interactivecultures

Left to right: Prof Tim Wall, Andrew Dubber, Dr Simon Barber and Jez Collins.

What is it?

‘Just Like Jazz‘ is a collaborative project between the Interactive Cultures research unit at Birmingham City University, and the Scarborough Jazz Festival. The team comprises Professor Tim Wall, Andrew Dubber, Dr Simon Barber and Jez Collins. Part of our academic interests include jazz and so we’re working with the Scarborough Jazz Festival to explore the ways in which jazz festivals can be portrayed online.

Why is it different?

Rather than creating a brochure website around the festival, or simply filming the festival and putting that online, our goal is to capture the spirit of the festival using a range of techniques such as photography, text and handheld, personal digital video. We have given small, cheap, portable video cameras to select audience members, musicians, backstage staff and the festival organisers and asked them to capture whatever they think is interesting: the buzz of the audience, the surrounding environment, snippets of the music performed, and any discussions that take place around jazz.

In this video, Professor Tim Wall describes the aims of the project:

What are we going to do?

We’re gathering together all of this video, photography and text from contributors and publishing it live on a website as the festival happens. We’re also tagging the content in order to experiment with the ways in which the characters and stories that are captured can be navigated by visitors to the website. This process gives audiences the opportunity to experience the festival in their own way and makes the event accessible to those who may wish to attend the festival in future years, or who may never have considered visiting a jazz festival at all.

Andrew Dubber describes this process:

Although we’ve worked on projects like this before, with Aftershock in Italy and with the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, we don’t have a fixed idea of what we’re going to end up with. We’re working with a loose structure and quite a lot of improvisation – in a way, it’s just like jazz.

Follow the event

Please bookmark http://justlikejazz.org and follow along with the experiment as it happens live online between September 18-20. The website will also remain online in the future, so you can check back to discover our thoughts on what came out of the process.

We hope you enjoy exploring the festival online with us,

Tim, Andrew, Simon and Jez.