sharing personal stories of suffering among peers? In The Platform Society (2018), the three authors define an online platform as “a programmable digital architecture designed to organize interactions between users – not just end users but also corporate entities and public bodies. It is geared towards the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, circulation, and monetization of user data” (Dijck, Poell &

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Waal 2018, p. 4). The “platform society” as a concept furthermore underlines how online platforms – particularly those controlled by the “Big Five” (cf. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft) – are becoming intimately intertwined with social structures in the sense that key institutions and cultural practices are increasingly relying on and moulded by corporate platforms and their three basic mechanisms: datafication of user behavior, commodification of data and selection or curation of the information presented to users (Dijck, Poell & Waal 2018, p. 32). This implementation of platforms as core social infrastructures is, however, not unproblematic since the “connective qualities of online platforms . . . do not automatically translate into public values” (Dijck, Poell & Waal 2018, p. 3). Important examples of public values that are often challenged due to the corporate platformization of society are: privacy, accuracy, safety, consumer protection, fairness, equality, solidarity, accountability, transparency and democratic control. The key argument of Dijck, Poell and Waal is that the multiple values produced by corporate platforms (which is the inherent focus of the multivalence framework) are often not aligned with these public values of Western and European democracies and that large corporate platforms have not been scrutinized and regulated sufficiently in terms of their (lacking) contribution to the common good of the societies they shape. This point also implies that a critical platform analysis must necessarily avoid simply listing the multiple values produced by platforms and instead ask if and how platforms contribute to public values: “The questions whose interests a platform’s activity serves, which values are at stake, and who benefits are central in disputes concerning the creation of public value in the platform society” (Dijck, Poell & Waal 2018, p. 25). As exemplified by WarOnCancer.com the healthcare sector is also facing a range of platformization processes and dilemmas. Key app genres of the health platform ecosystem can be divided into “fitness apps” like Endomondo (aimed at tracking performances) and “medical apps” like WarOnCancer.com (aimed at offering services related to the diagnosis and treatment of diseases) (Dijck, Poell & Waal 2018, p 99). Health platforms/apps can furthermore work according to three different business models: (1) a “for profit” model where data philanthropy or data gifts from users are commodified as sellable knowledge, (2) a “not-justfor-profit” model where economic and public goals co-exist, but often in unclear ways, and (3) a “nonprofit” model where the main aim is to produce knowledge and research valuable to users and society at large (Dijck, Poell & Waal 2018, p. 101). WarOnCancer.com can be described as a not-just-for-profit company that corporatizes health data while also offering a platform where patients have to opt in in order to take part in this commodification process. As it is often the case in relation to health platforms, WarOnCancer.com thus articulates its benefit as double-edged by on the one hand offering personalized solutions to users (e.g., peer

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support) and on the other hand contributing to the common good by supporting research. But when this “logic of personal gain serving the public good” (Dijck, Poell & Waal 2018, p. 98) is articulated “it often remains unclear who is the real beneficiary: is it individual patients, tech companies and their shareholders, ‘big pharma,’ researchers, or society as such?” (Dijck, Poell & Waal 2018, p. 100). And the question of how new health platforms relate to key public values of transparency, accountability and independent research is often difficult to answer due to this confusing co-existence of (1) rhetorical appraisals of public values (e.g., solidarity or patient empowerment) in the platforms’ marketing material and (2) opaque business models making it difficult for end users and the public to understand the underpinning transactions and interests governing the platforms. This confusion also haunts WarOnCancer.com – despite its dedication to empowerment, transparency and health innovation through “opting in”. Considering platformed multivalence together with public value, however, not only helps us to raise awareness of datafication and corporatization; it also helps us to acknowledge that, despite data scandals and processes of corporatization, patients and other users still use social media platforms for activities that hold affective, existential and social value for them (Lagerkvist 2017). It is the multivalence of platforms that makes it difficult to leave them behind while it is their ambiguous relationship to core public values that can make it tempting to abandon them.

Conclusion Patient practices and expectations are currently transforming in ways that challenge established notions of illness as private and the patient as an object of institutional sequestration who is passive, enduring and ready to wait. Patients today are expected to both respect medical authority and to actively engage in ensuring as much personal vitality and healthiness as possible by obtaining knowledge about illness and treatment. Social media has become a crucial arena for the formation of this knowledgeable and active patient. In this chapter, I have been interested in stressing and understanding the multiple converging cultural and economic processes involved in participatory patient practices on social media. Primarily, I have argued that the Bolin case stresses how cancer storytelling is increasingly shared in multivalent media environments and that the exploration of patient participation on social media must also focus on how social media platforms themselves participate in shaping and valuating certain forms of patient activity as valuable participation. The WarOnCancer platform is an attempt to create a transparent model for the interaction between patient and health industries that allows people to be empowered by sharing their crises through storytelling while voluntarily supporting

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research with data. Yet it remains to be seen whether the platform’s overlapping of orders of worth will prove too unclear for users, or too much at odds with public values, for the platform to attract enough patients willing to combine illness storytelling with health innovation. Thinking about patient participation on social media as “multivalent” implies that we depart from the idea that social media platforms should primarily be approached as spaces for empathy, peer relations and patient empowerment that in themselves foster participation by turning passive patients into public participants or storytellers with agency. Instead it invites us to focus on how social media platforms are also “participatory agents” in themselves, since they, for example, blur the boundaries between the patient’s private sphere, the public sphere, and the market (Marres 2017). The platformization of the health sector and cancer storytelling also stimulates a range of more general questions and discussions: After centuries of excluding the patient from the public sphere, should the participatory patient now be primarily approached as a figure reclaiming public agency or rather as the latest incarnation of the ideal citizen who both respects medical authority and scrutinizes him/herself in order to improve his/her own vitality? Do social media technologies make visible the invisible life of patients or do they systematically make certain patients visible (e.g., younger media savvy cancer patients) and others invisible (e.g., older patients, patients belonging to minority groups or patients with rarer diseases)? And how do these dilemmas relate to public values of equal and democratic health treatment for all citizens? Questions like these, I would argue, lie at the very heart of the formation of current forms of patient participation on social media through storytelling. The co-existence of empowerment, patient in/visibility and more or less conflicting forms of platformed and public value have become fundamental dimensions of the social media technologies that patients use for various illness-related purposes. In the social media era, being a patient no longer means being patient but rather being materialized as a participant in multiple and often ambivalent forms of valuation.

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Part III

Cultural policy and institutions

10 The “problem” of participation in cultural policy Leila Jancovich and David Stevenson

Introduction The need to increase recorded rates of cultural participation has become a recurring trope within cultural policy discourse. Internationally governments have commissioned research to measure who takes part in different cultural activities and developed policy initiatives to address perceived failings (see UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2012 on international approaches). Commonly this assumes that the cultural offer is beyond reproach, but it is the participant who must change in order to be able to take up the opportunities that are on offer. In other words certain patterns of cultural participation are represented as a problem caused by a deficit amongst individuals and state intervention is needed to build the capacity of individuals to take part in what is represented as mainstream culture (Miles & Gibson 2017). In Denmark for instance, despite government surveys demonstrating high and stable rates of participation in civic activities, declining rates in specific artforms such as theatre and classical music are still seen as a problem for cultural policy to solve (Jancovich & Hansen 2018). However, the aspirations that cultural policy has set out in this regard have broadly failed. In the UK for example, which is the focus of this chapter, despite almost two decades of sustained policy interventions and associated measurement, the headline rates of cultural engagement (in those practices which cultural policy measures) appear to have changed very little (Neelands et al. n.d.). Yet recent research analysing the breadth of people’s everyday participation has shown the value that people place in their own active participation across a range of other cultural and creative practices (Crossick & Kaszynska 2016; Miles & Gibson 2017). This academic activity is mirrored by the growing number of organizations (for example: Voluntary Arts, 64 Million Artists, Fun Palaces) campaigning for cultural policy to better recognize and support amateur creative expression. They argue that this would better meet the needs of a diverse culture, than the current narrow focus on the professional arts. Such work challenges the very the notion of “non-participation” as a “problem” and instead questions the legitimacy of taste hierarchies on

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which established cultural policy is founded (Stevenson, Balling & KannRasmussen 2015; Jancovich 2017). But despite this sustained critique and the failure to deliver noteworthy changes in patterns of cultural participation, there is limited evidence of significant changes in how cultural policy is executed in the UK or in the distribution of funding to cultural organizations. For all the rhetoric, what little has been done has arguably remained on the periphery, involving relatively small levels of investment in short term projects. This chapter examines why policies to support cultural participation appear to be so hard to change. It will do so by taking a historical approach, for as Foucault notes, for a problematization to have formed something prior “must have happened to make it uncertain, to make it lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties about it” ([1984] 2003, p. 24). As such, this chapter aims to identify when practice around cultural participation became problematic and the conditions under which this occurred. Specifically, it will consider whether, rather than being a problem to be solved, the continuing existence of so-called cultural non-participation is in fact central to maintaining the status quo and affirming taken for granted power relationships within cultural policy.

Understanding the arts as an institution It is important to remember that although this chapter is analysing the construction of a problem within what is commonly called cultural policy, this is a fairly recent description for what would have been understood in many countries, throughout the 20th century as arts policy (Craik 2007). While there is much debate about participation that focusses on what should be funded, this makes the arts reducible to a fixed list of activities that the label is or is not applied to rather than considering the label as an object in its own right. As such, debate tends to focus on asking what are the arts rather than what is the arts? However, an Arts Council England study found that some people perceived an ontological difference between “art” and “the arts” (Arts Council England 2008) with many appearing to see the arts as something “institutional”. Broadly speaking, institutions can be understood as “conventions that are self-policing” (Phillips, Lawrence & Hardy 2004, p. 638) and which produce “stable, valued and recurring patterns of behaviour” (Huntington 1965, p. 394). Within this understanding individual organizations can be understood as the materialized expression of an institution, but no organization by itself is complete or complex enough to be an institution in its own right (Kangas & Vestheim 2010). As such, the cultural policy bodies such as Arts Council England, local authorities, and delivery organizations such as museums, galleries and theatres may all be considered as component parts of a single institution – the arts – that in turn is a

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significant constituent part of the manner in which power is exercised, values are distributed and asymmetric power relationships are maintained in society. Fairclough presents institutions as a fully conceived order of discourse that is “simultaneously facilitating and constraining the social action of its members: it provides them with a frame for action, without which they could not act, but it thereby constrains them to act within that frame” (1995, p. 38). Specifically in relation to the arts George Dickie argues there are not a narrow group of people intentionally executing explicit institutionalizing power, but rather there is a network of people employing the same body of knowledge and system of meaning to imbue certain objects and actions with value (Jelinek 2013). As such, the constituent organizations within the arts are simultaneously given their self-justification and constrained by the institution of the arts. However, institutions are not eternal and transcendent, they are the product of a particular time (Phillips, Lawrence & Hardy 2004). It is necessary therefore to consider the historical emergence of the institutional discourses of the arts, to reflect on how they came into being and to examine the central role that the “problem” of cultural participation has had throughout.

The constitution of the arts as an institution Literature on the establishment of arts policy in the UK commonly focusses on the setting up of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946 and the creation of regulations to allow local authorities to subsidize “entertainment” for their constituents in 1948 (Hewison 1997). However, these policy interventions and the core assumptions upon which they were based should be understood as having a far older discursive pedigree, one that was created in the late 18th century and which was refined and entrenched as part of the civilizing fervour of 19th-century Victorians. As such, the issue of participation has been fundamental to these discourses from the outset. But as Shiner (2001) argues, for the largest part of human history there was no notion of the arts as an independent concept as is now understood. He further argues that the category of the arts as it is used today is a modern European invention established in the 18th century when the “cult of art” and the “inflated, quasi-religious rhetoric that goes with it” came into existence. The arts was discursively constructed as “something that exists beyond particular societies and belongs to the subject of, what might be called for want of a better phrase, ‘humanity in general’” (Mirza 2012, pp. 28–29). Yet despite this, the ability to interact with the arts is not something that humanity in general was assumed to naturally possess. Rather, an appreciation of the arts was understood as a learnt sensibility that must be both cultivated and mediated. Furthermore, in the 19th-century artistic skills were not seen as something that

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everyone should develop and the arts were accepted as something created by “a leisured class with plenty of time and nothing required of them but to create and define art for the rest” (Upchurch 2004, p. 206). This approach was challenged at the time by the likes of William Morris (1882) who espoused universal creative expression, or art in the everyday, where the professional artist (or artisan in his terminology) was not someone from a privileged elite, but a worker. This thinking is also present in the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who describe an ideal society as one “in which there are no painters but . . . people who engage in painting [or art]” (Marx and Engels quoted in Bourdieu 1984, p. 397). Such thinking influenced a long tradition of grassroots participatory practices and workers’ education classes that grew up within the Labour movement and gave rise to high levels of and investment in cultural activity in Britain throughout the 20th century (Keaney 2006a) until the decline of both the nationalized industries and trade unions. But it was the notion of the aesthetic as a specific type of experience (Shiner 2001) that became integral to the modern conception of the arts. Associated to this was the conception of the individual who was not having these experiences, and whose life was all the worse for it. This discursive identity has developed over time into that of today’s cultural non-participant. Yet if the discursive logic of the arts requires the existence of the cultural non-participant then their non-participation should not be seen as a “problem” for the arts. Indeed it is something that is to be expected. It would not be until the arts entered into a policy relationship with the state that the non-participation of so-called non-participants would become a “problem”. For as the arts became an institution of the state, the non-participant would act as the primary boundary object (Star & Griesemer 1989) around which different discourses could coalesce and legitimate the presence of the state in the management and regulation of the cultural choices of its citizens.

The arts and the state It would be more than a century after the establishment of the institution of the arts, as defined previously, before a formal relationship with the state would finally be established. Until late in the 19th century, the dominant feeling remained that “as long as the market was seen to be meeting the needs of the public [then there was no real need for the state] to become involved with an activity that was perceived to depend upon individual taste and fashion” (Gray 2000, p. 38). Yet over time, and through the lobbying of influential figures from within the professional arts, there was a significant ideological shift that situated the private lives of the populace within the purview of the state more so than had ever been the case previously (Toleda Silva 2015). One of the inspirations for

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this were the public museums built in the 19th century and intended to provide access for the public to collections that had hitherto been the preserve of the ruling classes. At a time of mass industrialization, urbanization and social division these museums and galleries would play a vital role in attempts by the state to define a shared culture (Appleton 2001). This aim also contributed to the increasing professionalization of cultural practice in which an elite of “academy-trained gentleman artist[s] of the middle or upper classes” (Upchurch 2005, p. 510), would paternalistically grant access to the arts for wider society, in the hope it would have a civilizing effect on all mankind. By the end of the Second World War the British Government would shift from a strategy of casual patronage to direct intervention, what Minihan (1977) describes as the nationalization of culture, and which significantly happened alongside the setting up of the welfare state, and its principle of universality (Coates & Lawler 2000). Operationally, this took the form of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB), formed in 1946 as a successor to two wartime organizations, the Entertainment National Services Association (ENSA) and the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) (Hewison 1997). Both had operated independently during the Second World War, but their focuses had been different. ENSA’s main activities in wartime had been the entertainment of troops, touring to improve public morale and setting up local arts clubs and associations where people could participate in artistic practice. CEMA, in contrast, had focussed on protecting cultural heritage through storing and preserving national treasures and providing work for actors and artists during troubled times. When the Arts Council was formed at the end of the war it absorbed the duties of both organizations, but its direction was shaped by the personal and political influence of John Maynard Keynes, the previous Chair of CEMA, who now chaired the Arts Council. As such its interests were most clearly aligned to the aims of this body and as a result one of their first acts was to stop ENSA’s support for touring and amateur arts clubs. As a liberal politically, Keynes was distrustful of an overarching state, so he separated the decision making process from government, arguing instead for an approach, known as the arm’s length principle which has been widely exported internationally (Upchurch 2011). The arm’s length principle has been defined as a “system of separation of powers and of ‘checks and balances’ fundamental to a pluralistic democracy, [where] money voted by parliament is granted to .  .  . quasi independent bodies [to] determine their own policies and spending choices” (Landry & Matarasso 1999, p. 23). But far from providing checks and balances to ensure the accountability of decision making, this chapter argues that this has resulted in cultural policy being riddled with vested interests and conflicts of interest from within the artistic community. The result is an arts policy that is inherently concerned with supporting artistic independence

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for a professional class of artists rather than the universal creativity or participation of society in general. However, as Gray (2000) notes, in a laissez-faire free market economy, when the state intervenes in society it must be seen to be for a purpose and the outcomes must also be seen to be legitimate themselves. As such, justification for public subsidy and the legitimacy of a professional cultural elite making decisions about how that money was spent had to be integrated into the institutional discourses of the arts. Adhering to a strict division between the aesthetic and the corporeal was problematic to sustain if the arts was to be granted public support on the basis of providing a unique and societally useful transformative experience. Therefore, the introduction of explicit state funding for the arts necessitated the adaptation of its founding institutional discourses.

Discursive legitimation Legitimacy is a social, cultural and performative process and legitimation, it is argued is a necessary part of the work undertaken by publicly funded organizations (Larsson 2016). This work is shaped by the institutional environment in which the organization exists (Meyer & Rowan 1977) and according to Taylor and Van Every (1993) the legitimate status of institutions depends on the maintenance and adaptation of the discourses upon which the institution relies for meaning, status, and power. Institutional agents manage this process through the on-going production of symbolic communication that leaves traces (Taylor & Van Every 1993). These traces act as a signal to others that the actions of the institution are legitimate and through their pervasiveness they act as a barrier to the unmanaged entry into the field of new discourses that present alternative realities or legitimate alternate institutions. However, as McGuigan notes: “no discourse is ever closed off entirely from other discourses or without internally disruptive elements” (2004, p. 35). This means that structural and cultural changes in society can pose a threat to institutions as they can cause shifting relationships between discourses that may challenge their taken for granted status. In particular, institutions face difficulties where there is a need to secure transference of existing constructions of reality to new communities or generations that have their own system of meanings upon which they could establish new, and ultimately competing, institutions (Phillips, Lawrence & Hardy 2004). Institutional agents can chose to adapt the behaviour of the institution to such societal pressure for change, and/or execute strategies that defend the established beliefs and patterns of behaviour on which they depend for their existence (Kangas & Vestheim 2010). This chapter argues that in regard the institution of the arts it is the second option that has most commonly been adopted by its agents. This is particularly evident in relation to the “problem” of participation within cultural policy,

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where institutional agents have adapted existing discourses or co-opted new ones in order to construct refreshed “explanations and justifications for the fundamental elements of their collective, institutionalised existence” (Boyce 1996, p. 5). As stated, from the outset, in order to be seen as a legitimate site for state intervention, the arts were recognized for “their contribution to national prestige, and their role in civilising the population” (Gray 2000). As such, and up until the 1970s, state subsidy for the arts was discursively justified in two primary ways. One strand focussed on representing access to the arts and the unique experience that this afforded as an inalienable right. State subsidies for the arts were therefore represented as part of an egalitarian process of democratizing mainstream culture (Mulcahy 2006; Landry & Matarasso 1999; Evrard 1997). This approach to the concept of participation shifted the emphasis from that within political science, which defines participation as being about power and decision making to a more neutered version within the cultural sector that is about taking part in cultural activities. But this strand gained legitimacy from the wider postwar European discourses of the redistributive welfare state (McGuigan 2004) where the core assumption is that the wealth (both tangible and intangible) of a society should be evenly distributed amongst its population, rather than the means of production. Those activities, objects and organizations that had already been discursively written upon by the arts as being of unique aesthetic value were now represented as being part of the intangible wealth of the nation and should not therefore be the preserve of any one group. State intervention could therefore be justified in order to facilitate the equal dispersal of the means of consumption and the cultural nonparticipant functions as the necessary subject to which such redistribution can occur. However, the egalitarian sentiment of the democratization discourse was also bound to a more pragmatic second strand of discursive justification. This strand sought to make clear how the provision of the unique aesthetic experience that the arts claimed to be able to provide would have a useful impact on society. Like the institution of the arts itself, the logics of this discourse can be traced to the nineteenth when Utilitarians such as Francis Hutchison and Jeremy Bentham were asserting that the role of the state was to seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number. However, Bentham’s anointed prodigy, John Stuart Mill, proposed that there existed two tiers of pleasure. The pleasure of intellectual and moral actions was of greater value than the supposedly simple pleasures gained through acts that required less cognitive engagement – therefore participation in entertainment is most certainly not equal to participation in the arts. Rather than happiness, the result of simple pleasure was better understood as contentment and thus ultimately of lesser value (Mill [1863] 2001). Mill believed the pursuit of the higher pleasures was not

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only of greater intrinsic value to the individual but that those who pursued such pleasure would be of greater value to society. Of course, the converse of this logic is that those who do not pursue these higher pleasures, those who might now be labelled as cultural non-participants, are likely to be of less value to society. These claims had discursive strength because of the extent to which they made explicit use of the existing dividing practices (Danaher, Schirato & Webb 2000) that were already used to delineate society. Two existing discursive identities became mutually self-affirming because those most deprived socially were identified as not having been exposed to the arts, their lack of exposure to the arts in turn seen as a contributing factor to their social deprivation. By association, the supposed cultural non-participation of these individuals becomes part of the wider problematization of their societal disengagement and in so doing gains legitimacy as a site for state intervention. Subsidizing the arts can therefore be justified on the basis of providing access to opportunities for these necessary interactions to occur, both in order to help more people “transform” into effective and productive citizens and to maintain the contributions of those, who by virtue of their existing participation, who have already been “transformed”.

