This project is co-produced by Drake Music and Furtherfield. The Virtual Studio is hosted by Furtherfield, who create online and physical spaces and places for different kinds of people to come together to get involved with contemporary arts and digital technologies.
Our aim is with this project is to make music collaboration easy, and accessible.
Why a virtual studio?
If we can remove the need to travel to a rehearsal studio in order to collaborate on music together in real time, then potentially it can be more accessible for disabled musicians.
Many studio spaces are in old buildings which don’t have ramps, communication aids, tactile surfaces, parking or other access requirements. These disabling barriers affect musicians attending rehearsals, recording sessions, collaborating with other artists and so on.
Creating a virtual studio space removes financial, physical and support barriers from the process of making music in a studio or rehearsal space.
How will it work?
The DIWO* Virtual Rehearsal Studio explores and tests distant musical collaboration using the internet, and specifically using free (wherever possible) and accessible technologies.
During this project we will set up 3 virtual rehearsal studios that can support live jamming, rehearsal and collaboration using a robust, inexpensive network connection – software, hardware and network setup in physical studios.
Artistically the project will be led by John Kelly, who will work with 3 other musicians, including Roger Mills.
At the end of the project Furtherfield will publish “The Guide to Building Your Own DIWO Virtual Rehearsal Studio” to share what we learn. This will be a simple technical guide and a case study drawing on technical reports and documentation of the process.
The guide will be distributed online, on open source principles, to share the knowledge we have gained and encourage other people to build similar virtual spaces.
What is DIWO?
* DIWO (Do It With Others) is the term for a collaborative approach to making art in the networked age, initiated by Furtherfield in 2006 and subsequently embraced and celebrated at many international art festivals. As yet it has not been encountered by a wider London audience.
An artwork or artistic practice is considered DIWO if it:
• Enlarges artistic freedoms
• Uses the metaphors, tools, cultures and processes of digital & physical networks
• Is led by experimental artistic processes rather than utilitarian or theoretical concerns
• Disrupts traditional hierarchies and concepts of ownership working with decentralized peer-to-peer practices
• Involves diverse participants (unwitting and active collaborators), ideas and social ecologies
• Generates unruly and provocative relationships between symbolic meanings and material effects
• Co-creates a new, freer art context for more and more diverse people
Visit the DIWO Resource for more information.
