Convergence Culture: Reality TV is billed as live entertainment but it's edited. There's a greater element of risk on the web, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.
The essence of "live performance" is changing as the web and recording technology allow us to be more selective about what we watch and when. The web's ability to put people in contact with each other, regardless of where they are, raises new and interesting possibilities. The real innovations, though, are coming from people who understand the new need for immediacy.
Content producers on the web have the example of reality TV as a genre that came from nowhere and quickly dominated screens across the world. Reality TV is essentially an "as-live" experience , recorded and edited from live footage but given the appearance of a live event. Celebrity Big Brotheris a case in point. In the recent "Jade Goody" episode, it emerged the racism that so famously hit the screens could have been edited out by the producers.
The broadcaster Channel 4 deliberately took a chance on racism as entertainment and then had to deal with the fallout. For viewers, it became apparent that the "as live" genre is manipulated with possibly mendacious intent. These programmes promise the tension of live performance without taking the risks.
The essence of real live performance is handled only by rare artists such as Lenny Bruce and Peter Cook, comedians who were capable of taking audiences to the precipice of the performer's potential for failure.
There is a trend now towards simulating those distant risks and that is essentially what Reality TV has traded on. It is characterised by imminent fabricated deadlines and time-sensitive challenges rather than by any concept of reality. Celebrity Big Brother, I'm a Celebrityor The Restaurantare programmes that satisfy in us a need to believe decisions made before our eyes involve an adrenalin rush for participants and really matter. They have reintroduced to audiences the potential for failure, the long walk that we used to take once in a generation with real artists.
The drama of live entertainment, even when simulated, has become more compelling. Now it's branching out. In Amsterdam the Paradiso Club hosts significant up-and-coming bands from around the world. Those live acts are now available through www.fabchannel.com. Fabchannel is cementing Amsterdam's reputation as a place where innovative cultures such as rock music meet the innovative edge of the web.
Media Republic's Eccky is another example. Ecckys are baby avatars - cartoons to me and you - and they represent a new form of entertainment. On the Eccky website people have the opportunity to pick a partner with whom to have and raise an Eccky, a baby. It's relationship building without the messy bits in between.
Phenomenally successful Ecckys are sponsored now by a variety of large Dutch companies. Your Eccky comes with free insurance courtesy of insurer OHRA.
What Ecckys have in common with reality TV is that they too simulate adrenalin but in this case through the risk of relationships rather than failure. Relationships are an essential part of today's growing live performance culture.
Zabberbox, an American website, takes these principles a stage further with its Soup of the Day, a "relationship entertainment experience". In Soup, Brandon, a photographer has three girlfriends and a blog. Three times a week Zabberbox shows three to five minute films of Brandon with one of the women. Viewers then have access to Brandon through his MySpace page. Soup recorded six million downloads in the first couple of months of its life.
Zilo.com takes the principle of Live to the college campus. Its producers and contractors tour America's colleges culling live video performances from the average undergraduate. The performers ad-lib in front of their friends and classmates rather than in front of an anonymous audience and although all they have to do is tell a true story, the results can be excruciating.
Clearly some people are trying to be different. One who succeeds and who may eventually find a place up there with Bruce and Cook, is Peter Greenaway.
Greenaway, director of numerous avant-garde films beginning with The Draughtsman's Contract, is parleying the reputation of his new home, Amsterdam, to new heights. Greenaway has become the lord of the VJs, the video jockeys who ply their trade in the clubs of Amsterdam and London mixing video into ad hoc themes, narratives or plain delirious mash-ups.
Greenaway uniquely mixes scenes and shots from his own movies, right now Tulse Luper Suitcase, into ad-hoc narrative and multi-faceted live creations. It debuted in Amsterdam last July. In his new live act he produces performance movies in real time, an innovation that will surely pressure creative minds elsewhere to drop the storyboard and live a little nearer the edge. Greenaway explains that narrative film is too one-dimensional and brings into play too few of the artist's senses. To create movie experiences in real time is no mean feat. All that's needed now is the international acclaim.
Haydn Shaughnessy edits the online magazine wripe.net. Next: how consumers got into design.
Words in your ear
VJ- Video Jockey, a disc jockey who combines moving images in real time in clubs and other venues
Relationship entertainment- a growing genre spawned by the immediacy of contact on the World Wide Web
MySpace- a website where people can create their own profiles and invite others to join them
Tulse Luper Suitcase- a Peter Greenaway film that the director now reorders and remixes across giant screens, effectively giving live performances of his editing and visual composition skills