Challenging the dominant discourses However, by the 1970s the pre-eminence of these discourses was being contested. The growth in the number of universities providing higher education in the 1960s, and the development of cultural studies within universities began to challenge the cultural hegemony created by a predefined great tradition in the context of a society that was itself becoming increasingly heterogeneous (Williams 1983; Willis 1990). Academic debate was re-oriented from a focus on appreciation of the artist’s intention towards an examination of the way that the public respond to and interpret the work. This shift coincided with broader social and cultural changes taking place at the time. Not least, in the 1970s Britain becoming an increasingly multicultural society meaning that there were many new voices wanting to be heard. Increasingly, therefore, there was talk not of one culture but many cultures. This more relativist definition challenges the institution of the arts by invoking a broader notion of culture than had previously been the case. As such, the notion of a single artistic canon came under sustained critique for the extent to which it, and the institution of the arts, ignore or devalue alternative cultural traditions and those who create them (Khan 1978). Alongside this, a new generation of young artists, experimenting with new artforms, and a politically active and articulate community arts movement grew up. This was partly in response to the decline of workplace-based creative activity, which resulted from the privatization

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or closure of many traditional industries, such as the coal industry, which, through the National Coal Board, had been significant funders of creative activity among the working classes (Ashworth 1986). Practitioners working within this context adopted an approach to participation that more closely reflected a need for people’s participation in decision making. They called for arts policy to change its support for the selfinterest of the arts and to respond in a similar vein (Braden 1978). Likewise, in response to criticism of the London bias of the national Arts Council, Regional Arts Associations started to flex their power. By dint of their accountability to an electorate through their associations with local authority members, many were much more open to a dialogue with local artists and community groups. This created a two-tier approach to cultural policy (Hutchison 1982) that often challenged the national arts policy prioritization of classical artforms by supporting greater cultural pluralism and increased grassroots activity locally. But despite this, little fundamentally altered in regard to the dominant logics of what national cultural policy should be or how it should be executed. For example, in 2004, Arts Council England reviewed their funding, claiming a priority was to address participation. However, after the review there is evidence that 85% of the financial support that they provided continued to be given to the same organizations as before. Likewise, in 2010 when policy discourse further emphasized the need to increase participation there is evidence that participatory arts organizations were worst hit in austerity cuts (Jancovich 2017). This is not to say that attempts to change have not been made. The New Labour government who were in power 1997–2010 attempted to find a compromise between different approaches in order to “fix” the “problem”. They looked beyond the traditional arts agencies, such as the Arts Council, to broader public policy agents, such as its social inclusion unit, for guidance on the development of cultural policy. Local authorities also continued their interest in this arena and by the end of this period were investing at least as much if not more than the Arts Council themselves. However, the status quo has continued to be exceptionally resilient to such interventions. Not least because the Third Way (Giddens 2000) principles of New Labour meant that rather than challenging a policy model based on hierarchy and expertise, new policies sought an accommodation between the differing factions. This accommodation was to be achieved through partnership working. Inherent in the notion of partnership is an attempt to govern by consensus between different interest groups. This requires consultation with a wider range of voices than may be defined by top-down government, or indeed than could make up the cultural elite who had been so influential in arts policy since the Second World War. Yet while the government might suggest the need for a wider range of voices to be involved in decision making in the arts, the arm’s length principle limits government’s

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capacity to determine in what way this should be implemented. Instead, the way policy would be implemented and spoken about continues to be left to agencies such as the Arts Councils themselves to determine. In turn, this leads to tokenistic consultation masquerading as participation in policy making. For example, although Arts Council England has conducted research around their decision-making processes, including undertaking deliberative consultation, the purpose of this process was to measure the value stakeholders currently have of the arts (Keaney et al. 2007; ICM Unlimited 2015). This misses the point that in order to challenge institutionalization such participatory methods must be allowed to produce learning that may change both the values and indeed the practices of the arts themselves. Instead, the tokenistic approaches employed fail to “explain what [the arts] does to create value or whether [it] might create more or different value if it did things differently” (Keaney 2006b, p. 40). In this case, there is little evidence that Arts Council England used it to explore how it might change itself. Rather, the primary outcome was that it changed how they communicated both internally and externally about their activity and devolved the problem of institutional change further down the chain, by asking the organizations it funds to address the problem of its “crisis of legitimacy” (Holden 2006). This is indicative of the discursive adaptation by which the institution of the arts is able to neutralize criticism while remaining relevant to the dominant discourses of the state at any given time. The on-going process of discursive legitimation produces new discourses but the creation and adoption of one does not result in the abandonment of another. As Talja (1999) notes, there are always several more-orless conflicting discourses existing in a particular field of knowledge or institution and “that is why discourses are internally relatively coherent, but mutually contradictory and alternative” (Talja 1999, p. 468). Indeed, as stated previously, an institution can be strengthened by the presence of multiple discourses upon which its agents can draw, in particular if these discourses share commonalities to which each can refer. As such, the discursive strand of the unique transformative experience of the arts and the association of the cultural non-participant with those identities that the state represents as problematic are both still part of the discursive legitimation work being done by the arts today. This has allowed the arts to intertwine its own logics with the dominant discourses of the state very effectively in a process that Gray has described as policy attachment (2004) and Belfiore as defensive instrumentalism (2012). So, while the state may no longer be faced with the threat of anarchy from the uneducated masses of the industrial revolution (Arnold 2009) in a neoliberal meritocracy the responsibility for personal and social happiness has shifted from the state to the individual. Personal growth, self-improvement and wellbeing are all key elements of the dominant

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discourses of social mobility and individual aspiration. Every citizen is expected to increase their social capital through taking part in civic or cultural activities (Putnam 2000). Failure to do so implies a deficit, not in the service provided but in the individual participant. This dovetails perfectly with the discursive identity of the cultural non-participant and so the arts has positioned itself as being well placed to help those with a cultural “deficit” (Gilmore 2013) to overcome the “barriers” (Stevenson 2013) they face to “taking-part” (Jancovich 2017). In turn, government performance targets were created to assess how well the publicly funded arts organizations were achieving this goal. Yet it has been shown that the extent to which such interventions have any meaningful long-term effect on social inequity is questionable (Belfiore 2009). Bourdieu (1984) argues that all forms of capital are in fact by definition finite and kept in short supply under capitalism. He contends that differences in levels of capital are how social divisions are sustained, and the dominant class will continually find ways to maintain distinctions between those who have and those who have not. Increasing participation in the arts, rather than participation in decision-making does not reduce these social divisions, but simply reduces the value placed on the artistic practice that has become more “inclusive” while those with the greatest privilege adopt a different practice to maintain their distinction. If this is true then it may be argued that the arts as an institution exists to perpetuate inequality. Therefore, cultural policy, when allied to the arts, can never deliver increased participation, let alone the universality implied by the social contract originally conceived in its association with the welfare state.

A discursive knot threatening discursive coherence In attempting to convince of the naturalness of the institution of the arts continuing position of privilege with the state, cultural participation has increasingly had competing and contradictory meanings. Likewise, the arts has become more vaguely defined as “a mélange of cultural forms . . . while still being touted as powerful medicine for whatever ails society” (Jensen 2002, p. 148). Both Jensen (2002) and Shiner (2001) see such discursive work as a highly successful act of self-preservation by those who can exert the most power in the field. However, over time this adoption and interweaving of discourses can result in a discursive knot (Wodak 2007) that becomes increasingly complex and ostensibly contradictory. A complexity that itself starts to risk the discursive coherence of the institution they were employed to defend. Binding the 18th-century discourses of the arts to modern discourses of social democratic redistribution, neoliberal service provision, the free market of the creative industries and the need to provide people and communities more agency in decisions that affect their lives, has left the arts somewhat Janus faced. The arts must

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be seen as unique but ubiquitous, exclusive but inclusive, not for everyone but for anyone, in need of state aid but a driver of the economy. It must be seen to respect diverse cultural values while simultaneously finding something wrong with the cultural values of certain problematic individuals that needs rectifying, which only the arts can do. The discourse of democratizing culture had been based on the logics of a knowing elite bringing the best to the most. However, diffusing the understanding of what the best is in order to say that the most are being reached means that the “cultural democracy movement led unwittingly to the erosion of the social-democratic project from the inside” (McGuigan 2004, p. 41). Likewise, if the activities that are legitimate within the discourses of the creative industries and abundant everyday participation are adopted as legitimate modes of cultural participation then they must be accepted as offering the same unique type of experience as that which one could previously only gain through an encounter with the arts. Given the abundance of such activities the subject identity of a cultural nonparticipant and the need for state sponsored cultural intermediaries to encourage their participation would be increasingly difficult to sustain (Stevenson 2013). Instead, a new justification for why the state continues to be involved in cultural policy at all would need to be formulated, one which would need to focus on what the state is investing in rather than who is participating. Yet the idea of the arts as a separate field of human activity, on which only members from within the arts can speak, continues to persist in cultural policy. It has not been assimilated into an anthropological discourse as just another form of social activity and thus simply one manifestation of the multiplicity of cultures that exist within society. Discursive boundaries may change but that does not mean that boundaries no longer exist. Although the range of objects and activities that can be understood as the arts has significantly expanded, it remains the case that they are judged according to the rules and logics of the arts, from which they become considered as an example of just how diverse, and thus inclusive, the arts can be. Maintaining the existence of the cultural non-participant negates the need to ever definitively explain what these people are doing with their time and what the alternative activities are that they are inevitably already participating in. Instead, discursively affirming the existence of the cultural non-participant in text, speech and practice implicitly defines cultural participation as a distinct social activity that it is possible not to do. Just as Danto (1964) reached the conclusion that while anything could be art, not everything was, so too it may be argued that while anything can be cultural participation, not everything is. It is this logic that is vital in protecting the institution of the arts from the oblivion of meaninglessness that the ongoing discursive legitimation work of its agents has risked invoking.

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For no matter which claims about the impact of state subsidies for the arts are made, they almost all rely on participation. “Art which noone wants to use is not an addition to the nation’s wealth” (Pinnock 2006, p. 175, emphasis in original). While there are arguments about the value of public subsidy for the arts that on face value do not depend on use – legacy and bequest, prestige, option value (Holden 2004, 2006) – in actuality they remain dependent upon a presumption of use by somebody at some point. Something that provides benefits for some rather than all would struggle to legitimately lay claim to public subsidy in a liberal democracy. At a minimum it should be clear that while all might not be making use of it now, they value the option to be able to make use of it later and cannot gain the same benefits elsewhere. The existence of the discursive identity of the cultural non-participant ensures that while some may not participate with any of the physical manifestations of the arts, they have no choice but to participate in the institutional discourses of the arts and the logics that they reproduce. For such individuals are unknowingly taken into the dispositive and are written upon by its discourses. Having become objects in the discourse they legitimate the continued financial support of the state for the institution that has co-opted culture for itself, and they affirm the privileged position of the cultural professionals whose social status this institution supports.

Conclusions: The right to speak within the field of cultural policy If cultural participation is less about the specifics of what cultural activity is considered valuable to participate in and more about where the activity is discursively located by those that are legitimated to speak within the field of cultural policy, then it follows that cultural policy needs to refocus its interest in participation from participation in culture, to participation in decision-making processes. The principles of participatory decision making have their roots in the work on deliberative democracy which John Parkinson defines as “public reasoning between citizens” (Parkinson 2006, p. 1). Mark Bevir and R.A.W Rhodes (2010) argue that such approaches can challenge institutional logics, where the actors involved in decision making are changed and are involved in setting the agenda. In many senses the arm’s length principle common to arts and cultural policy in the UK appears to fit this principle of deliberative decision making working outside state control. However, just like the governments that fund them, arm’s length bodies have tended to adopt the principles of Third Way politics in which finding technical solutions through supposed consensus is accepted as the best way to remove politics and allow for rational, evidence based decision to be made (Fairclough 2000). However, as has been argued throughout this chapter, by its nature the requirements of consensus politics ignore the influence of the specific

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agents actually involved in interpreting and implementing policy, such as the Arts Council or the cultural leaders of key organizations. When the plurality of interests and power relationships within decision making groups are ignored, it leads to a built-in bias towards maintaining the status quo. But where the approach not only allows, but actively seeks out dissent, rather than consensus, through the inclusion of other forms of discourse such as argument, rhetoric, humour, emotion, testimony or storytelling and gossip (Markovits 2006), it may provide a mechanism for hearing less powerful voices and bringing about institutional change. Rather than trying to find consensus across an imagined cultural sector, an alternative would therefore be to actively seek out and understand key conceptual and ideological differences within the range of cultural practices that exist. Such an approach may be central to avoid ignoring the “insidious and often hidden connections between culture and power” (McGuigan 2004, p. 141). However, to truly achieve such an objective would require organizations to “enable the anti-institutional diversification of value” (Connor 1992, p. 4) that would undermine their own elevated status and privilege. For all that the majority of those working within the arts may claim progressive intentions, as Gartman notes, in practice they “have no interest in eliminating cultural authority per se, but merely in securing a greater share of it for themselves” (Gartman nd, p. 439). As such, they opt to continue to conserve and reproduce the values on which their existence relies through their management of the discourses that give their practice meaning. As Connor notes, once established “only an institution can dissolve itself” (Connor 1992), and this is the paradox at the heart of supposedly liberal arts institutions orientated towards equality. However, the capacity to engender the change that is required in order to advance a more culturally equitable society is significantly limited because of the difficulties of thinking outside the institutional discourses of the arts and the discursive logics upon which its relationship with the state is based. One cannot truly question the arts from within its discursive logic. It is perhaps therefore time to develop new logics that start with equity, rather than the arts and which offer support for people to participate in decisions that affect their lives, ensuring resourcing for what they already choose to participate in. The first step would be to abandon the discursive identity of the nonparticipant, which is an act of micro power that suppresses the capacity of many to speak within the field of cultural policy. Until this happens cultural policy will continue to favour how cultural professionals define what cultural participation should be. This matters because as Jensen reminds us, “if we live by stories, and seek the best stories by which to live, then we must first figure out what stories we are already telling ourselves, so that we can decide if we like where they are taking us” (2002, p. 117). The persistence of a story about cultural

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non-participants means that as Garnham pointed out in 1983, “one cannot understand the culture of our time or the challenges and opportunities which that dominant culture offers to public policy-makers” (cited in McGuigan, 2004, chap.42). The asymmetric power relationship upon which the arts was established as an institution means for all that the rhetoric of cultural policy is saturated with liberal, egalitarian and even revolutionary ideas, these ideas will all inevitably flounder in “the gap between the juridical people and the empirical people . . . the ideal and the real, the utopian and the present” (Miller & Yudice 2002, p. 25). Cultural policy will remain permanently orientated towards the operation of sedimented values while failing to adequately acknowledge the imperative to value that is a fundamental aspect of life (Connor 1992) and integral to an individual’s freedom.

Acknowledgements The authors gratefully acknowledge funding towards this research from the Arts and Humanities Research Council

References Appleton, J 2001, Museums for “the people”?, Academy of Ideas Ltd., https:// capitadiscovery.co.uk/chi-ac/items/358179. Arnold, M 2009, Culture and Anarchy (Reissue), Oxford University Press, Oxford. Arts Council England 2008, The arts debate: What people want from the arts, Arts Council Publications, London. Ashworth, W 1986, The history of the British coal industry, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Belfiore, E 2009, ‘On bullshit in cultural policy practice and research: Notes from the British case’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 343–359. Belfiore, E 2012, ‘“Defensive instrumentalism” and the legacy of New Labour’s cultural policies’, Cultural Trends, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 103–111. Bevir, M & Rhodes, R.A.W, 2010, The State as Cultural Practice, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bourdieu, P 1984, Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste, Routledge, London. Boyce, ME 1996, ‘Organizational story and storytelling’, Journal of Organizational Change Management, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 5–26. Braden, S 1978, Artists and people, Routledge, London. Coates, D & Lawler, PA 2000, New labour in power, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Connor, S 1992, Theory and cultural value, Blackwell, Oxford. Craik, J 2007, Re-visioning arts and cultural policy: Current impasses and future directions, ANUE Press, Canberra.

