The 15th anniversary Talkaoke party was a great milestone. It was the first time two Talkaoke sessions were performed in the same space and, actually it worked rather well. There were faces there from the last 15 years; recent members, but also people who were there at the very first Talkaoke event. And there were many from all that time in between. Looking back, I have learnt from every single event we have done, that’s a lot of learning. If you want to look through material, 274 events are on archive.org and we are adding more from the archive as well as new events every week.

Because every Talkaoke event is different, depending on the collected personalities, mood and theme, there is scope for much more. This year sees a massive growth internationally for us. There are nascent Talkaoke projects in Holland, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Brazil, and across the Arab world. My job has become much about distilling the learning of how to get the most out of the Talkaoke set up, rather than hosting Talkaoke myself.

That leaves me able to sit around the table and really enjoy the event, hearing what other people have got to say and ranting on myself a bit too much. It is good training for the next generation of Talkaoke hosts to pull the mic away from a loudmouth like myself, and let someone who is quieter and more considered have their say!

Mikey

Swivelly chairman.

Featuring: Saul Albert (UK), Diane Ragsdale (US/NL), Hans Abbing(NL)

With austerity budgets slicing into the civil service, healthcare, education, and the arts across Europe, it’s a prime moment to stop and assess what we as a society value and hold dear. The straw man argument usually goes that hospitals are more important than art galleries, but is a society with no cultural expression worth living in? We can put a man on the moon, so can’t we balance a budget so that people have good local hospitals and a nice film festival to attend, too? Our society has evolved in an amazing way — flush toilets! airplanes! smartphones! — and yet when it comes to investing in culture, it can feel like we never left the cave.

This debate  focused on the finer points of how we think about culture and money, and how we can get out of the losing argument with our austerity-minded leaders. The conversation was guided by a cultural economist with experience both in Europe and the US (Diane Ragsdale), an artist-economist with insides into both fields (Hans Abbing) and a representative from The People Speak, who masterminded the Who Wants To Be?gameshow/social experiment that saw V2_ audiences spending around 1000 Euro together at the previous night’s Test_Lab (Saul Albert).

Following a brief talk show with Diane, Hans and Saul, the audience  joined us at the interactive Talkaoke table. The debate was animated and heated, as participants challenged each other on how economic prosperity and cultural vibrancy can co-exist.

event stream

“This was the first event in ten years I’ve organised where everybody spoke!”

Michelle Kasprzak
Curator
V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media

Mohammed is the chief designer at The People Speak. There is nothing he can’t make. Mohammed has been central to the design of every series of Talkaoke table including the mark 6 which we are working on right now, but that is just the start.

Test_Lab: Who Wants to Be…? was a social experiment in the form of a raucous game show developed by art collective The People Speak. All visitors chiped in 10 EUR in advance to enter the game, after which they brainstormed, argued, and voted on how to spend the collective money. Questions around value, worth and common ideals simmered under the surface of this ‘direct democratic game show’. A past performance of Who Wants To Be…? resulted in the collective purchase of a woodland, but participants have also proposed to fire the host and to simply get their money back. Everything is possible in Who Wants To Be…? What is certain is that participants have a say in it.  In the Test_Lab: Who Wants To Be it was a 350 euro decision to commission an artist to design a new doorbell for V2! Brilliant

You can watch event stream and/or event teaser on the V2 website 

Wow, what a great turn out for the 15th Anniversary of Talkaoke!

Thank you to everyone who came out and helped out celebrate in grand fashion. We tried something new by conducting 2 Talkaoke Tables at the same time which worked out wonderfully … and amazing the world did not did end.

Here are the links to the videos!

Table 1 the Reception Space

Table 2 the Dirty Space

And here is the Talkaoke Cloud from the Friday night’s Table 1 discussion:

http://bit.ly/wAzhx1

August 2011 to October 2012

October 2011 to November 2011

November 2011 to January 2012

The Heckle System used at the National Theatre

Here’s a short post about one of our tools for participation and conversation: the Heckle System from Saul, The People Speak’s researcher in residence.

Heckle is the tool we use to create instant, shareable visualisations of conversations as they happen – you might have seen it in use if you’ve ever been to a Talkaoke, or watched how people at our events post up images, videos and tweets to the video stream of what’s happening.