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Crossick, G & Kaszynska, P 2016, ‘Understanding the value of arts & culture: The AHRC cultural value project’, Arts and Humanities Research Council, file:///C:/Users/Jennifer/Documents/AHRCCulturalValueProjectFINAL.pdf. Danaher, G, Schirato, T & Webb, J 2000, Understanding Foucault, Sage, London. Danto, A 1964, ‘The artworld’, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 61, no. 19, pp. 571–584. Evrard, Y 1997, ‘Democratizing culture or cultural democracy?’, The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 167–175. Fairclough, N 1995, Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language, Longman, London. Fairclough, N 2000, New labour, new language?, Routledge, London. Foucault, M 2003, ‘Polemics, politics, and problematizations: An interview with Michael Foucault’, in P Rabinow & N Rose (eds.), Essential Foucault, 2nd edn, The New Press, New York, pp. 18–25. Gartman, D n.d., ‘Culture as class symbolization or mass reification? A critique of Bourdieu’s distinction’, in American journal of sociology, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Giddens, A 2000, The third way and its critics, Polity Press, Cambridge. Gilmore, A 2013, ‘Cold spots, crap towns and cultural deserts: The role of place and geography in cultural participation and creative place-making’, Cultural Trends, vol. 22, pp. 86–96. Gray, C 2000, The politics of the arts in Britain, Macmillan, Basingstoke. Gray, C 2004, ‘Joining-up or tagging on? The arts, cultural planning and the view from below’, Public Policy and Administration, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 38–49. Hewison, R 1997, Culture and consensus: England, art and politics since 1940, Methuen, London. Holden, J 2004, Capturing cultural value: How culture has become a tool of government policy, Demos, London. Holden, J 2006, Cultural value and the crisis of legitimacy, Demos, London. Huntington, S 1965, ‘Political development and political decay’, World Politics, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 386–430. Hutchison, R 1982, The politics of the arts council, Sinclair Brown, London. ICM Unlimited, 2015, Arts Council England Stakeholder Research 2014–15, viewed 19 November 2018, https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/ download-file/ACE_Stakeholder_Research_2014_15_Quantitative_Survey_ Report_FINAL_0.pdf Jancovich, L 2017, ‘The participation myth’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 107–121. Jancovich, L & Hansen, L 2018, ‘Rethinking participation in the Aarhus as European Capital of Culture 2017 project’, Cultural Trends, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 173–186. Jelinek, A 2013, This is not art: Activism and other not-art, I.B. Tauris, London & New York. Jensen, J 2002, Is art good for us?, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland. Kangas, A & Vestheim, G 2010, ‘Institutionalism, cultural institutions and cultural policy in the Nordic countries’, Artikler, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 267–286. Keaney, E 2006a, From access to participation cultural policy and civil renewal, IPPR Publications, London. Keaney, E 2006b, Public value and the arts: Literature review, viewed 19 November 2018, https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160204123107/www. artscouncil.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/browse-advice-and-guidance/ public-value-and-the-arts-literature-review.

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Keaney, E, Bunting, C, Oskala, A, Saucek, J & Smith, L, 2007, The Arts Debate: Summary and Analysis of Consultation Responses, London, Arts Council England. Khan, N 1978, The arts Britain ignores: The arts of ethnic minorities in Britain, Commission for Racial Equality, London. Landry, C & Matarasso, F 1999, Balancing act: Twenty-one strategic dilemmas in cultural policy, Council of Europe Publishing, Belgium. Larsson, H 2016, Performing legitimacy, studies in high culture and the public sphere, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Markovits, E 2006, ‘The trouble with being earnest: Deliberative democracy and the sincerity norm*’, Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 249–269. McGuigan, J 2004, Rethinking cultural policy, Open University Press, Maidenhead. Meyer, JW & Rowan, B 1977, ‘Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 83, pp. 340–363. Miles, A & Gibson, L 2017, ‘Everyday participation and cultural value in place’, Cultural Trends, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 1–3. Miller, T & Yudice, G 2002, Cultural policy, Sage, London. Mills, JS 2001, Utilitariansim, ed. G. Sher, Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis. Minihan, J 1977, The nationalisation of culture, New York University Press, New York. Mirza, M 2012, The politics of culture: The case for universalism, Macmillan, Basingstoke. Morris, W 1882, The lesser arts of life, viewed 19 November 2018, www.marxists. org/archive/morris/works/1882/life1.htm. Mulcahy, K 2006, ‘Cultural policy: Definitions and theoretical approaches’, The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 319–330. Neelands, J, Belfiore, E, Firth, C, Hart, N, Perrin, L, Brock, S & Knell, RJ n.d., Enriching Britain: Culture, creativity and growth, https://warwick.ac.uk/ research/warwickcommission/futureculture/finalreport/warwick_commission_ final_report.pdf. Parkinson, J 2006, Deliberating in the real world: Problems of legitimacy in deliberative democracy, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Phillips, N, Lawrence, TB & Hardy, C 2004, ‘Discourse and institutions’, Academy of Management Review, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 635–652. Pinnock, A 2006, ‘Public value or intrinsic value? The arts-economic consequences of Mr Keynes’, Public Money and Management, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 173–180. Putnam, R 2000, Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community, Simon and Schuster, New York. Shiner, L 2001, The invention of art: A cultural history, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Star, SL & Griesemer, JR 1989, ‘Institutional ecology, “translations” and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907–39’, Social Studies of Science, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 387–420. Stevenson, D 2013, ‘What’s the problem again? The problematisation of cultural participation in Scottish cultural policy’, Cultural Trends, vol. 22, no. 22, pp. 77–85. Stevenson, D, Balling, G & Kann-Rasmussen, N 2015, ‘Cultural participation in Europe: Shared problem or shared problematisation?’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 89–106.

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Talja, S 1999, ‘Analyzing qualitative interview data: The discourse analytic method’, Library & Information Science Research, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 459–477. Taylor, JR & Van Every, EJ 1993, The vulnerable fortress: Bureaucratic organisation in the information age, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Toleda Silva, G 2015, ‘UNESCO and the coining of cultural policy’, Presented at 10th international conference on interpretative policy analysis, Lille, France. https://ipa2015.sciencesconf.org/ UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2012, Measuring Cultural Participation, viewed 19 November 2018, http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/mea suring-cultural-participation-2009-unesco-framework-for-cultural-statisticshandbook-2-2012-en.pdf Upchurch, A 2004, ‘John Maynard Keynes, the Bloomsbury group and the origins of the arts council movement’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 203–217. Upchurch, A 2005, ‘William Morris and the case for public support of the arts’, History of Political Economy, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 509–534. Upchurch, A 2011, ‘Keynes’s legacy: An intellectual’s influence reflected in arts policy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 69–80. Williams, R 1983, Culture and society, 1780–1950, Columbia University Press, New York. Willis, PE 1990, Common culture: Symbolic work at play in the everyday cultures of the young, Open University Press, London. Wodak, R 2007, ‘What is critical discourse analysis? Ruth Wodak in conversation with Gavin Kendall, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, vol. 8, no. 2. accessed 19 Novermber, http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/255

11 Public participation and agency in art museums Emilie Sitzia

In the last few decades, art museums have seen a shift in their perceived roles and the contexts in which they operate. The perception of the role of the art museum has gradually transformed from an institution solely presenting and defending the culture(s) of the elite (Jordan & Weedon 1995; Bal 1996; Ferguson, Greenberg & Nairne 1996; Borg & Mayo 2010; McCall & Gray 2014; Clover 2015), to one also promoting alternative forms of content, knowledge transfer and production. Within the framework of the new museology, museums saw attempts at democratization and at the representation of multiple voices by working with communities to provide critical views of museums’ history, theories and practices (Dewey 1916/2008; Vergo 1989; Mairesse & Desvallées 2007). From seeing the museum as a “contact zone” (Clifford 1999), to a social inclusion tool (Sandell 1998, 2002, 2003) and a constructivist terrain of knowledge production (Hein 1999; Falk & Dierking 2000), the museum has taken on a wide range of new potential roles.1 These multifarious roles are sometimes contradictory and at odds with more general expectations regarding the traditional role of museums. Art museums are simultaneously asked to serve as a temple of the elite’s art and as an instrument for democratic emancipation (Nochlin 1972; Sitzia 2017). Museums, therefore, are not neutral spaces and the forms of participation, modes of presentation and content they offer to audiences determine their position in society. As Clover noted, “Public art galleries and museums do take sides” (Clover 2015, p. 303). As the function of the museum was questioned, the perception of the role of audiences within museums also changed. As Hooper Greenhill wrote, “The age of the passive visitor has passed, to be superseded by the age of the active and discriminating ‘consumer’ or ‘client’” (HooperGreenhill 1992, pp. 210–211). While Hooper-Greenhill’s consumerist presentation might seem grim, it also denotes recognition of the active roles visitors now play in institutions. As a consequence of this shift in the role of the art museum and that of its audience, the perception of learning in that space has also shifted.2 From a unidirectional and authoritative model, learning in art museums is now widely understood as multiform.3

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For the purpose of this chapter I will focus on art museums because the narratives and interpretations of artworks stay relatively open to audience contribution, especially when it comes to attributing meaning or constructing narratives related to artworks. As Ferguson remarked, “the idea that meanings are impossibly unstable is embraceable because inevitable. With works of art, meanings are only produced in context and that is a collective, negotiated, debated and shifting consensual process of determination” (1996, p. 186). This instability of meaning and fluid official narratives has led to a great variety of participatory practices (Sitzia 2018) and to the general claim that art and art museums are potential tools for audience emancipation (Jung 2010; Clover 2015; Sitzia 2017). So-called participatory practices have become omnipresent in art museums.4 This chapter analyses how participatory practices in art museums build diverse forms of public agency. I will first investigate what public agency is in the context of the art museum, how it relates to key concepts such as empowerment, ownership, knowledge creation and learning. I will also present what kind of agency is created, allowed and acceptable in the art museum. I will then look closely at the relationship between various forms of participatory practices in art museums and agency. I will focus on three key types of participatory practices that are particularly productive in terms of public agency: meaning making, co-creation of artworks or events and participatory collection management activities.5 For each of these three practices I will investigate, on theoretical grounds, the level of agency, the output and the educational framework of such practices. For each practice, I will therefore ask: • • •

what kind of public agency is created? who benefits in terms of knowledge production? what kind of power relationship and agency dynamic is implied in the learning models underpinning such participatory practices?

Investigating participation through agency, this chapter aims to contribute to the theoretical debates about the role and impact of participation in the arts. This chapter positions itself firmly in the field of art museum participation and cultural education. It aims to focus on matters of knowledge creation, learning, engagement and ultimately emancipation of the participant through public agency. In this regard, this chapter builds on the works of the likes of Richard Sandell, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Nina Simon, Jacques Rancière, Yuha Jung and Bernadette Lynch.

Museums as battlefields of agency: Public agency in the museum Museums have been presented as “frontier” zones; that is, zones “where learning is created, new identities are forged; new connections are made

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between disparate groups and their own histories” (Golding 2009, p. 4; Philip 1992). This “frontier” could also be seen as a battlefield of agencies. In this regard, art museums are particularly interesting as not only do they often make visible this battle of agency, but their content also allows them to experiment, reevaluate dominant narratives and involve audiences in creative ways. Defining agency in art museums Defining agency in the art museum is a difficult task; however, it is important to distinguish agency from empowerment and ownership, two terms that are unfortunately often used in literature and in practice as equivalent to agency. Empowerment is a possible result of agency, but it is distinct from it and is socially and culturally determined. While agency and empowerment often go hand in hand, it is not unimaginable that a specific group or target visitor feels empowered in a museum without necessarily having agency in the matter. For example, being represented in a collection has proven to contribute to feelings of empowerment even though the agency in terms of selecting or exhibiting the artwork does not rest with the audience. Lynch (2017) has convincingly shown that “inclusive” practices can very easily become problematic token practices when the agency of the participant is not respected. Social inclusion ideals and empowerment do not necessarily go hand in hand. Ownership, another term often conflated with agency, is also a possible result of agency but is distinct from it. Ownership has more to do with autobiography and self-narrative. No intention is necessary for a sense of ownership to develop. Once again, if a specific artwork is encountered and triggers a sense of ownership (belonging to one’s own frame of cultural reference), while there is a visible outcome (belonging), no action is needed on the part of the audience (aside from taking ownership), nor is there an original intention on the part of the visitor. While there are a number of museum scholars who have worked on agency in the museum context (for example, see Fyfe 1995; Sandell 2002; Kirchberg 2007; Coffee 2008; Cameron 2015), a specific definition of agency that is operationalisable in terms of empirical research and evaluation – two key aspects of participatory practices research – is still missing from the art museum studies field. Rather, it is in another field, that of video game studies, that agency is most relevantly and precisely defined. Indeed for Mateas: Agency is the feeling of empowerment that comes from being able to take actions in the world whose effects relate to the player’s intention.6 This is not mere interface activity. If there are many buttons and knobs for the player to twiddle, but all this twiddling has little

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Emilie Sitzia effect on the experience, there is no agency. Furthermore, the effect must relate to the player’s intention. If, in manipulating the interface elements, the player does have an effect on the world, but they are not the effects that the player intended . . . then there is no agency. (Mateas & Stern 2005, p. 21)

Three elements stand out from this definition of agency when applied to an art museum environment: • • •

intention; that is, the defining of goals, large or small action; that is, an active participation element, the ‘doing’ part outcome/effect; that is, a result in line with the goals originally set

It should be stressed that all elements are necessary to create agency. As one can infer from this definition of agency, participatory practices don’t necessarily create agency as this also depends on how successfully they use design, implement the project and on the way in which results/ outcomes are shared and made visible (or not). In order to trigger agency, rigorous design of participatory activity is essential. As noted by Simon (2010) and Mateas & Stern (2005), the balance between constraints (material and formal) is essential for the player/participant to experience agency. However, it is not the case that participatory practices should be offered by the institution or the artist without any rules or framing. A game without rules is not fun to play. Instead, the design should ensure a balance between constraints and respect for the participant’s agency (that is, their intention, action and output). Agencies in the art museum Art museums, along with many other museums, can therefore be perceived as sites where various agencies clash, especially if we think of the museum not as a whole entity but as a panel of individual agencies (that of the people working in the museum). Hein posits that the museum is an “ethically freighted entity” that “exists over and above the individual people who work there or are in charge”, further arguing that it “must be understood that such identities interlace insofar as the museum’s decisions and agency take the form of human beings thinking, deciding, and acting in concert” (Hein 2011, p. 215). Similarly, Gilbert argues that museums tend to absorb individual agencies and render them invisible (Gilbert 2016). This composite agency of the museum creates a tense field of practice, and as Lagerkvist posits, “diversity in itself makes controversy unavoidable” (Lagerkvist 2006, p. 54). But which agencies are in conflict in an art museum? There is first the perceived agency of the overall institution (expressed in its board nomination, its regulations, its budget allocation or its mission statement, for

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example). Then there are the agencies of various departments (conservation, curatorial, education, marketing etc.). The various individuals in each department also have a certain amount of agency at stake. Then, following in Latour’s and Larson’s footsteps, there is the agency of the objects exhibited (Latour 1993; Larson 2009). Such objects have a “multivocal quality” (Larson 2009, pp. 243–244). Not to be forgotten, the agency of the exhibition space allows or promotes certain practices within the institution.7 The agency of the external stakeholders should also not be underestimated in a public institutional context: artists, politicians, funders etc., all have agency that impacts on the museum. Finally, there is the public agency, on which this chapter seeks to focus its attention. Agency, knowledge production and learning in the art museum As the role of the museum evolved, matters of emancipation and inclusivity came to the fore (Sandell 2003; Jung 2010; Sitzia 2017). It is within that framework that public agency came under scrutiny. Public agency is closely linked to issues of knowledge production and conceptions of learning. Indeed, if we consider public agency as a process (intention followed by action leading to an outcome), the outcome of this process is a form of knowledge production. The process itself, the ways in which this knowledge is produced, is a learning process. For public agency to take place there must be an intention, action and output. As mentioned, this output can be identified as various forms of knowledge production. Knowledge has been usefully defined by Gottschalk as a cluster concept with seven characteristics. According to Gottschalk Mazouz, knowledge: • • • • • • •

has a practical aspect is person-bound or not (personalized or represented knowledge coexist and are dependent) has a normative structure is internally networked (linked to existing internal knowledge) is externally networked is dynamic has institutional contexts (Gottschalk-Mazouz 2008)

This definition of knowledge shows how it has gradually expanded beyond factual, normative information and is supplemented by the development of diverse individual cognitive skills (such as analytical, critical, internal and external networking skills etc.), various individual emotional skills (such as empathy, expanded imagination, creativity etc.), a wide variety of individual psychomotor skills (such as how to look at a painting, move in a limited space, manipulate an artwork etc.) as well as

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a range of social skills (normative museum behaviour or communication skills, for example). These processes of knowledge production are linked to the agency of the museum public. Indeed, while the knowledge produced has an institutional context, this knowledge impacts on and is impacted by the ability of the public to make independent critical decisions. It is precisely in that process of knowledge production that learning in the art museum takes place. As noted above, knowledge production and therefore learning in the art museum goes well beyond cognitive engagement and information transfer, and extends into emotional, psychomotor and social learning and skills development (Sitzia 2018). As Illeris noted, there is not necessarily a disjunction between personal and social forms of learning in the museum (Illeris 2006, p. 23), and the agency of participants can be individual or collective. However, all these various learning relationships imply various levels of participation and also various levels of agency on the part of the public and the institution. Accepted modes of public agency in the art museum There are standard modes of accepted public agency in museums. As Hill noted, traditionally, public agency in museums is limited to specific areas such as volunteering, donating or visiting (Hill 2011, p. 220). However, new modes of participation have encouraged a shift in accepted forms of public agency in the museum. Participatory practices can be seen as particularly tense areas in terms of agency negotiation because a certain amount of authority is given from the institution and its myriad individual agencies to the public. As Cornwall stressed, “participation as praxis is, after all, rarely a seamless process; rather, it constitutes a terrain of contestation, in which relations of power between different actors, each with their own ‘projects’, shape and reshape the boundaries of action” (Cornwall 2008, p. 276). I believe the use of agency as a measuring factor – and as a promotion of deeper participation (especially the link between outcome and intention) – can be beneficial as a framework to further think about participation in art museums.

Defining participation through agency Participatory practices in art museums are complicated by issues of the autonomy of the artwork and the social engagement of the artist or the institution. This has led to a myriad of definitions and understandings of participation within the artistic field. In the art museum, the term ‘participation’ has come to cover a range of public, institutional and artistic practices ranging from attendance to contribution, collaboration, interpretation, co-creation of artworks or events and collection management activities. This disparity in the use of the term often leads to problems of

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communication and expectation within the art institutions themselves and between art museums and their funding bodies, the public and the artists involved.8 Researcher Anna Elffers and I therefore attempted to build a scale of participation specific to the art museum field (2016). We posited that participation in the art museum created a specific type of challenge because of the various fields involved: artists and artworks, curatorship, education and marketing.9 The choice of the scale format was linked to recurring issues of measurement of the impact of the arts and concerns from the field over token participation. Vestergaard Knudsen has traced the history of such participation ladders (2016, p. 194). By working in that tradition and building on Arnstein’s model, we created a scale of the field’s understanding of participation ranging from attendance to co-creation of artworks and events. The scale aimed to facilitate internal and external communication about what participation means, what are the goals of the institution as a whole and what are the intended outcomes (for the institution and the audience). At the bottom of our art museum participation scale, on the negative side, was attendance, followed by contribution, collaboration and interpretation/co-creation of meaning. At the very top of the scale, on the positive side, was co-creation of an artwork/event. The aim of this scale was to clarify various levels of participation and help institutions better understand that all participation is not equal. However, a young researcher, Noguera Vich, questioned our scale, asking what it actually measured.10 I first tried to explain it through the distinction made by Kothari between presence, performance and power (Kothari 2001). But the core issue then became one of power, which didn’t reflect the reality of the complexity of art museum participatory practices. A visitor attending the museum already holds some form of power by virtue of attending the museum. So while power is indeed essential in the participatory dynamics in museums, I felt this should not be the measuring unit of the scale because choosing to enter a museum is already justifying and supporting the existence of the institution, for example.11 As Cornwall pointed out, most of these ladders have been created with a good/bad implication and a “focus on the intentionality, and associated approach, of those who initiate participation” (2008, p. 270), when what we were originally trying to represent was what happened on the side of the participant (rather than the institution). In the meantime, the scale itself needed to be updated to encompass new types of participatory practices emerging in the field that relate to governance aspects of institutions, such as participatory collection management, which I added at the very top of the scale. This shift in practice led me to ask whether the participation had more to do with the audience’s sense of agency. Is agency the measure of all things participatory? Indeed, if one considers the definition of agency as intention, action and output/effect, it aligns with thinking on participatory

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practices and emancipation of the public (Rancière 1991; Jung 2010; ten Thije 2018). But it is also quite clear that in the context of agency, the ladder format oversimplifies the situation. This format doesn’t reflect the variety of practices that reside under the same “label”; for example, cocreation can mean a myriad of things depending on the museum, the national and even regional environment or the design. Furthermore, as Cornwall notes, “being involved in a process is not equivalent to having a voice” (2008, p. 278). Therefore, it is important to clarify what kind of agency is being promoted by the institutions in various types of participatory practices, what kind of knowledge is being created for whom and what kind of learning framework underpins those practices that already assume and encourage a certain agency dynamic.

Public agency, knowledge creation and learning in the art museum In order to answer these questions, this chapter focuses on three key types of participatory practices: meaning making, co-creation of artworks or events and collection management activities. I outline below what should happen in theory. Further field research is needed to confirm this theoretical model. These three types of participatory practices have been chosen as they are often perceived as particularly productive in terms of public agency and are common practices in art museums. They represent a range of engagement with the public and a variety of ideological choices in the art museum environment. However, such practices are not unambiguous. Each meaning-making, co-creation and collection management activity will be very different depending on the museum, the various contexts and the participants themselves. I aim here to look at the underlying structures and agency dynamic implied in such models. As Kirchberg points out, museum visits are a combination of “determining structures and individual determination” (Kirchberg 2007, p. 118). The determining structures for participatory practices are their knowledge creation processes and underpinning learning theories and values. Meaning making As a form of participation, meaning making is debated: just how participatory is it? Indeed, attending an art exhibition and interpreting works seem to be a rather minimal and superficial form of participation. However, Falk and Dierking argue convincingly for meaning making as an important participatory activity (2000). Similarly, Hill argues that interpretation is a form of “performance of identity” (Hill 2011, p. 221), and Csikszentmihalyi sees it as a core activity to trigger creativity (1996). Such participatory activities can take the form of label-writing exercises

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and interactive guided tours but also simply “response” exercises such as post-it walls or social media reactions to the works. If we consider the form public agency takes in the meaning-making process, intention from the public is present. It is a very individual form of intention that is linked to a visitor’s wish to attend an exhibition, to encounter the artworks and to spend time pondering those artworks, as well as to the visitor’s ability to network existing knowledge. Therefore, the audience’s intention is definitely present in meaning-making activities. Action, the second requirement for agency, is present, but it is an abstract, intellectual and cognitive form of action. By recognizing specific patterns and by developing internal and external networks, the audience member is actively shaping and interacting with the artwork. Cognitive and emotional learning take place and as such the outcome/effect is limited to knowledge construction in the learners themselves and is therefore not necessarily visible and shared unless the design of the activity actively plans for it. In terms of the learning model, we can say here that this type of participation matches Rancière’s model of the ignorant schoolmaster (Rancière 1991). The role of the “ignorant museum” is then to choose objects – “chose commune” – and promote engagement with those objects from the audience (Sitzia 2017). The learning is focussed on the individual and assumes an equality of intelligence. Jung argued that such a model could reduce elitism in the institution (2010) as it would not only take the object seriously but also the meaning ascribed by the audience onto this object (Sitzia 2017). In terms of knowledge production, the public is the main beneficiary of the knowledge created. The institution is only a beneficiary of this type of participation if it sets up a way to collect the results of this meaningmaking process and then uses them in its cataloguing or mediation programme or to inform further acquisition, for example. Artists rarely have access to the results of this meaning-making process and therefore would not be considered beneficiaries in this type of participatory model.12 Meaning making, in terms of public agency creation and knowledge production, is then a productive form of participatory practice. The learning model underpinning such participatory activities (while debated as a form of participatory practice) implies a relatively balanced relationship of power and active public agency. Co-creation Co-creation is often seen in the art world and in policy development as an ideal form of participation. Such participation can take the form of the co-creation of an event, exhibition or an artwork and typically involves the bodies, minds or experience of the participants. In reality, such projects are, and often need to be, relatively controlled. Being

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invited to engage in these types of participatory practices doesn’t necessarily create agency. There is a difference between giving people choice within a limited environment and giving them agency. Of course, the participants will have decided to “play”, so there is an intention, but it is very limited (mostly the intention to participate). This is especially true if the institution/artist didn’t reveal its broader objectives. The intention of the institution/artist is not necessarily divulged when engaging an audience in a co-creation process: this further reduces the actual agency of the participants. Because public intention is not necessarily as free and individual in this form of participation and because of its more collective and negotiated nature within an existing frame, it shapes the kind of agency (if any agency at all) given to the participant. For example, being a participant in a participatory artwork and being given a card to read out loud limits (if not erases) the agency of the participants. In such practices, action on the part of the audience can be abstract (such as coming up with a consultation process tool) but can also be very concrete (such as building an artwork or organizing an event). Learning in that context is more complex and layered. Cognitive and psychomotor learning can happen depending on the project, while emotional learning and social learning are almost always present in such contexts. The outcome/effect is also more collective and is commonly perceived as simultaneously identity building and community building. In terms of learning theory, experiential learning and social learning are more relevant. Experiential learning asks for a range of modes of engagement and a reflection on the process. As explained by Dewey: To “learn from experience” is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. (1916) It is therefore important that for such projects to be learning experiences, they must have built into their design a reflective moment for both the institution and the participants. As for social learning, Wenger outlines that in order to enter a community of practice one needs three basic modes of identification: engagement (with concrete participatory practices), alignment (positioning oneself in a community and its framework) and imagination (Wenger 1998, p. 189). These three processes often happen in the context of cocreation. Furthermore, for Wenger, learning is at the centre of the basic components of communities of practice. Learning is then linked to practice (learning as doing), to community (learning as belonging), to identity (learning as becoming) and to meaning (learning as experience). They are all key elements in the learning process and in co-creative participatory practices (Wenger 2009, p. 211).

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In the case of co-creation, the agency created is limited and the boundaries and control of the institution, even when following best practices, remain quite high. The knowledge production benefits the participating public (if a reflective moment is integrated in the design of the co-creation project, which is not always the case), the institution (as it centralizes and displays the common knowledge created by the project) and the artist (as a member of the community of practice within the co-creation process). Therefore, co-creation, which is often perceived as a very “participatory” practice, in effect creates a rather limited public agency. Governance: Collection management Participatory collection management is one of the most debated forms of participatory practice in the museum. It is often seen as threatening the expertise of museum staff and is even perceived by some as a form of populism. But there are true democratic forms of participatory practices involving the public in the purchasing, collecting, conserving and exhibiting of collections. Such activities can take many forms, from citizen science and collection tagging, to crowdsourcing artistic commissions. However, as Lagerkvist highlights in his study of the Museum of World Culture, there are limitations to such practices. Even when the participants worked on the project for over a year, “The Museum’s limits for inclusion in professional areas were actually quite tight. Including nonspecialists in an intense specialist process of a major exhibition seemed both difficult and hazardous considering the time pressure we were working under” (Lagerkvist 2006, p. 59). Indeed, it is in these environments that the audience’s agency clashes in the most visible way with issues related to matters of museum staff expertise. Museum conservators, curators and managers have often studied and researched their area of expertise extensively and often have difficulty seeing the institutional benefits of such participatory practices. If we look at the forms of agency delivered by this model, intention is again limited and negotiated within existing frameworks. The public is rarely given “carte blanche” and must instead function within very strict boundaries. Action on the part of the audience is important but is also heavily negotiated. The action in this context can be abstract (developing an exhibition concept, for example) but can also be practical (management, selection and installation of artworks). The outcome is again more collective: building identity and community is also at the core of this practice. Learning is at its richest: a combination of cognitive, emotional, psychomotor and social learning. In terms of learning theories, Jarvis’s model of learning from primary experience is suitable to describe the process. For Jarvis, “all human learning begins with disjuncture – with either an overt question or with a sense of unknowing” (Jarvis 2009, p. 22). In this context, the social aspect and

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the interaction between specialists and audience are key to learning, as learning is both existential and experiential. In his learning model, sensation or disjunction initiate and enable learning. However, to Jarvis, visitors cannot make meaning alone; they need a social interaction to be enabled as a learner. Therefore, the participatory practice must provide for a social context that encourages interaction between expert and participants. In terms of knowledge production, while the public certainly acquires knowledge, the institution is the biggest beneficiary of such forms of participatory practices. The public learns about the institutions’ rules and limitations and a little about the expertise of the staff. The museum experts, on the other hand, gain a great insight into their audiences’ set of values and behaviours. The artists, if involved at all, benefit the least from such practices. Therefore governance, which is perceived as the ultimate form of participatory practice in terms of audience involvement in the institution, also doesn’t necessarily create public agency.

Conclusion: A call for a diversity of participatory practices and going beyond the ladder model This theoretical exploration of various forms of participation and of public agency within these practices shows that there is enormous value in diversity of participatory practices. While some forms of participatory practices will lead to a specific form of public agency that will itself allow for the development of a specific type of knowledge, others will benefit the institutions or society more broadly while limiting the agency of the public. From this analysis it becomes clear that researchers and institutions should abandon scales as a way to model participatory practices. The scale format implies a hierarchy from full to empty participation when this chapter has shown that various types of agency are desirable and that some practices that are at the very bottom of such scales (such as meaning making) can actually translate into very high public agency. Therefore, institutions and researchers should look not for hierarchy but into the benefits of various formats and move towards a different form of modelling. This could take diverse forms. For example, Farrington and Bebbington (1993) proposed a model with two axes to assess participation according to depth (which would correspond to individual agency) and breadth (which could be understood as more general social impact). This could be adapted to art museum participation. Another potential matrix could be based on Rolan’s records continuum model of archival practices (2017). This model is more process- than outcome-focussed. It would need adaptation as it is concerned with archival practices, but these are close enough to museum practices to be of use. One could also

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imagine a simpler mobile scale that would shift depending on the goals/ desired outcome (increased agency, building of community etc.) and the point of view adopted (institution, artist or visitor). It is also important for institutions and policy makers to acknowledge that some forms of participation reinforce exclusion by diminishing an individual’s agency. As Cornwall rightly noted, “although the term itself evokes a warm ring of inclusion, ‘participatory’ processes can serve to deepen the exclusion of particular groups unless explicit efforts are made to include them” (Cornwall 2008, p. 277). As such, a specific effort should be made to respect agency, especially when working with vulnerable groups. All researchers agree that respecting agency (that is, the intention, action and outcome continuum of the visitor) is essential in inclusion/exclusion mechanisms, strengthening self-worth and nurturing the voices of audiences (Newman & McLean 2004; Lagerkvist 2006; Cornwall 2008; Lynch 2011, 2017).

Notes 1 But there is a lack of in-depth reflection on the fact that social inclusion does not necessarily lead to audience empowerment (Lynch 2017; Coffee 2008). 2 Learning is nowadays considered a key role of art museums (Hooper-Green hill 1999). 3 The various types of learning in museums is important to my argument about agency and will be detailed further on in the chapter. Indeed the various learning frameworks adopted by museums when designing participatory practices impact on agency dynamics. 4 On the definition of participatory practices in the artworld, see Elffers and Sitzia (2016). For the purpose of this chapter the definition of participation will be re-developed in the section “Defining participation through agency”. 5 These three practices have been chosen as they represent a range of engagement with the public, allow for a variety of ideological choices and are the most commonly used participatory techniques in the art museum environment. 6 I obviously disagree here with the conflation of agency and the feeling of empowerment (see earlier paragraph), but the rest of the definition seems very helpful. 7 The agency of artistic objects and museum spaces can arguably be seen as an extension of the agency(ies) of artists or the institution. But I will not debate these positions in this chapter. 8 Many examples of such misunderstandings are present in the rich volume of case studies put together by McSweeney and Kavanagh (2016). 9 It is possible that the same variations are found in other types of museums, but further research is necessary to back up such a claim. 10 He went on to write a very interesting master’s thesis, Museum participation or empty rituals?, at Maastricht University in 2017. 11 I then tried to align it with White’s work by attempting to apply nominal, instrumental, representative and transformative participation to our existing scale (White 1996). But this attempt didn’t help clarify the nature of what is being measured. 12 This, of course, only applies to contemporary art museums or galleries.

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References Bal, M 1996, Double exposures: The subject of cultural analysis, Routledge, New York. Borg, C & Mayo, P 2010, ‘Museums: Adult education as cultural politics’, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, Fall, pp. 35–44. Cameron, F 2015, ‘The liquid museum: new institutional ontologies for a complex, uncertain world’, in Witcomb, A & Message, K (eds), The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, Volume 1: Museum Theory, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 345–361. Clifford, J 1999, ‘Museums as contact zones’, in D Boswell & J Evans (eds.), Representing the nation: A reader: Histories, heritage, and museums, Routledge, London, pp. 435–457. Clover, DE 2015, ‘Adult education for social and environmental change in contemporary public art galleries and museums in Canada, Scotland and England’, International Journal of Lifelong Education, vol. 34, pp. 300–315. Coffee, K 2008, ‘Cultural inclusion, exclusion and the formative role of museums’, Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 261–279. Cornwall, A 2008, ‘Unpacking “participation”: Models, meanings and practices’, Community Development Journal, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 269–283. Csikszentmihalyi, M 1996, Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention, Harper Collins, New York. Dewey, J [1916] 2008, Democracy and education, Project Gutenberg, Champaign, IL, viewed 18 January 2019, www.gutenberg.org/les/852/852-h/852-h. htm#link2HCH0008. Elffers, A & Sitzia, E 2016 ‘Defining participation: Practices in the Dutch artworld’, in K McSweeney & J Kavanagh (eds.), Museum participation: New directions for audience participation, MuseumsEtc, Edinburgh, pp. 39–67. Falk, J & Dierking, L 2000, Learning from museums: Visitor experiences and the making of meaning, AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, CA. Farrington, J & Bebbington, A 1993, Reluctant partners: Non-governmental organisations, the state and sustainable agricultural development, Psychology Press, Routledge, London. Ferguson, B, Greenberg, R & Nairne, S 1996, Thinking about exhibitions, Routledge, London. Fyfe, G 1995, ‘A Trojan horse at the Tate: Theorizing the museum as agency and structure’, Sociological Review, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 203–228. Gilbert, L 2016, ‘“Loving, knowing ignorance”: A problem for the educational mission of museums’, Curator The Museum Journal, vol. 59, no. 2, pp. 125–140. Golding, V 2009, Learning at the museum frontiers: Race, identity and power, Routledge, London. Gottschalk-Mazouz, N 2008, ‘Internet and the flow of knowledge: Which ethical and political challenges will we face?’, in Wittgenstein and the philosophy of information, Ontos Verlag, Frankfurt, pp. 218–222. Hein, G 1999, ‘The constructivist museum’, in E Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), The educational role of the museum, Routledge, London, pp. 73–79. Hein, H 2011, ‘The responsibility of representation: A feminist perspective’, in J Marstine (ed.), The Routledge companion to museum ethics: Redefining ethics for the twenty-first-century museum, Routledge, London, pp. 112–126.

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Hill, K 2011, ‘Thinking about audience and agency in the museum: Models from historical research’, paper from the conference “Current issues in European cultural studies”, organised by the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS), Norrköping, 15–17 June, conference proceedings published by Linköping University Electronic Press, viewed 25 January 2019, www.ep.liu. se/ecp_home/index.en.aspx?issue=062. Hooper-Greenhill, E 1992, Museums and the shaping of knowledge, Routledge, New York. Hooper-Greenhill, E 1999, The educational role of the museum, Routledge, London. Illeris, H 2006, ‘Museums and galleries as performative sites for lifelong learning: Constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of audience positions in museum and gallery education’, Museum and Society, vol. 4, viewed 15 December 2018, https://journals.le.ac.ukjojs1/index.php/mas/articleiview_j75. Jarvis, P 2009, ‘Learning to be a person in society’, in K Illeris (ed.), Contemporary theories of learning, Routledge, New York. Jordan, G, & Weedon, C 1995, Cultural politics. Class; gender, race and the postmodern world, Blackwell, Oxford. Jung, Y 2010, ‘The ignorant museum: Transforming the elitist museum into an inclusive learning place’, in N Abery (ed.), The new museum community: Audiences, challenges, benefits, MuseumsEtc, Edinburgh, pp. 272–291. Kirchberg, V 2007, ‘Cultural consumption analysis: Beyond structure and agency’, Cultural Sociology, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 115–135. Kothari, U 2001, ‘Power, knowledge and social control in participatory development’, in B Cooke & U Kothari (eds.), Participation: The new tyranny?, Zed Books, London. Lagerkvist, C 2006, ‘Empowerment and anger: Learning how to share ownership of the museum’, Museum and Society, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 52–68. Larson, F 2009, An infinity of things: How Sir Henry Wellcome collected the world, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Latour, B 1993, We have never been modern, Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York. Lynch, B 2011, Whose cake is it anyway? A collaborative investigation into engagement and participation in twelve museums and galleries in the UK, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, London. Lynch, B 2017, ‘Migrants, museums, and tackling the legacies of prejudice’, in C Bevelander & P Johansson (eds.), Museums in a time of migration: Rethinking museums’ representations, collections, and collaborations, Nordic Academic Press, Lund. Mairesse, F & Desvallées, A 2007, Vers une redéfinition du musée, L’Harmattan, Paris. Mateas, M & Stern, A 2005, ‘Interaction and narrative’, in K Salen & E Zimmerman (eds.), Game design reader: A rules of play anthology, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 642–669. McCall, V & Gray, C 2014, ‘Museums and the “new museology”: Theory, practice and organisational change’, Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 19–35. McSweeney, K & Kavanagh, J (eds.) 2016, Museum participation: New directions for audience participation, MuseumsEtc, Edinburgh. Newman, A & McLean, F 2004, ‘Presumption, policy and practice’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 10, no. 2, pp.167–181.

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Nochlin, L 1972, ‘Museums and radicals: A history of emergencies’, in B O’Doherty (ed.), Museums in crisis, G. Braziller, New York, pp. 7–41. Philip, MN 1992, Frontiers: Essays and writings on racism and culture, The Mercury Press, Ontario. Rancière, J 1991, The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation, trans. K Ross, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Rolan, G 2017, ‘Agency in the archive: A model for participatory recordkeeping’, Archival Science, vol. 17, pp. 195–225. Sandell, R 1998, ‘Museums as agents of social inclusion’, Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 17, pp. 401–418. Sandell, R 2002, ‘Museums and the combating of social inequality: Roles, responsibilities, resistance’, in R Sandell (ed.), Museums, society, inequality, Routledge, London, pp. 3–23. Sandell, R 2003, ‘Social inclusion, the museum and the dynamics of sectoral change’, Museum and Society, vol. 1, pp. 45–62. Simon, N 2010, The participatory museum, Museum 2.0, Santa Cruz, CA. Sitzia, E 2017, ‘The ignorant art museum: Beyond meaning-making’, International Journal of Lifelong Education, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 73–87. Sitzia, E 2018, ‘The many faces of knowledge production in art museums’, Muséologies. Les cahiers d’études supérieures, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 141–157. ten Thije, S 2018, The emancipated museum, Jap Sam Books, Amsterdam. Vergo, P 1989, The new museology, Reaktion Books, London. Vestergaard Knudsen, L 2016, ‘Participation at work in the museum’, Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 193–211. Wenger, E 1998, Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity, Cambridge University Press, New York. Wenger, E 2009, ‘A social theory of learning’, in K. Illeris (ed.), Contemporary theories of learning, Routledge, New York, pp. 209–218. White, S 1996, ‘Depoliticising development: The uses and abuses of participation’, Development Practice, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 6–15.