Since 2007, our collective The People Speak have been working on ways of trying to make the 13+ years of conversational oral history we have on archive public and searchable.

The conversations between people who meet around the Talkaoke table, on street corners, at festivals, schools, or conferences have been recorded and archived on every format going from digi-beta to hi-8, RealMedia (oh God, the 90′s), and miniDV. For the last two years, we have finally moved to digital only, but the archival backlog is intimidating.

Talkaoke, if you’ve never seen it before, is a pop-up talk-show invented by Mikey Weinkove of The People Speak in 1997. It involves a doughnut-shaped table, with a host sitting in the middle on a swivelly chair, passing the microphone around to anyone who comes and sits around the edge to talk. Check out the Talkaoke website if you’re curious.

As challenging as the digitisation and archival issues are, the real problem is figuring out what people are talking about in this mountain of data. All the conversations facilitated by The People Speak are spontaneous, off the cuff, and open to people changing tack at any point. This has made it almost impossible to provide a thematically structured archive.

And this problem is not unique to this rather speciliased context. Aren’t all conversations, questions and answer sessions, and in fact, pretty much anything that involves people interacting with each other on video subject to the same contingencies of meaning?

If my early-stages training in Conversation Analysis have shown me anything, it’s that the apparent ‘content’ of a conversation is impossible to represent in any way other than through further conversations, and observations of how people work to repair their misunderstandings.

The Heckle System

The People Speak’s response to this problem has been the ‘Heckle’ system.

Using ‘Heckle’, an operator, or multiple participants in a conversation may search for and post google images, videos, web links, wikipedia articles or 140 characters of text, which then appear overlayed on a projected live video of the conversation.

Here is a picture of Heckle in use at the National Theatre, after a performance of Greenland.

As you can see, the people sitting around the Talkaoke table aren’t focused on the screens on which the camera view is projected live. The aim of the Heckle system is not to compete with the live conversation as such – but to be a backchannel, throwing up images, text and contextual explanations on the screen that enable new participants to understand what’s going on and join in the conversation.

The Heckle system also has a ‘cloud’ mode, in which it displays a linear representation of the entire conversation so far, including snapshots from the video at the moment that a heckle was created, alongside images, keywords, ‘chapter headings’ and video.

This representation of the conversation is often used as part of a rhetorical device by the Talkaoke host to review the conversation so far for the benefit of people who have just sat down to talk. A ‘Heckle operator’ can temporarily bring it up on a projection or other nearby display and the host then verbally summarises what has happened so far.

It also often functions as a modifier for what is being said. Someone is talking about a subject, and another participant or viewer posts an image which may contradict or ridicule their statement; someone notices and laughs, everyone’s attention is drawn to the screen momentarily, then returns to the conversation with this new interjection in mind. Some people use the Heckle system because they are too shy to take the microphone and speak. It may illustrate and reinforce or undermine and satirize. Some ‘heckles’ are made in reply to another heckle, some in reply to something said aloud, and vice versa.

If keywords are mentioned in the chat, those keywords can be matched to a timecode in the video, in effect, the heckled conversation becomes an index for the video recorded conversation: the conversation annotates the video.

People don’t just post keywords. It’s quite important that they can post images and video too. The search terms they use to find these resources can also be recorded and used as keywords to annotate the video. A further possibility for annotation is that a corpus of pre-annotated images, such as those catalogued using the ESPgame could be used to annotate the video. This would then provide a second level of annotation: the annotations of the images used could be considered to be ‘nested’ annotations of the Talkaoke conversation.

If you’re looking for a video of yourself doing Talkaoke or one of our other formats, and you can’t find it. Do get in touch. All our public videos go online at Archive.org.

When we work with clients, our approach is to find out what they want to get out of that conversation, then we develop the right approach for each situation. Here are some case studies that illustrate the use of The People Speak’s “tools for the world to take over itself” in some novel and challenging contexts.

The idea was to get artists and artists facilitators to exchange strategies, ideas, information and contacts in a fun way. As we went along Zsolt, our lightning fast illustrator updated the fantasy map of the London artworld.

Fantasy Map of the London Artworld. Need to KnowledgeFantasy Map of the London Artworld. Need to Knowledge

This is what he came up with

You can view the “Heckle” stream of this event part one here:

http___theps.net_heckle_2_tvt