12 Re-ordering and re-performing Re-placing cultural participation and re-viewing wellbeing measures Susan Oman

Introduction Measuring wellbeing – no place for the arts and culture? (Jennings 2011)

This headline appeared in the UK-based arts sector trade journal, Arts Professional, on 12 December 2011. It responded to the publication by the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) of their anticipated measures of national wellbeing. The author explained that they and their colleagues were “shocked to see that the current proposals do NOT [sic] include specific measures relating to Arts and Culture” (Jennings 2011). This commentary reflects the wider cultural sector’s passionate belief that its work is inherently good for wellbeing, and that these qualities do not receive the recognition they deserve. Three weeks later, John Holden wrote that the omission of culture from the measures was because it is “invisible” to policymakers (Holden 2012). The research described in this chapter considers the appraisal of wellbeing by policymakers and national statisticians and explores whether culture is invisible, or “mis-placed”. It does so with a view to interrogating whether a reordering of value hierarchies is called for and what this might mean for understanding cultures of participation. If the arts and culture are good for personal and societal wellbeing, why do they not feature in the UK’s national measures of wellbeing when other policy areas do? This question emerges at a particular moment in cultural policy following 25 or so years of rapidly increasing metrication1 in all aspects of social life, including governance (Espeland & Stevens 2008; Espeland 2015; Beer 2016). As policymaking increasingly incorporated measurement as part of New Public Management,2 the cultural sector has felt an associated burden to prove the impact of publicly funded arts activities (Belfiore 2006). Alongside this are longstanding concerns regarding the quality of the evidence provided to satisfy these demands (Belfiore 2002; Merli 2002; Selwood 2002) and the misapplied beliefs in the social impact of the arts (Oman & Taylor 2018; Belfiore 2009). Given the context surrounding the cultural sector’s “shock” at its exclusion from the wellbeing

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measures, it is important to approach this question “why not?” in a critically reflective way to understand how knowledge of cultural participation for cultural policy could be produced differently. Research evaluations that inform cultural policy and advocacy often approach cultural participants and ask how a given dose of culture (a community arts programme or a particular performance, say) has improved their wellbeing. This approach has been criticized, since interviewer bias can affect responses, leading to the assumption of causation (between culture and wellbeing) to be confirmed and used in advocacy and policy.3 To address these concerns, this chapter describes a research project which aimed to look for evidence of cultural participation in a data set collected to understand wellbeing. As such, it describes an attempt to do qualitative cultural research differently with analytical reflections on the methodological decisions – and practical deflections – involved in such an endeavour. Working with a qualitative wellbeing data set that is atypical – both for cultural policy studies and for a national statistics authority – led to complications in the research process. I retell some of this here to reveal hidden aspects of government social science methodologies and contextualize new possibilities for cultural research. The chapter briefly describes the rise of wellbeing in governance, its importance to cultural policy and the impact of this salience on research with an interest in these areas. The UK’s response to the wellbeing agenda was to hold a national debate on wellbeing and use what people said mattered to them in live events, a survey, telephone line and various online forums (Evans 2011) to inform the national wellbeing measures. It was not possible to access the data ONS collected for re-analysis at the outset of the research and so the chapter discusses the decision to “re-perform” the national debate. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on performativity and its developments in the “social life of methods” (Butler [1990] 1999; Law 2009), I engage with “re-performance” as a mode in which dysfunction can be revealed (Butler 2010), adopting this into my methodology. Re-performance as an inductive and mixed methodology reveals flaws in how the wellbeing/culture relationship is categorized and articulated. Through a re-ordering analysis of debate responses, I reveal that the orthodox ways of labelling “what we do”, both in cultural policy research and wellbeing research, are not adequate to understand how people participate in ideas of “the good life”. I uncover aspects of what research for cultural policy – and broader policy – keeps obscure in terms of value and values. As a result, I offer some reflection on how cultures of participation might be re-placed in conceptions of wellbeing for policy.

The measuring national wellbeing debate: A brief history of the research site The term “wellbeing” is familiar and widespread, even ambiguous. As explained by the director of the MNW Debate, “[t]he terms wellbeing,

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quality of life, happiness, life satisfaction and welfare are often used interchangeably (although some disciplines draw distinctions between them)” (Allin 2007, p. 46). Wellbeing is frequently an all-encompassing concept to describe the quality of people’s lives (Dodge et al. 2012), but much wellbeing discourse focusses on a binary of pleasure versus purpose. The responsibilities of these are individualized in self-help literature, such as “Happiness by design” and “Flourish” (Dolan 2014; Seligman 2011), or seen as the responsibility of government in reducing suffering or maximizing people’s opportunities to thrive (Bentham 1789; Sen 1999). Crucially, the claim that the arts can both be pleasurable and bring about a sense of purpose is fundamental to expressions of the relationship between cultural participation and wellbeing. Furthermore, that wellbeing is conceived as both an individual responsibility and as part of the welfare promise of governments is essential in cultural policy contexts. This discourse is not only rooted in intellectual tradition (Belfiore & Bennett 2008) but has also been instrumentalized by the cultural sector to argue the social impact of its work in response to the wellbeing agenda and its eligibility for funding on these grounds. ‘The rise of wellbeing’ (Bache & Reardon 2013) in policy-making resulted, in part, from intellectual and practical advances across academic fields including psychology, social policy, and economics (ibid, p. 908). These movements also complemented a political shift to identify a more social measure of progress than those that capture the purely economic. There were growing concerns that, ‘[b]y design and purpose it [GDP] cannot be relied upon to inform policy debates on all issues. Critically, GDP does not measure environmental sustainability or social inclusion and these limitations need to be taken into account when using it in policy analysis and debates (European Commission 2009, p. 2). The “UK’s response to the wellbeing agenda – and definitional confusion over wellbeing was a five-month national debate (November 2010 – April 2011) to understand ‘what matters to people’” (Cameron 2010). As a large-scale qualitative enquiry it was an exceptional undertaking for a national statistics office. The national debate called “Measuring National Wellbeing (MNW): What Matters to You?” collected 34,000 responses across various modes and is said to have informed the proposed measures of national wellbeing criticized by the sector at the opening of this chapter. “What Matters to You?” was both the name of the debate and the overarching question, decided upon because the definition of wellbeing was considered too subjective. The “participatory spirit” of the debate has been acknowledged internationally (Kroll 2011) and was evident in the ONS’ or ONS’s efforts at public engagement and outreach with partner organizations. As such, it represents a unique moment of social, cultural, political and scientific participation and it has much to offer disciplines from

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cultural studies to the sociology of knowledge, the politics of expertise and where they intersect. The debate generated evidence of “what matters” to people, based on everyday understandings, experiences and values, and brought these into dialogue with interdisciplinary expertise via advisory groups and literature reviews (Matheson 2011). It could therefore be framed as an attempt to understand how people participate in the good life; a democratic exercise to reorder how progress is measured. As such, it opens up a series of possibilities: ethical possibilities to measure wellbeing as a project of social inclusion and sustainability; methodological possibilities to define the aspects of the good life that warrant measuring; and empirical possibilities from having gathered a large number of testimonies on what matters to people. Yet not all the testimonies from the debate have made it into published findings to become indicators (Oman 2019). Cultural sociologist Wendy Espeland describes the production of social indicators as the “systematic removal of the persons, places and trajectories of the people being evaluated by the indicator and the people doing the evaluation” (Espeland 2015, p. 56). Surveys, as with all methods, impact upon how the social world is ordered, governing the distribution of resources and policy actions, or indeed how a nation understands itself on a cultural level (Law 2009; Savage & Burrows 2007; Davies 2018). In this sense, despite claims to neutrality, social survey data are performative in that they have social effects (Law et al. 2011). The same might be said of cultural management, of course: what was thought to be good for people has long histories of being invested in by government agencies and is thus recorded and described as such (Oman 2019). “Re-performance”, as a mode in which dysfunction can be exposed (Butler 2010), is an important facet for an inductive and mixed methodology to reveal how the wellbeing/culture relationship is categorized and articulated. In re-analysing the debate through a process of reenactment and additional ethnographic study, the cultures of participation behind the national wellbeing measures – and the choices involved – become clearer. Through re-performance this chapter attempts to disrupt these histories of categorization by reorganizing the ways in which things are researched. This is not to suggest that the methods described here are not performative, but to reveal that how research is performed – and how its findings are distributed – has effects on the social world they claim to measure. The following section retells the experience of engaging with the MNW Debate as a research site in multiple ways. It does so not only to uncover how the measures overlooked aspects of lived experience and cultural participation but also to understand how a national statistics agency might manage the enormity of so many descriptions of wellbeing to offer possibilities for future cultural policy research.

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Retelling research: Mixing methods, alternate research sites Evidence of the value of culture to wellbeing is largely reliant on asking participants whether they felt better in some way, or their lives and outlooks improved as a result of participation. As has been indicated, such leading questions are problematic (Belfiore 2002) and part of larger discussion about cultural sectoral evidence as “methodologically flawed”, “say[ing] more about policy intentions than about actual impact” (Selwood 2002, p. 13). The research described in this chapter emerged from a proposal to turn this default qualitative approach on its head: to reorder the relationship between the data set and the question. Instead of collecting testimonies of improved wellbeing from a site of cultural participation, I proposed to use a qualitative wellbeing data set to investigate whether people refer to cultural participation when talking about what matters to them – without being asked about culture at all. Taking a national-level data set and seeking a causal relation between cultural participation and wellbeing is a familiar quantitative approach. However, this research design was based on a qualitative data set. I proposed analysing the free text responses from the MNW Debate’s questionnaires to listen to how people describe what matters to them. Sadly, owing to a number of data management issues, relating to resource and how the data had been collected and stored, the ONS declined access. Without access to the secondary data set, I shifted the research site to focus on primary data collection: I would recreate the national debate in order to re-perform the research. I approached re-performance as a methodology through designing an approach that emulated the ONS’s modes of data collection, questions and facilitation techniques. I recreated the ONS’s “live events” as a national programme of group discussions in 14 locations across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. These groups of people already participated together in some way and I visited them in their place of participation. For example, I met stand-up comedians in the local pub where they perform, an arts group in a category B male prison, a disability housing advocacy group in a local housing association meeting room and a yoga class inside an elite golf club. I was, therefore, able to re-perform the national debate (on a manageable scale) and re-enact data collection, aiming to get as close to a replication of method as possible. Revealing the ONS’s methodological approach to the MNW’s live events was difficult: there was no description in the public domain, and while ONS employees were generous in conversations, these conversations were not always conclusive regarding detail: how groups were facilitated, how questions had been asked and what data had been captured. What did transpire, however, that in those 2,750 events, the testimonies of what mattered to people had not been recorded or transcribed and held by ONS. Instead, a consensus of the top three most important

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aspects was reached at each event’s conclusion, which were recorded but not available in the public domain or by request. While there is not room to describe findings from the fieldwork in detail in this chapter, responding to the question “What matters to you?” led to personal and emotional descriptions of people’s life experience ‘experiences and barriers to well-being’. Vitally, when describing what matters, a number of people noted that they were not referring to things that they had that gave them quality of life, but instead things that they did not have, but needed. In the context of the disability advocacy group, this could be as easily categorized as health or relationships, when under pressure to vote on a top three from a pre-defined list. The group discussions were much more layered and complex, unsurprisingly, in their descriptions of how they participate in the good life. This included aspects of social, cultural and political participation. It seems likely that the 175 events organized by the ONS would have generated similarly complex stories, which could have existed as an archive from the national debate. This would have proved a vital resource for policy, social science and cultural studies research. It is possible that the interviewer effect (me as facilitator, rather than the more official ONS) enabled participants to open up more. This may have resulted from my sparse facilitation, attempting to allow participants’ discussions to be self-directed towards group meaning making. It is, of course, impossible to draw firm conclusions. However, it is possible to go some way to account for myself as facilitator not leading people to talk about participation, as in some cases they did not talk about it in the way I expected at all. In the case of the prison arts group, I had gained access to the group, I suspected, because it was desirable for the project to gain evidence of its impact on the wellbeing of participants. Yet, discussants not refer to the project once, while often talking about community centres outside the prison, for example. I was also expecting explicit references to the arts and culture in the context of broader discussions of participation when I proposed analysing the ONS’s MNW free text data. However, I was to be similarly surprised in this instance, as I discovered when, after organizing my national fieldwork, I was granted access to the free text data, which I explore in the following section.

Re-ordering and including “the other” – surveys’ free text fields There are two main ways that free text is used in questionnaires. In the first, an open-ended question is asked and people can answer in their own words. In the second, fields appear after a list of pre-defined categories that can be ticked. The free text field, often labelled “Other” enables a participant to answer in their own words – particularly if their answer does not fit a tick box option. Figure 12.1 is a recreation of Question 1 from the

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Q1 What things in life matter to you? Please tick all that apply. Income and wealth Job satisfaction and economic security Ability to have a say on local and national issues Having good connections with friends and relatives Present and future conditions of the environment Crime Health Education and training Personal and cultural activities, including caring and volunteering

Other…. Please specify

Figure 12.1 A recreation of question 1, from the four questions in the Office for National Statistics’ Measuring National Wellbeing Debate questionnaire. Source: Copyright by Susan Oman

MNW debate survey, including the free text field. There were five questions in all. Four of which are formatted as follows, and the final question was an open-ended question that asked for “Any Other Comments?”. Survey design experts often flag the use of free text fields in response to open-ended questions because they are resource-heavy to analyse. This same literature also presents “myriad examples” of the effects of the ordering of tick box options, with the first and last options often being the most popular ticked option (Lavrakas 2008). So, what of coding the free text field that appears after the end of tick box options? In the case of the MNW Debate, the ONS did not explicitly publish their coding frames. In terms of how the data were stored, the free text responses were not linked with the tick box responses. It is, therefore, not possible to know how many people ticked how many of the presented options while also using free text, and how many only used free text. Yet, Questions 3 and 4 (half of the questions) received more free text responses than the highest use of tick box responses. For example, question 3 asked, “which of the following sets of information do you think help measure national wellbeing and how is life changing over time?”. The highest response from the information which followed was “Life satisfaction”, receiving 523 “ticks”. 649 people responded using free text, however, rendering these data of quantitative interest. Furthermore,

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this demonstrates the importance of re-ordering analysis to include free text in representations of what matters to people as they contain rich and detailed description of qualities of life, including the emotional impact of social change which should be “listened”’ to (Oman 2015). Crucially, as demonstrated by the ONS, what mattered to people was in fact feeling listened to (Evans 2011, p. 31), with one participant explaining “If I thought we would be listened to, it would be worth commenting but I remain sceptical if this will come to anything” (Evans 2011, p. 18). In replicating analysis of the free text fields, this research can present what people said in a way that the ONS did not. As a consequence of “listening” to what people said, the most frequent theme I coded as “leisure and spare time”, with 40% of people describing the importance of where and how it was spent. Table 1 shows my analysis of the free text response themes, organizing them by prevalence. It also demonstrates how my findings contradict headline findings from the ONS, shown on the left hand of the table in order of importance, based on prevalence of response. There are methodological reasons for the difference in emphasis across the two fields of qualitative and quantitative responses in the same survey. The mode in

ONS’s ordering of tick box responses (most prevalent at the top)

A re-ordering of free text field responses (most prevalent at the top)

1st

Health

Leisure and spare time

1st

2nd

Having good connections with friends and relatives Job satisfaction and economic security

Quality of natural environment

2nd

Family

3rd

4th

Present and future conditions of the environment

Security

4th

5th 6th

Education and training Personal and cultural activities, including caring and volunteering

Protect planet/nature Freedom/power

5th 6th

7th 8th

Income and wealth Ability to have a say on local and national issues

Access to "leisure" possibilities Healthcare

7th 8th

9th 10th

Crime Other

Equality Happiness/wellbeing of others Government Fairness/social justice

9th 10th 11th 12th

Access to services

13th

Politics

14th

3rd

Figure 12.2 A re-ordering of priorities in the Measuring National Wellbeing Debate Questionnaires. Source: Copyright by Susan Oman

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which questions are asked and answered will clearly affect results. Therefore, presenting only one set of results quantitatively provides an incomplete picture of what matters to people. Analysis of all modes of response should be included if there is to be an ongoing move towards governance using wellbeing measures, as the aim of the MNW Programme. It is important to say here that I am not claiming that analysis of only the free text data leads to a more accurate analysis than analysis of only the ticked options. Instead, through listening to the values people expressed in their own words and inductively coding by hand, the mode of knowledge production has been reordered so that it can be included in the evidence. Revisiting wellbeing data in this way was an opportunity to review the relationship between cultural participation and wellbeing. In the following section, I explore the theme of “spare time and leisure” as the most popular theme in the free text fields and as a description of cultural participation. I “re-perform” the categorization of personal and cultural activities, foregrounding the labels used by the survey respondents in free text rather than the survey authors.

Re-placing descriptions of cultural participation Taking now the point of view of identification, the reader must remind himself as the author constantly has to do, of how much is here embraced by the term culture. It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people; Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list. And then we have to face the strange idea that what is part of our culture is also part of our lived religion. (T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture [1948] 1973)

T.S. Eliot’s essay on identity and the meanings, definitions and classifications of culture are all enveloped into musings on the conditions in which it should flourish. Eliot lists “the characteristic activities and interests” that can be embraced by the term culture. Here Eliot acknowledges that such a list is both personal and instrumental to flourishing; these sorts of lists could be found in the free text of the debate. A flourishing culture has long been seen to reflect personal and societal wellbeing, as debated since Plato and Aristotle (Belfiore & Bennett 2008). These arguments surrounding definition and value remain fundamental to how the sector views itself (Belfiore 2006; Oman 2019) and its identity, as much as how it is viewed by policymakers with responsibilities that intersect with culture in the UK. Yet, as Eliot’s list demonstrates, cultural participation is far more than how the cultural sector would define itself.

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In inductively coding the free text from the ONS debate, 40% of responses to the question “What things in life matter most” talked about their “leisure and spare time” rather than more formal types of arts and cultural participation. This opens up questions about how both culture and wellbeing are conceptualized for measurement and whether the default categories are ill-equipped to fully communicate “what matters” for the good life. For example, “the arts” was mentioned only once. However, people also talked about “living creatively” as a spiritual pursuit, “beauty [and] creative ability”, the importance of “[c]reating safe spaces for people to express themselves” and “being able to interpret and interact’” with the world. Interestingly, one participant responded “liberty, freedom, democracy and creative expression”, suggesting they saw creative expression as a moral right in some way; another said “fairness, prosperity, opportunity, leisure time”. This analysis demonstrates that the value of cultural practices and leisure pastimes to wellbeing does not map on to the established hierarchy of “the arts and culture”, rather than “leisure and recreation” as it manifests in cultural policy (Oman 2019). Of course, a statistician or quantitative social scientist would be likely to order this list of activities by their prevalence in free text. For a start, there are too many activities with only one occurrence for much meaningful quantitative analysis. However, the order in which people express values in narrative analysis can “lead to a particular reading of their meaning in relation to each other” (Elliott 2006, p. 11), and this is true of textual analysis more broadly. Few of the activities described in free text would fall under the remit of institutions that receive investment to support personal activities by way of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), being more ‘everyday” in their nature (see Miles & Gibson 2016; Ebrey 2016 for definitions of everyday participation). The management of cultural participation ordinarily manifests through institutions, with public funding only ordering certain institutions. Crucially, only two respondents out of the 346 who were coded in the “spare time and leisure” theme, used the word “cultural”, and both respondents referred to it as instituted within local service delivery or as an amenity. Having access to good local services at minimal cost that enrich cultural and physical life e.g. libraries, parks. (Case 114) it is important to me that community is fostered andd [sic] that collecctive [sic] concerns are given proper consideration [sic] and funding. Local amenities, cultural centres such as theatres and community arts venues need encouragement and finacial [sic] aid, particularly in times of crisis. (Case 308)

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Case 308 was also the only description of wellbeing to contain any mention of a cultural institution that was not a library. Four people (1%) mentioned libraries specifically, once again as facilities rather than cultural institutions, while four people also talked about heritage and the historic environment, one explaining that their heritage and historic environment was most important, two regarding its preservation and one person describing their interest in local history and its research. Thus people’s expressions of free time in free text suggests that “taking all things as equal” should be the best way to understand the relationship between participation and wellbeing. Another study looked at many of the pre-set categories of activities in DCMS’s Taking Part Survey,4 both arts-related and more broadly recreational (Miles & Sullivan 2010). It concluded “that it is participation per se that matters for health and wellbeing rather than participation in high rather than low culture . . . there is nothing intrinsically more valuable about certain types of activity” (ibid: 19). Miles and Sullivan’s findings are corroborated by the analysis here. Given the institutional histories involved in managing culture, it is unlikely that what participants described would reorder investment based on contribution to wellbeing. Re-performance as a methodology has uncovered practices of measuring what is easiest to measure, and public investment in what cultural elites have dictated is imperative. When research begins with what people say is important, rather than default categorizations, it gathers different answers, re-ordering hierarchies and priorities enabling a re-placing of cultural values.

Re-viewing wellbeing descriptions, re-ordering what is important to measure Whilst economic security is important, and everything to do with income and employment – I don’t think these economic-related indicators should be the key focus of measuring national wellbeing. I think this exercise should break away from the traditional areas that already measured excessively, and focus instead on measuring the areas that genuinely make people happy – social connections, participating in local community and personal activities, having access to green open space for a healthy walk with your family/friends, having cheap/no cost access to cultural activities that lift the spirit e.g. libraries, parks, physical activity.

The account mentioned here from a free text field from the MNW Debate is one of many that makes explicit the relationship between wellbeing and a broad idea of culture. As in other cases (see earlier), and the wider analysis, lists of activities and cultural resources intermingle with ideas of what a good life might be. It is one of many examples of free text fields that were coded using multiple themes because the participant described so many aspects of wellbeing. In this case, these included

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(not exhaustively): “security”, “financial stability”, “family”, “friends”, “spare time” and “access to services” (see Table 1 for the top 14 themes). This debate participant drew a comparison between “domains” of life, which are “measured excessively” and those which “genuinely make people happy”, recalling the European Commission cited on page 203 of this chapter on the limitations of economic measures, as they do not account for “sustainability or social inclusion”, which means they are omitted from policy analysis and debates. (2009, p. 2). The respondent creates a polarity of affect between the excessive and the sincere, with social, personal and cultural participation captured as articulations of positive wellbeing effects. Their suggestion that the Debate should be a moment of change in the ordering of practices echoes the promises of the National Statistician and Prime Minister to “measure what matters” based on what people say. This eloquent response speaks the ONS’s discourse back at them. The language mirrors that presented by the ONS’s survey authors in the questionnaire and tick box options. The participant used the “Other” field to not just elaborate upon the options presented by the ONS, but, arguably, to articulate the importance of some domains over others. In the ONS’s analyses the importance of a tick box was decided by the number of times they were ticked. There was not an opportunity for participants to rank their tick box. This free text field was used to reorder through re-articulation to communicate the respondents’ hierarchy of interests. This longer form description from a free text field suggests some people want a reordering of priorities – and that the project to measure wellbeing could be the place in which reordering can begin. This was the ideological promise of the wellbeing agenda, as articulated by international bodies and the UK Prime Minister and National Statistician. It – more importantly – was the driving force behind the MNW debate as a political and practical exercise. Through re-performing aspects of the Debate, and as described here, its analysis, it is possible to see that the MNW programme has enormous promise, yet the habituated methods of the ONS affected what data and whose testimonies made it beyond what Back calls “truths with short time spans” (2007, p. 20). The headlines from the official Findings report (Evans 2011) are able to impact upon the world, as they are reproduced in official reports from the ONS (and beyond) and repeated in news media headlines (BBC 2011). By contrast, the evidence that is less prominent, found in appendices and further back in official reports like the “Findings from the Debate” (Evans 2011), and arguably, even overlooked altogether, does not get to perform change upon the evidence base. Re-performance as a method, therefore, enables a revisiting of the evidence and the methods in such a way that cultures of participation: whether expert, elite or everyday, are revealed.

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Re-performance and reordering as methodological approaches Evidence-based policy is an approach to governance that assumes an objective, rational character that relies on data. Yet, too little emphasis is placed on how data are culture-driven, in that the methods which generate these metrics emerge from institutional cultures and traditions. Historicizing the use of numbers in social science research for national governments contextualizes applications of “the scientific method” making it possible to foreground these cultural aspects of their production (Poovey 1998; Savage 2010; Davies 2018). “The social life of methods” is a “critical agenda” (Savage 2013, p. 3) in which social science methods are researched as an object that is implicated in the organization, administration and transformation of social, cultural and economic life. Furthermore, a theoretical framework which prioritizes the cultural, illuminates many everyday questions and functions of public management in terms of people and practices (Hood 2000) that are relevant to cultural policy. Applying “the social life of methods” to cultural policy has foregrounded problems and paradoxes arising from mistaken beliefs in the possibilities for neutrality in evidence-based policymaking (O’Brien 2013, 2016; Campbell, Cox & O’Brien 2017; Oman 2019). The “social life of methods” problematizes methods as “reliable tools for describing and so enacting social reality” (Law 2009, p. 242). Recognizing the performative aspects of the social sciences in and of themselves (Law 2009; Butler 2010) is vital to draw attention to the social and cultural effects of measuring and researching wellbeing for evidence-based policymaking. Butler’s development of “performativity” emerges from a vital requirement in gender studies to not only “trouble” how gender is understood and has been constructed historically (1990) but to reorder how we interpret it and reclaim it as productive. Instead of conceptualizing gender as a neutral and stable binary that categorizes and organizes, it is, instead “performative”, in that it leaves an impression on others by way of behaviours and expressions. In other words, it directs the way we act upon the world rather than our assigned gender causing us to act. As Butler acknowledges when writing about the “performative agency” of economics in the crash, the social sciences have borrowed her formulation “to supply an alternative to causal frameworks for thinking about effects” (2010, p. 147). Problematizing the assumptions of causal direction is one of the aims of “the social life of methods” and is vital to understanding the findings outlined previously with regard to the relationship between cultural participation and wellbeing. In a sense, then, these applications of performativity, in extension of ideas of the speech act (Austin 1962), are used as a form of discourse analysis. In the context of this research, they are applied to a particular example of government social science to reveal the “effects” of this work for, on and in cultural policy: what it says it does and what it actually does

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to the cultures we participate in. A key aspect of Butler’s formulations of performativity that we should return to is that performance does not intend to imply an actor able to perform in any way they choose. Instead the concept recognizes any actor is limited in how they can perform (to communicate, to affect) by what is intelligible by the existing system. In other words, effects are only possible in a system that can accommodate these effects, whether gender, or indeed aspects of the social sciences. In “Performative Agency”, Butler explains that “economic relationships are performed (and re-performed) by certain practices, but that often the full extent of the means and mechanisms (the system) of these performances are only made clear on the condition of breakdown or disruption” (2010, p. 151). This theoretical formulation therefore suggests that a re-performance of certain practices can deconstruct the instruments that describe and structure the social world. This chapter has described research that attempted to incorporate this theory and apply the principle to the social scientific method itself. We can recreate the practices of the social scientists and the statisticians to afford a form of replication. In so doing we can reveal the fissures in the existing modes of representation to look at alternative effects, trouble the status quo and present a reordering of research. Using the social life of methods, I re-examined the MNW Debate as a case of knowledge produced through social science technologies (methods, approaches and systems) which create politically performative “representations” (Law 2009, p. 239). I did so, as “a focus on practice is needed to understand how statisticians put society on display through their work” (Mair et al. 2015, pp. 5–6, in Beer 2016, p. 70). This enables us to follow the numbers “at work” (Mitchell 2005, p. 318) and gain insight into how knowledge “moves” (Freeman & Sturdy 2014) across cultures of participation in management and policy contexts. Re-performance retraces the steps and practices or replicates the analysis of others with some understanding of the cultures of knowledge production in which they operate. The metholodogy’s inductive analysis began in this case with policy analysis and ethnographic approaches to understand the context of production. It is important to acknowledge that re-performance is a term used in auditing to check the workings, specifically the sampling methods of the audited (Loughran 2010). It is also important to state that this was not the intention at the outset of this research. Instead, the re-performance approach evolved through a series of circumstances in which what Butler (2010) calls “fissures” were revealed in what were assumed to be standard knowledge practices. This opened up potential for things to be understood differently by way of a re-ordered narrative and empirical account of the evidence in this project of social science for policy. In the case of answering the question about cultural participation and wellbeing, what is taken for granted about the relationship does not include a neutral representation of either. In disrupting and reordering knowledge practices of both of these domains, the opportunity for

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alternatives is created, arguably one which accommodates the voices of those in the debate and the values they described.

Conclusion This chapter described research that aimed to reorder approaches to understanding the association between cultural participation and wellbeing. This question is prevalent in cultural policy studies and typically involves extracting narratives of improved wellbeing from participants of an arts project or programme. By contrast, this research originates from the premise that if the relationship between participation and culture is robust, it should be testable, beginning with descriptions of wellbeing to see if people include cultural participation therein – without being led by the question. This chapter has described multi-method PhD research for cultural policy studies in order to understand not only the relationship originally tested, but the context in which wellbeing knowledge is made. The research has been framed as a methodological engagement with the issues of wellbeing and cultural participation: having to adapt methods and research sites as situations evolve. As a consequence of the pragmatics and politics of the research, it became necessary to engage with the effects of methods and the performativity of social science itself to reconcile the process. I did so through reconceptualizing Butler’s use of the word ‘re-perform’ and applying it to the context of understanding the culture of metrics. Or, more specifically, how different aspects of culture are enabled or disabled from participating in the increasingly pervasive culture of metrics. Re-performance as an inductive methodology comprises the reenactment of research processes, including data collection (the MNW live events), analysis (such as the ONS data), together with ethnographic methods of observation and purposive interviewing and discourse analysis to understand the context of cultural production that is research. Approaching research in this way allows for the reordering of findings which can help reevaluate the state of evidence for policy or indeed the effects of research more broadly. Investigative epistemologies which evaluate knowledge contexts are vital to develop an understanding of erasures, fissures and the evolution of gaps in knowledge production and presentation. Working with unfamiliar, secondary or marginal data, such as free text fields, can reveal underlying problems with the ordering of knowledge. Furthermore, re-performing aspects of primary data collection uncovers multiple questions about the context of production that are obscured by the way knowledge is habitually reproduced and consumed. Being open to less conventional research approaches and presentations has the potential to reveal issues of method, narrative and practice – and cultures of participation – which are often missed. The focus groups and free text field data present modes of resistance against the power of knowledge, its production, analysis and

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dissemination. Changing the default labels to those of debate participants offers the opportunity to reveal “the work” being done in wellbeing “knowledge”, while also retelling the stories of wellbeing and the relations with different cultures of participation. These retellings offer contributions to the fields of wellbeing studies, knowledge for policy, cultural policy studies and methodologies. This chapter showed that generating metrics on wellbeing or cultural participation involves subjective decision making; thus, the relationship is not presented neutrally. This issue does not lie at the door of increased metrication alone, however. There are broader problems with wellbeing research that are embedded in habitual and ideological, rather than critical or accurate, presentations of knowledge and its practices. These knowledge cultures are shaping the way that wellbeing metrics are produced and that cultural formations are described. This not only changes what we know about wellbeing and culture but challenges the authority of the social sciences to understand progress and facilitate how we participate in a culture of the good life.

Acknowledgements This chapter offers a methodological summary of my thesis and has been presented at the International Social Theory, Politics and The Arts Conference, Manchester, 2018, and Cultures of Participation, Aarhus, Denmark, 2018. I thank the participants of these meetings and seminars, the editors of this book, my supervisors and colleagues on the Understanding Everyday Participation project and for their support. I would also like to thank the ONS for granting access to the free text data set, and my interviewees in the ONS for their cooperation in the broader PhD research project.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities Large Project funding for ‘Understanding Everyday Participation: Articulating Cultural Values’, 2012–2017 [AH/ J005401/1].

Notes 1 This sits, in turn, in a much longer history of describing and controlling social life through measurement, as described by Davies (2018), Porter (1996), and Poovey (1998).

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2 See O’Brien (2013) and Hesmondhalgh et al. (2015) for two detailed explanations of the effects of new public management on cultural policy specifically. 3 The “now discredited” (Belfiore 2002; Merli 2002; Selwood 2002) Matarasso report Use or ornament? (1997), was highly influential for its “impressivesounding numbers” (Belfiore 2009, p. 348). It was described by the then Secretary of State as “compelling’, despite the “paltry evidence” (Belfiore 2009, p. 348). One of the key methodological flaws highlighted by Belfiore, are those relating to asking participants whether they were happier or healthier as a result of participation (2002, p. 99). 4 The Taking Part Survey originated in 2005 and is the main evidence source for DCMS and its sectors. The survey’s main objectives are to provide a central, reliable evidence source that can be used to analyse cultural and sporting engagement, providing a clear picture of why people do or do not engage.

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13 Diving into the archive Google Cultural Institute and the cultural politics of participation Bjarki Valtysson

Internet giants such as Google and Facebook are instrumental in shaping users’ access to information as well as facilitating cultural interfaces for content production, consumption, distribution and participation. Actors of this calibre constitute and control large archives of data, be it through facilitating platforms for user-generated content or through ambitious digitization projects. In the case of Google, these two go hand in hand, as Google is a huge actor in facilitating information sharing through its search machine and web browser, in enabling user-generated content on YouTube and in providing archives of digitized cultural heritage. The last one is covered by Google’s Cultural Institute, which under headlines such as “Let Machu Picchu Take Your Breath Away”, “Get Lost in the British Museum” and “1000 Museums at Your Fingertips” promises to provide unique digital access and participatory designs to celebrated artworks and cultural institutions. This chapter aims to discuss how Google frames users’ cultural participation in selected projects organized by its Cultural Institute, and how the cultural politics of the archive revoke discussions on cultural participation within the field of cultural policy. When discussing the participatory potentials of the internet, the digital archive promises to bring forward logics that facilitate creativity and user engagement. Seen from this perspective, the digital archive is a site where users turn into active participants and co-creators. However, diving into the archive leaves traces of data, and the aim of this chapter is to scrutinize how Google’s Cultural Institute facilitates user participation and at what cost. An important part of this chapter therefore deals with the price users, and partners pay for cultural participation facilitated through an archive provided by a major global technology actor like Google. In order to do this I will conduct a platform analysis of selected projects initiated by the Institute, supported by an analysis of how these participatory designs are encapsulated in the wider frameworks of the cultural politics of Google. This entails focussing on Google’s privacy policy and terms of service and on how these outline the cooperation between Google, established cultural institutions and users.

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Google Cultural Institute and the promise of participation Google Cultural Institute was launched by Google in 2011 and has since then partnered with a number of cultural institutions on making exhibition and archival content digitally available. On the Institute’s website, the project is introduced with the following words: Founded in 2011, the Google Cultural Institute is a not-for-profit initiative that partners with cultural organizations to bring the world’s cultural heritage online. We build free tools and technologies for the cultural sector to showcase and share their gems, making them more widely accessible to a global audience. (Google Cultural Institute n.d.a) To further understand the structure, aim and magnitude of the archive, it is interesting to look more closely at how the Institute represents itself under its “Our History” feature, which dates back to 2011. Here, it is revealed that the first partnership was made with Yad Vashem World Holocaust Centre and brought an archive of 140,000 documents, photographs and objects online. In February the same year, the Google Art Project was launched in Tate Britain with the participation of sixteen other museums from nine countries. In April 2012, 151 project partnerships in 40 countries were announced at Musée d’Orsay in Paris. In May, the World Wonders Project was launched, which uses Street View technology “to explore iconic places across the world” (Google Cultural Institute n.d.a), in partnership with UNESCO, WMF and Getty Images. In October 2012, the first exhibits on major topics were launched, with more than 400 partners using the platform to share their collections and stories. In 2013, focus was on designing interactive experiences for users, as the Institute introduced new storytelling tools for partners, featuring animated zoom views, maps and video/audio captions, and it opened the Lab in Paris where “creative experts and technology come together, share ideas and build new ways to experience art and culture” (Google Cultural Institute n.d.a.). This emphasis on increasing user experience continued in 2014, with the introduction of the Street Art project, the Google Cardboard virtual reality feature, an ultra-high resolution art camera and the development of mobile apps. In 2015, the Street Art project expanded, bringing 10,000 assets from more than 85 partners in 34 countries online, and the site announced that more than 850 partners were using Cultural Institute tools which provide access to 4.7 million collection assets and more than 1,500 curated digital exhibitions. In addition, Google tools were introduced as being an immersive part of the Institute’s doings, with examples such as Chrometab extensions, Google Now cards and Android Wear. Considerable attention has generally been paid to technological

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advances in this historical overview with phrases such as “new immersive experience”, “unique”, “world-class performances” and “instant recognition” being highlighted, in this case concomitant to performing arts, 360º videos and virtual reality tours of museums and galleries. The historical overview ends in 2016, with two stories on celebrating the first five years with what is now a collection of more than 1,000 museums and cultural organizations and the announcement of a new Tiltbrush virtual reality app. The purpose of starting by focussing on the Institute’s own account of its history is not only to introduce this chapter’s object of study but also to further examine how Google chooses to represent its Cultural Institute. Here, technological advances are at the forefront, together with a recurring weight on the scope and nature of the cooperation that the Institute has established with prominent cultural institutions and cultural organizations worldwide. The art camera and the museum view are taken as examples of technological advancements: “Art Camera is our stateof-the-art system for capturing paintings at ultra high-resolution”, and with respect to the museum view, “[s]pecially-designed Street View tools create seamless, 360° virtual tours for our partners, with floor plans and information about the location” (Google Cultural Institute n.d.a). This emphasis on state-of-the-art technology is further underlined in the Institute’s communication to partners, as can be seen in how it explains the potentials of its collection management system: “Control, manage and access your digital assets and metadata with our advanced collection management support. It offers virtually unlimited content hosting space, advanced publishing and image processing technology, and sophisticated searching and filtering tools” (Google Cultural Institute n.d.a). Furthermore, the Institute explains how its storytelling tools and platforms work, where the high-res zoom viewer, expertly narrated videos, viewing notes and maps are particularly highlighted. Finally, the Institute promotes live conversations with experts and the possibility of reaching out to a global audience by publishing on multiple platforms. The platforms highlighted are the Cultural Institute platform, personal mobile apps, personal websites, Chromecast Backdrop, the Chrome browser, Cardboard and Google Now. Apart from the app, these are just suggestions on how to integrate the platform into services that Google already offers its users, such as Google Maps, Google Street View or Google’s Chrome browser. So far, focus has been on how the Institute communicates with its partners. Such partnerships have to be applied for, and Google can basically pick and choose who it wants to work with. Currently, most partners are established cultural institutions and organizations that wish to use the Institute’s tools to make a selection of their own works available on the Institute’s platforms. This part of the external communication on the site is directed to cultural institutions. The other part is directed to those termed

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the culturally curious, which in this case means the users who will engage and participate in the designs that are made available on the Institute’s platforms. Here, the communication is turned towards a more dynamic rhetoric of experience, exploration, involvement and accessibility. This is further articulated with phrases such as “discover artworks, collections and stories from all around the world like never before”, “explore cultural treasures in extraordinary detail and easily share with your friends”, “discover millions of artworks, historical sites and stories”, “magic happens when technology meets culture’ and ‘enjoy culture anytime, anywhere” (Google Cultural Institute n.d.b). In terms of concrete tools, the Institute presents four patterns of access: the zoom function, the museum view, digital exhibitions and Google Cardboard. The zoom function is meant to provide users with details invisible to the naked eye, the museum view is supposed to transcend physical boundaries and Google Cardboard is meant to give an immersive 360º virtual reality experience. The digital exhibitions aim to get users immersed in the stories behind the objects: “Let expert curators inspire you through beautiful stories gathered to uncover and share memorable moments in culture” (Google Cultural Institute n.d.b). With regard to narrated experiences, users are invited to explore art, history and cultural wonders, and with regard to cross-mediated communication patterns, these seamless experiences are channelled through Google’s own products: “Wear beautiful artworks on your wrist with Android Wear. See it every time you open a tab on Google Chrome, or on your TV screen with Chromecast Backdrop” (Google Cultural Institute n.d.b). Finally, in terms of getting involved, users are encouraged to be their own curators, to get social and to learn with experts. Concerning the self-curating function, the Institute maintains that nothing is more personal than culture, and users are therefore encouraged to curate and share with the world their own collections of art, landmarks and historical events. When this function is activated, it automatically links with the users’ Google accounts where they can create a gallery. Users are further instructed to group their favourites into galleries by artists, objects or any topics they choose. Participating in this function therefore presupposes that users have chosen favourites from the archive, which they then can organize into galleries. The social function encourages users to join a community of like-minded people through social media. Google’s own platforms Google+ and YouTube are put in the foreground, but “getting social” is also facilitated by participation on Twitter and Facebook. As is clear from this introductory description of the functionalities which the Google Cultural Institute provides, the Institute is placed within an interesting spectrum when seen from the perspective of cultural participation. It was initiated by one of the largest actors in the global technology industry, and participants are dependent upon Google as a gatekeeper that strategically prioritizes its own platforms and services when designing for

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cultural institutions and users. The involved actors are therefore wholly immersed in the tools that Google makes available either for forming the online presence of their collections or for participating and interacting with these interfaces as users. The cultural institutions have actively asked to be partners and need to work with the tools that Google provides them with. Communication patterns are therefore shaped in certain ways, thereby limiting the participative potentials of users to specific forms. The rhetoric of the Google Cultural Institute in its communication to partners and users is similar to many of the voices expressing favourable views concerning the promise of participation. Typically, these are characterized by emphasizing the engaging, participative possibilities inherent in digital communication by coining concepts such as creative audience and users-turned-producers (Castells 2009), interactive audience (Jenkins 2006), produsers (Bruns 2008) or productive enthusiasts (Gauntlett 2011). These voices certainly do not stand alone in indicating shifts in the roles of producers, consumers, users and citizens, and are in this context barely taken as examples stressing the engaging and participative elements that a lot of digital media and digital communication allow for. These engaging potentials are furthermore meant to indicate certain shifts from passive, non-visual forms of participation to active, visual forms of participation exemplified in Lawrence Lessig’s (2008) shift from read-only cultures to read-write cultures as well as David Gauntlett’s (2011) move from a sit back and be told culture to a making and doing culture. Discursively, this is quite apparent in the ways the Google Cultural Institute chooses to address both cultural institutions and users, with promises of reaching out to global audiences and magical experiences when technology meets culture. However, technology does not just meet culture. The reason for this is, as Jose van Dijck maintains, that a platform cannot be perceived as an intermediary but rather as a mediator, as it shapes the performance of social acts: Technologically speaking, platforms are the providers of software, (sometimes) hardware, and services that help code social activities into a computational architecture; they process (meta)data through algorithms and formatted protocols before presenting their interpreted logic in the form of user-friendly interfaces with default settings that reflect the platform owner’s strategic choices. (2013, p. 29) Van Dijck furthermore underlines the usefulness of perceiving platforms as techno-cultural constructs and as socioeconomic structures. This means paying particular attention to technology and how it shapes uses and users and to what kind of content comes out of the interactions between

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the two. Furthermore, she emphasizes the need to be attentive to ownership, the business model and the governance of platforms, as these are instrumental in coming closer to the general cultural politics of platforms, which in this case refers to Google and its Cultural Institute. Even though van Dijck’s suggestion is novel and certainly useful in the context of the Google Cultural Institute, it is still easier said than done to fully understand the global governance, regulation and business model of a large-scale actor such as Google, especially when considering the wider implications of citizen rights and national cultural institutions. In this respect, it is useful to refer to visible and invisible governing on and by platforms provided by the Google Cultural Institute. On the visible part, it is important to pay attention to how technology shapes user manoeuvrability, and in which contexts (Valtysson 2014). What this means is how the interface with which cultural institutions are provided and by which users are confronted determines participative potentials in certain ways. Furthermore, it is also important to decipher the context in question, as prominent cultural institutions add a certain “charge” to the digital space (Valtysson & Holdgaard 2019), which constitutes the Google Cultural Institute. The reason for this is that the cultural institutions chosen to generate the communication of the Google Cultural Institute are prominent institutions of historical, cultural and political significance and are known for producing, maintaining and representing common identities, history and heritage. This adds an extra layer to the curatorial designs that users experience through the Institute’s interface. At the same time, the cultural institutions are conditioned by the tools Google puts at their disposal. However, limited as they may be, they are still visible, and their governing logics can therefore be analysed. This is not the case with the algorithmic logics of the Institute and how it further processes the data which users (and the involved cultural institutions) leave when interacting with the platforms. The invisible governing logics of Google’s Cultural Institute are largely based on the prioritization of its algorithms. Algorithmic governing prioritizes certain ways of perceiving the world and focuses on how these are presented to users through specific interfaces. Prioritizations of this sort have a real effect, and because they are specifically linked to visible interfaces, as in cultures governed by algorithmic logics, the visible and the invisible cannot be kept apart. Such cultural forms therefore bring approaches within cultural policy research together, as they ask crucial questions about what kind of communicative spaces and networked publics platforms like the Google Cultural Institute constitute, as well as how the power of the algorithm governs its subjects. With regard to power, Beer states that this “is undoubtedly an expression of power, not of someone having power over someone else, but of the software making choices and connections in complex and unpredictable ways in order to shape the everyday experiences of the user” (2009, p. 997). Indeed, algorithms’

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calculative recommendation, visibility and circulation (Roberge & Seyfert 2016), and their somewhat deceiving promises of objectivity (Gillespie 2014), make them powerful instruments in prioritizing certain values, knowledge and ideas. What they do is to search, to categorize, to visualize and to place. Or, as Rob Kitchin notes, algorithms are “used to seduce, coerce, discipline, regulate and control” (2017, p. 19). While this certainly applies to the algorithmic logics of the Google Cultural Institute, these logics cannot be separated from the platform logics put forward when defining the user manoeuvrability within its interface and how users are pushed towards certain modes of participation. Some theoreticians choose to focus on the critical side of such platform politics, emphasizing elements of digital labour, such as the fact that users “perform unpaid, value-generating labor” (Fuchs 2013, p. 213), while operating services by a platform provider like Google, where search results are personalized and user behaviour and data is resold to advertising clients. This is a crucial element of what Shosana Zuboff refers to as surveillance capitalism, where “populations are targets of data extraction” (2015, p. 86). Finally, in a similar vein, Evelyn Ruppert et al. refer to such populations as governing subjects and further investigate how societies dominated by the interests and instrumental logics of large-scale platform providers can be understood based on what they refer to as data politics. On a broader scale, data politics “is concerned with not only political struggles around data collection and its deployments, but how data is generative of new forms of power relations and politics at different and interconnected scales” (2017, p. 2). They furthermore refer to three interrelated conditions that constitute data politics: worlds, subjects and rights. Subsequently, they emphasize the importance of analysing data politics as material conditions of the communicative infrastructures of the internet and dominant platforms and services such as those provided by Google, how data subjects are framed by these infrastructures as producers and consumers of data and how subjects exercise and claim rights within such environments. Even though there certainly is a growing body of literature that problematizes the conditions of participation in the algorithmic platform society, there is still an inherent tension in the way these actually work. To put it bluntly, many of the most prominent platforms, be it Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter or Google’s search engine, are dependent upon stimuli from users. Without users and without usage, these platforms are basically empty shells. Standardized and quite sterile interfaces with form but no content. Therefore, there is an essential degree of human agency involved in triggering the reactions, choices and governing provided by the algorithmic logics of platforms. In this context, David Beer foresees reflexive citizens who “may begin to actively shape the information so as to direct the way that the software reacts to them” (2009, p. 997), and Jose van Dijck and Thomas Poell take the same position when discussing

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the programmability of social media logic, maintaining that “users retain significant agency in the process of steering programmability not only through their own contributions but also because they may resist coded instructions or defy protocols” (2013, p. 6). This is also Nick Seaver’s point in perceiving algorithms not in culture but as culture: “Like other aspects of culture, algorithms are enacted by practices which do not heed a strong distinction between technical and non-technical concerns, but rather blend them together” (2017, p. 5). Seaver therefore stresses that algorithms are not cultural because they work on things, or because of popular concern, but rather “because they are composed of collective human practices” (2017, p. 5). Therefore, instead of praising or loathing the participative potentials of users on commercial digital platforms, either by celebrating the engaging potentials of prosumers, produsers, creative audiences, interactive audiences and productive enthusiasts, or criticizing the commodification, labour patterns, surveillance and privacy breaches of the same, it is more useful to analyse these patterns of participation in proper contexts. The context of this chapter is the Google Cultural Institute, and therefore, the forthcoming analysis will start by accounting for how participation is tailored on the Google Cultural Institute platform and whether it lives up to the promises of participation put forward on its site. This tailoring of participation and the data traces that it leaves will then be put in the broader perspective of Google’s privacy policy and terms of service. However, one of the interesting parts of the Google Cultural Institute is that it is not only a platform provider interacting with and providing participatory potentials for users, as the cultural institutions also play an important role. Therefore, the analysis will conclude by examining these dynamics in a broader perspective.

Participation on the Google Cultural Institute platform As previously mentioned, the Google Cultural Institute provides partners and users with access to their own technologies and platforms, such as Google Street View and Google Zoom, as well as providing interface structures that push partners to selecting certain representational forms. These include focus on artists, collections, featured themes and featured stories. As with all designs of this sort, some are prioritized at the account of others. This prioritization shifts over time, but one of the characteristics of archives is that not all objects, and knowledge, can be presented in the same way, at the same time. In the case of the Google Cultural Institute, these can be prioritizations based on algorithms, or human actors. We do not really know, but as previously stated algorithms react to stimuli, and therefore there is always a reciprocal relation between human agency and algorithmic calculations when contained within platforms like the Google Cultural Institute. In this context, it is useful to look closer at the

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themes, narratives and institutions that are highlighted on the front page that welcomes users who access the archive. The analytical strategy used here is therefore to take what the archive provides, meaning to follow the recommendation and prioritization provided by the Institute. When I entered the archive the first featured theme on its front page1 was Museum Island Berlin: More than 6,000 years of human history (Google Cultural Institute n.d.e). Here I could choose between going forward to the history or the buildings. When choosing the history I was confronted with an editorial feature, which is a trustworthy, professionally communicated and curated account of the Museum Island Berlin and its five museums, written by professional museum workers at the respective museums. Google provides the tools, the interface design and the construction of the narrative, in the same vein as Facebook, Google+ and Twitter do, but in this case, it is not the general user that fills it with content but professional museum workers. This textual historical overview is further supplemented with one Google Street View snapshot of each museum, which the curators deem of particular interest. The site allows users to add the museum to their favourites, to copy the link to this specific site or to share it on social media. The same is true of the building function, which is neatly curated, and the informative text is supplemented with snapshots from Street View and, in some cases, audio recorded narratives. The site dedicated to the Museum Island Berlin then moves on from a function called The history of us, which is a curated feature that includes similar artefacts from different museums, to the History’s most beautiful woman with specific focus on Queen Nefertiti. Again, the narrative is informative in relation to the subject and uses the same tools as previously mentioned, adding audiovisual material to the mix. The museum furthermore provides a guided tour of 14 artworks under the heading The hidden stories behind the masterpieces where in particular zoom technology is used together with text to point to specific details in the paintings. The museum focusses specifically on its Bronze Age treasure, where users are guided through the Bronze Age and allowed to explore a 3D model of the Berlin Gold Hat. The Pergamon Altar and the Ishtar Gate are also in focus, again by carefully constructing informative narratives based on the same techniques. Finally, the museum shares stories on preservation, conservation and behind the scenes. This is basically the narrative construction that recurs throughout the cultural institution’s presence on the Google Cultural Institute platform. There are of course large differences between partners with regard to how much they have invested in their partnership with the Institute. Museum Island Berlin is specifically highlighted by the Institute, as it is a prominent cultural institution and has invested quite a bit in digitization and used the Institute’s tools quite extensively to construct narratives and make use of the different available technologies. Another example is that of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. This profile is also highlighted by the

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Institute, and even though it is not as extensive as the Berlin case it has constructed narratives like The address of Vermeer’s little street discovered and The night watch. However, these two cases from highly established, large cultural institutions cannot be said to be representative of the input and volume that museums and cultural institutions contribute to the archive. This has more to do with policy than prestige, as many prestigious institutions, such as MoMa, and quite a few national museums and galleries in, for instance, Poland, Denmark, Japan, Spain and India have quite a modest presence in the archive. In methodological terms, the purpose of such enumeration is not to provide an overview of genres, narratives, volume, types of institutions, geographical spread etc., as that would be a very different research objective. The analytical strategy in the context of this chapter is centred on how cultural participation is formed by the platform and which kind of data traces such participation leaves. However, in terms of cultural representation, it is still relevant to reflect on the cultural politics of the archive, who is in and who is out, who is put to the fore and who is kept in the background. This is why I am following and sensing the logics of what the archive gives to me. In line with this approach it is interesting that a few days after the archive had placed Museum Island Berlin at the forefront, it replaced it with an editorial feature called 10 top museums you can explore right here, right now (Google Cultural Institute n.d.f).2 The editorial feature ranked ten museums as the top museums and pushed them forward in the interface construction so that they were the first material users see when accessing the archive. There is a lot of curational power in an act of this sort, a curational power that in many ways contradicts the usergenerated promise of digital participation. In this case this power is manifested in a rather conservative snapshot of the top ten museums in the world, which are listed as the British Museum, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the MASP in Sao Paulo and the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. What these museums have in common, apart from prestige, is an ambitious presence in the Google Cultural Institute, using the functions provided by the Institute in similar ways, as the case is with the Museum Island Berlin. This visible power to represent the archive is central to the cultural politics of the Google Cultural Institute; power that raises significant questions of who is represented and in which contexts. This is what Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon (1995) emphasized in their account of the representational power of cultural politics, asking questions such as whose culture should be the official and whose should be subordinated? Which cultures should be put to the fore as worthy of display and which

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should be hidden? Whose history will be remembered and whose forgotten? Who should be heard and who should be silenced? And quite simply: “Who is representing whom and on what basis?” (1995, p. 4). These are interesting questions for understanding the cultural politics of the archive, as it has a double gatekeeper role – between the Institute and partners, and between the two and the users. The first follows the logics of partners providing narratives and items to the archive, which are carefully constructed under the partners’ profiles. However, much of the material in the archive is not structured by the partners’ profiles but rather by themes narrated by algorithms. An example of this is the theme Art nouveau (Google Cultural Institute n.d.c), which provides 1,040 items that have been deemed appropriate and can be organized by users based on the criteria popularity, colour and time. In fact this is one of the most prominent functions of the archive and is widely used by the Institute. Another example is Cats in ancient history (Google Cultural Institute n.d.d). While this function certainly is playful and provides new associations, there is still the crucial question of who picks the theme and how the theme is algorithmically constructed? With digitization the volume definitely has expanded, but the fundamental principles of the archive and how it relates to Jordan and Weedon’s questions remain the same. In terms of cultural participation, the partners are, as previously demonstrated, contained within the structure provided by the interface design and the tools offered by Google. The partners’ user manoeuvrability is therefore limited. However, when taking a further look at what users are allowed to do in terms of cultural participation, we go from limited to severely limited. As already described, the tools offered by the Google Cultural Institute are the Zoom and Street View functions, and the possibility of reading text and listening to audiovisual material provided both by professional curators and thematized and algorithmically constructed narratives. Apart from that, users can use the tools that Google puts at their disposal to scroll and copy links, they can share on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, email, Vkontakte and Classroom, and they can add to favourites and create their own collections. However, in terms of the aims put forward in the Institute’s own description directed at the culturally curious, this seems to be rather hollow, and certainly at odds with the aims of and the prolific literature on participatory cultures. Quite frankly, it is difficult to understand engaging and participatory conceptualizations like creative audience, interactive audience, users-turnedprodusers, productive enthusiasts, read-write culture and making and doing culture when the object of analysis is the Google Cultural Institute.

The traces of participation In the prior section I discussed the participative potentials of partners and the culturally curious when contained within the archive of the Google

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Cultural Institute. One of the findings of that analysis points towards a certain mismatch between the somewhat enthusiastic proclamations of the participative potentials of digital communications and the actual participative potentials that the archive provides for. However, there is another side to these limited participative formats which often slips under the radar. I choose to call this the traces of participation and will briefly discuss them from the viewpoint of Google’s privacy policy and terms of service. While the Google Cultural Institute specifically maintains that the project is not-for-profit, the archive all the same adheres to Google’s general terms of service and privacy policy. Indeed, when users scroll down the page which explains the objectives of the Institute, at the bottom they find links to these policies. The reason why I mention this is once again to bring attention to what is referred to as the platform society, which automatically invokes concepts relevant to surveillance capitalism, privacy, digital labour, data politics and algorithmic control. Some of these concepts have already been explained and should be kept in mind when engaging with Google’s privacy policy and terms of service. Google’s terms of service, effective 22 January 2019, particularly focus on users’ content in Google’s services. Here, the terms clearly state that users hold any intellectual property rights: “Some of our Services allow you to upload, submit, store, send or receive content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours” (Google Terms of Service 22 January 2019). However, even though users retain ownership, they still give Google permission to use the data in quite extensive ways: When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works . . . communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. (Google Terms of Service 22 January 2019) According to Google, this extensive license is granted for the purpose of operating, promoting and improving Google’s services. With regard to further treatment of the data that users give Google permission to access, the terms of service state that “[o]ur automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection”. Furthermore, it is stated that Google may display “actions you take on Google or on third-party applications connected to your Google Account (such as +1’s, reviews you write and comments you post) in our Services, including displaying in ads and other commercial contexts”.

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The terms of service further refer to Google’s privacy policy for more information of the uses and storage of user data, and when taking a further look at the policy a similar pattern emerges. The policy of interest in this chapter is the “post-GDPR” effective from 22 January 2019, which therefore gives an accurate picture of the current state of affairs, and also how Google reacts to the demands put forward in the GDPR. Discursively, the new privacy policy takes a more personal approach than the terms of service, addressing the users on the grounds of both protecting and providing better services: We collect information to provide better services to all our users – from figuring out basic stuff like which language you speak, to more complex things like which ads you’ll find most useful, the people who matter most to you online, or which YouTube videos you might like and “[w]e also collect the content you create, upload, or receive from others when using our services” (Google privacy policy 22 January 2019). While this certainly is in line with what is stated in the terms of service, the privacy policy is much more detailed as regards collected information. This includes the apps, browsers and devices users use to access Google services like the Google Cultural Institute, unique identifiers, browser types and settings, device types, operating systems, mobile network information, IP addresses, crash reports, system activity and date and time of requests. In terms of algorithmic control, the policy provides examples of what kind of information is collected based on users’ activity, for instance YouTube videos that we might like. In the YouTube example, it is specifically mentioned that Google collects terms we search for, videos we watch, views and interactions with content and ads, voice and audio information when we use audio features, purchase activities, people whom we communicate with or share content with, activities on third-party sites and apps that use Google’s services. Google also collects information from publicly accessible sources as well as marketing partners, business services and advertisers. In terms of how the data collection occurs, the policy mentions “various technologies to collect and store information, including cookies, pixel tags, local storage, such as browser web storage or application data caches, databases, and server logs”. All this information is used to measure performance “for analytics and measurement to understand how our services are used” and to “use algorithms to recognize patterns in data” (Google privacy policy 22 January 2019). As a response to the GDPR, the policy is more detailed concerning customized privacy control. However, as should be clear by now, the amount of information Google collects on its users when operating a service like the Google Cultural Institute is massive. Furthermore, it is quite striking how vague the policy is in many respects; especially the processing of information

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is unclear: “We also allow specific partners to collect information from your browser or device for advertising and measurement purposes using their own cookies or similar technologies” (Google privacy policy 22 January 2019). What this snapshot of Google’s policies demonstrates is that when regarding platforms as mediators of cultural participation, it is important to look at them in their full complexity, as Van Dijck (2013) and Ruppert, Isin and Bigo (2017) advocate for. While not all of the elements they recommend have been discussed in the context of this chapter, a central issue has been to look further at how participation on the Google Cultural Institute platform is tailored and what kind of traces this participation leaves. While users and partners operating within the Institute do not pay directly for their presence in the archive, the sheer volume of information and the intended use of information as presented in Google’s contractual agreements certainly feeds directly into Google’s business models. From the viewpoint of the users, the price of participation is personal data, and from the viewpoint of the partners, the digitized objects that they feed into the archive adhere to the algorithmic logics of the Google Cultural Institute, where certain narratives and items are inevitably prioritized at the account of others. This has of course always been the case with the sheer act of diving into archives. However, returning to the questions posed by Jordan and Weedon, the answers to these have been made increasingly opaque due to the algorithmic logic of platforms like the Google Cultural Institute and the ways the traces of participation are used for Google’s commercial purposes.

Conclusion When these considerations on cultural participation are projected on the construction of the Google Cultural Institute, there seem to be a few things at stake. First, the archive is based on partnerships with prominent cultural institutions and organizations which make a request to become partners and thereby agree on using the tools and terms of service that Google puts at their disposal. However, while prominence certainly provides the archive with an extra “charge”, the cultural institutions have all the same invested differently in the project. Some have used a great deal of resources to construct the narratives, like the Museum Island Berlin, while others are more reserved. Here, it is important to pay attention to the gatekeeper role of archives and the fact that they can never treat everyone equally. The pre-selecting of ten cultural institutions is a good example of this. Second, the tools provided by Google are surprisingly limited considering that we are talking about a dominant technology giant at a global scale. The institutions therefore succumb to very steered and limited forms of representation: digitization, zoom, street view, 3D construction and audiovisual and text material. This has to be said to be

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a rather conventional way of representing cultural institutions, considering the manifold forms of representation that digital technology actually allows for. Third, the archive actually provides for a double-layered gatekeeper function, the first being the relations between the Google Cultural Institute and its partners and the second being the relations between the two and user participation. Cultural participation is therefore double layered and conditioned by the cultural politics of the Institute. In both cases, user manoeuvrability of partners and users in terms of cultural participation is severely limited and not in sync with the aims set out in the Institute’s own account of these potentials. Fourth, there is an underlying algorithmic control that works both by prioritizing and by constructing narratives. This construction is based on digitized objects that can be prioritized and constructed as narratives in many ways. Indeed, one of the main functions of the archive is grounded in constructing narratives across museums and institutions that have provided digitized items to the archive. While this certainly has advantages in terms of both contextual awareness and sheer playfulness, the logics behind the selections are hidden. Fifth, to maintain that the Google Cultural Institute is not-for-profit is highly contestable. It is true that partners and users do not directly pay for the service. However, as we discovered by reading the privacy policy and terms of service, Google collects information on user behaviour and uses this information for commercial purposes. That should not come as a surprise, as this is basically Google’s business model. As a token of this when I now write “cultural institute” in my search browser, the Google Cultural Institute is the first to show up. This was not the case prior to writing this chapter.

Notes 1 This analysis was conducted on 26 October 2018. Changes are frequently made on the front page of the Google Cultural Institute in relation to the prioritisation of themes and cultural institutions. 2 This was 7 November 2018.

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Gillespie, T 2014, ‘The relevance of algorithms’, in T Gillespie, PJ Boczkowski & KA Foot (eds.), Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society, The MIT Press, Cambridge & London, pp. 167–194. Google Cultural Institute n.d.a, ‘About partners’, online, viewed 11 October 2018, www.google.com/culturalinstitute/about/partners/. Google Cultural Institute n.d.b, ‘About users’, online, viewed 15 October 2018, www.google.com/culturalinstitute/about/users/. Google Cultural Institute n.d.c, ‘Art nouveau’, online, viewed 8 November 2018, https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/m0g6pl?col=RGB_CE4A3F. Google Cultural Institute n.d.d, ‘Cat’, online, viewed 8 November 2018, https:// artsandculture.google.com/entity/m01yrx?categoryId=other&date=-2150. Google Cultural Institute n.d.e, ‘Museum Island Berlin’, online, viewed 8 November 2018, https://artsandculture.google.com/project/museum-island-berlin. Google Cultural Institute n.d.f, ‘10 Top museums you can explore right here, right now’, online, viewed 8 November 2018, https://artsandculture.google. com/theme/igKSKBBnEBSGKg. Google Privacy Policy, 22 January 2019, online, https://policies.google.com/ privacy?hl=en&gl=dk. Google Terms and Service, 22 January 2019, online, https://policies.google.com/ terms?hl=en&gl=dk. Jenkins, H 2006, Fans, bloggers, and gamers: Exploring participatory culture, New York University Press, New York & London. Jordan, G & Weedon, C 1995, Cultural politics: Class, gender, race and the postmodern world, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford & Cambridge. Kitchin, R 2017, ‘Thinking critically about and researching algorithms’, Information, Communication & Society, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 14–29. Lessig, L 2008, Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy, The Penguin Press, New York. Roberge, J & Seyfert, R 2016, ‘What are algorithmic cultures?, in R Seyfert & J Roberge (eds.), Algorithmic cultures: Essays on meaning, performance and new technologies, Routledge, New York, pp. 1–25. Ruppert, E, Isin, E & Bigo, D 2017, ‘Data politics’, Big Data & Society, pp. 1–7. Seaver, N 2017, ‘Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems’, Big Data & Society, pp. 1–12. Valtysson, B 2014, ‘Conditioned participation: Technology, context & usermanoeuvrability’, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 337–345. Valtysson, B & Holdgaard, N 2019, ‘The museum as a charged space: The duality of digital museum communication’, in K Drotner, V Dziekan, R Parry & KC Schrøder (eds.), The routledge handbook of museums, media and communication, Routledge, London, pp. 159–171. Van Dijck, J 2013, The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Van Dijck, J & Poell, T 2013, ‘Understanding social media logic’, Media and Communication, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 2–14. Zuboff, S 2015, ‘Big other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization’, Journal of Information Technology, vol. 30, pp. 75–89.

Index

360 panorama 99, 103–105 aesthetic theory 3, 5, 71 affordances 5–7, 114–125, 131, 133–136, 139, 140, 142–144, 149, 151 agency 4, 7, 9, 52, 54, 58–60, 65–67, 75, 94, 136, 139, 143, 147, 148, 161, 177, 185–197, 197nn3–4, 197nn6–7, 204, 226–227 algorithm 6, 94, 103–105, 115, 140, 158, 224–227, 230–234 Andersen, C. 96, 106–107 app 102, 104, 156–159, 222 apparatus theory 96, 97, 100 archive 10, 44, 47, 206, 220–221, 223, 228–231, 233–234 arm’s length principle 171, 175–176, 179 art: art festivals 38, 66; art institutions 67; art museums 9, 78, 185–192, 196, 197n5 Arts Council England 168, 175, 176 Arts Council of Great Britain 169, 171 assembly 3, 13–27 Atlas Lamenti 4, 36, 38–42, 39, 47 augmented environment 7, 101, 133–135, 141–144 autonomy 3, 4, 9, 30–48, 57, 190 Bala, S. 55, 57, 63 bijutsu dantai 34, 38, 47 biological entrepreneur 154 biomedicalization 149 Bishop, C. 30, 53, 55, 62, 73, 77, 94, 130, 145 Bolin, F. 7, 148, 149, 152–158, 160 Butler, J. 17–19, 202, 204, 213–214

cancer 7, 147–156, 160–161 Canclini, N.G. 32–33, 37, 42 Carpentier, N. 73, 151, 152, 156 civic re-enactment 22 co-articulation 158 co-creation 4, 9, 52, 66, 67, 155, 186, 190–195 collaborative art 32, 37, 55, 130 collection management 9, 186, 190–192, 195, 222 collective 25–27, 30–32, 34, 38, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48, 52, 66, 137, 139, 153, 154, 173, 186, 190, 194, 195, 227 collectivity 3, 30–48 Collins, K. 132 common good 73, 158–160 community 2, 4, 9, 14, 16, 23, 25, 36, 37, 42, 47, 53, 54, 57, 64, 68, 71–72, 76, 83–86, 137–138, 149, 153, 156, 157, 171, 174–175, 194–195, 197, 202, 206, 210, 211, 223 connectivity 94, 110, 113, 133, 137, 139, 158 consumer-generated VR 105 co-production 30, 80, 81 Cornwall, A. 71, 75, 85, 190–192, 197 critical participation 106 critique of ideology 96 cross-cultural collaboration 4, 51–68 cultural education 186 cultural institution 211, 228 cultural non-participant 8–9, 170, 176–179 cultural participation 1–2, 5–10, 71–73, 94, 167–169, 177–180, 201–205, 209, 210, 212–216, 220, 223, 229, 230, 233–234 cultural policy 1, 7–10, 56, 71, 73, 74, 167–168, 171, 172, 175, 177–181,

Index 201–204, 210, 213, 215, 216, 217n2, 220, 225 cultural politics 10, 220, 225, 229–230, 234 cultural sector 75, 78, 173, 180, 201, 203, 209, 221 cultures of participation 1–3, 7, 10, 13, 94, 96, 201, 202, 204, 212, 214–216 datafication 153, 158–160 data politics 226, 231 defensive instrumentalism 176 deliberative democracy 179 democracy 17, 23, 55, 72–73, 152, 171, 178, 179, 210 democratisation 72, 82n4, 173, 178, 185 development studies 5, 71 digital art 4 digital communication 116, 224, 231 digital labour 5, 226, 231 digital media 1–2, 5–6, 10, 148, 150–152, 224 digital photographs 110–111, 113–114, 120–123 Dijck, J.V. 110, 112, 113, 117, 121, 124, 149, 151, 156, 158–160, 224–226, 233 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 3–4, 30, 35, 36, 46, 47 Elsaesser, T. 96, 100, 103, 106 environments 4, 7, 25, 35, 46, 52, 54–55, 58, 59, 64–67, 93, 95, 99, 100–104, 106–107, 114, 116, 133–144, 160, 172, 188, 192, 194, 195, 197n5, 203, 208, 211, 226 equality 3, 13, 75, 87n4, 159, 177, 180, 193 everyday participation 8, 72, 73, 167, 178, 210 evidence-based policy 213 expertise 54, 74, 80, 175, 195, 196, 204 focus groups 215 Foucault, M. 147, 168 free text data/fields 206–209, 211–212, 215 gaming 96, 106 GDPR 232 Gibson, James 114, 121, 133, 167, 210

237

good life, the 202, 204, 206, 210, 216 Google 10, 103, 105, 159, 220–234 Google Cultural Institute 10, 220–234, 234n1 Gottschalk Mazouz, N. 189 government 16, 19–20, 23, 31, 33, 35, 37, 64, 167, 171, 175–177, 179, 202–204, 213 government social science 202, 213 Green Room Project 4, 36, 42–47 heteronomy 31 high-end virtual reality 105 Hinterwaldner, I. 101 illness 7, 147–154, 160–161 immersion 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106–107, 143 immersive experience 98, 99, 222 installation art 4, 54 institutions 1–2, 4–5, 7–8, 10, 13, 19, 20, 33, 34, 56, 71, 73–76, 78, 85, 97, 147, 150, 157, 159, 168, 169, 172, 185, 191–192, 197, 210–211, 220–222, 224–225, 229, 233–234, 234n1 interaction types 7, 10, 26, 36, 46, 47, 51, 53–55, 57, 60, 83, 93, 95, 101, 106, 110–112, 130, 132, 133, 136–138, 143, 144, 150, 158, 160, 174, 196, 224, 232 interactivity 59, 93, 129, 131, 132, 134, 144 interests 4, 5, 32, 37, 57, 71, 74–77, 84–86, 150, 158–160, 171, 180, 209, 212, 226 interface 2, 94, 96, 102, 106–107, 115, 118, 136, 187–188, 220, 224–230 Jancovich, L. 8, 72, 74, 167–168, 175, 177 Jarvis, P. 195–196 Kester, G. 31–32, 55, 57, 58, 60, 62, 130 Keynes, J.M. 171 knowledge production 185, 186, 189, 190, 193, 195–196, 209, 214, 215 learning models 186 lived culture 116, 156, 204 Malig, E. 4, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 47 Marx, K. 170

238

Index

materiality 2, 45, 74, 114, 129, 130, 131, 133, 136, 144, 145 meaning-making 133, 192, 193 measures 9, 155, 167, 201–204, 209, 212 measuring national wellbeing debate 202–204, 207, 208 mediality 7, 115, 121, 131–133 media participation 149, 152, 153 metainterface 107 metrics 213, 215, 216 Mill, J.S. 173–174 motivation 41, 53, 57, 61, 73, 75, 76, 83, 84, 115, 117, 122, 124, 145, 150, 156 multivalence 7, 149, 153, 157–160 narrative 14, 30, 35, 37, 56, 93, 96, 101, 105, 106, 111, 114, 152, 154, 156, 186–187, 210, 214–215, 228–230, 233–234 National statistics (office for) 10, 201–204, 207 networked 7, 100, 103, 111–115, 121–125, 133–135, 137–140, 144, 189, 225 new labour 175 new public management 201, 217n2 non-participation 4, 8, 57, 63, 167, 168, 170, 174 ownership 4, 9, 26, 30, 41, 42, 48, 74–77, 80, 85, 86, 186, 187, 199, 225, 231 parenting 112–115, 120, 124–125 Parsons, T. 147 participatory art 2–6, 11, 14, 27, 30, 31, 51–53, 55–57, 71, 75, 77, 80, 82, 84, 85, 86, 129, 130, 131, 144, 175, 194 participatory patient 7, 147–161 participatory surveillance 6, 110–111, 124 patient 7, 147–161 performance 3, 9, 14–15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 23, 27n1, 28nn3–4, 35, 42, 47, 55, 58, 78, 81–84, 111, 113, 118–119, 123, 134–135, 141, 159, 177, 191, 192, 202, 204, 205, 211–215, 222, 224, 232 performativity 9, 14, 17, 18, 202, 213–215

photospheres 99, 104, 105 platformization 156, 159, 161 platform society 158–159, 226, 231 Pold, S. 96, 106–107 policy attachment 176 politics of participation 10, 57, 66, 67, 220 postautonomy 4, 32, 33, 37, 38, 42, 46, 47, 48 privacy policy 10, 220, 227, 231–234 problematisation 132, 151, 168, 174, 213, 226 public participation 9, 73 public sphere 5, 16, 17, 18, 161 public value 7, 35, 149, 158–161 qualitative methods 9–10, 36, 53, 110, 115, 116, 149, 202, 203, 205 Rancière, J. 23, 71, 73, 83, 151, 186, 192, 193 realism 100 re-enactment 22 regional art 3, 36, 175 reperformance 9, 202, 204, 205, 211–215 Rettberg, S. 103–106, 123, 154 Rogoff, I. 4, 15, 27n2, 52, 57, 62, 85, 87n3 Sakai, K. 4, 42–44, 44, 46, 47 sharenting 112, 113 simulation 22, 95, 98, 99, 101, 104, 107 social indicators 204 social life of methods 202, 213–214 social media 1, 5, 7, 102–103, 110–117, 119–121, 123–125, 125n1, 140, 147–161, 193, 223, 227, 228 sound art 6–7, 129–145 sound installation 132, 135–138, 141, 143 sound sculpture 134–137, 144 soundwalk 134, 135, 141–143 Stacey, J. 148, 152, 154 Sternfeld, N. 15, 27n2, 71, 73–75, 83, 85 strategy 20, 27n2, 33, 72, 102, 103, 111, 171, 228–229 street art 4, 52–57, 64–67, 221 systemic image 6, 101, 103, 107 technology 2, 5, 94–99, 101, 103, 107, 110, 115, 117, 133, 141, 142, 156, 220–225, 228, 233, 234

Index terms of service 10, 220, 227, 231–234 Tomii, R. 30, 34–35 unsure localization 33, 42, 46 urban public space 4, 51–68 valuation 5, 71, 152, 157, 158, 161 value 7, 8, 10, 20, 31, 35, 53, 56, 63, 72, 87n4, 95, 97, 112, 122, 124, 130, 137, 147, 149, 152–154,

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156–161, 167, 169, 173, 174, 176–177, 179–181, 196, 201, 202, 205, 209, 210, 226 virtual reality (VR) 6, 93, 94–107, 221–223; participatory culture 93, 105 visibility 7, 100, 114, 119, 125, 148, 149, 151, 154, 161, 226 Wenger, E. 194 William, M. 170