My friends, dear sweethearts, my favorite 1032 people in the world!

Uh oh. You probably do not even remember you signed up for this newsletter!

Nevertheless, I have missed you all. And I missed writing about events.

My bad. What happened? Oh well.

Things. Life. Deadlines. An attempt to write a serious treatise on the topic that went nowhere. En een vreemde weemoedigheid die niemand kan verklaren.

So I took a short break from the newsletter, and here we are, 22 months later?

Really? Really. There are plenty of people on this list who never even got a single fine fresh newsletter in their mailbox. Ouch.

So most of all, this edition is to let you know I have plans! Expect a few newsletters to hit your inbox in the coming weeks and months, with ideas about events: past, present, and future. So bear with me - or unsubscribe!

For those that have forgotten what they signed up for way back when: please find an introduction below. I am also adding links to the earlier editions. Timeless content, I swear..!

What do you think is the future of events? Are we indeed just resuming normal service, or has something truly changed since the pandemic?

As always, I would love to hear from you!

Kind regards,

Monique van Dusseldorp

• Do feel free to connect on Twitter and LinkedIn as well! Or find me on Mastodon!

• If you want to know what I have been up to, here is my list of 2022 events.

• Feel free to send me feedback, ideas or….fill out this short form!

• And if you know of anyone else who should read this newsletter…

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What is this newsletter about, you ask? Or, more to the point:

What is the Future of Events?

Short recap: in December 2020, I set out to write about my experiences as an event professional during the lockdown to figure out how the pandemic was changing the nature of events.

Suddenly, online was the only place where we could meet. A hybrid future was looming. Experiments with new formats, tools, and interactions bloomed. Events were going to change forever. Right?

Ask our new ChatGPT overlords what the future of events is, and you will get this totally sensible, slightly boring answer:

‘‘One possibility is that virtual and hybrid events, which blend online and in-person elements, will become more prevalent. This could allow for a wider audience to participate and could also make events more sustainable, as attendees would not need to travel long distances. Another possibility is that events will become more experiential, with a focus on creating immersive, memorable experiences for attendees. This could involve the use of virtual reality, augmented reality, and other interactive technologies”.

Or not. To be honest, normal services have resumed everywhere, or so it seems. My 2022 events? In-person events, almost all of them. Not even a live stream for most. And a strange absence of social media responses as well! What is going on?

As a personal aside (you can skip all of this!) I have worked in media/tech events since 1992. As a student, I got an internship at the European Institute for the Media in Manchester. The library there had two shelves of studies on electronic media - not what you think, these were research reports dealing with the television industry. That long ago, indeed. (If you are looking for a really unnecessary and very long aside: I wrote down some memories of working at the EIM a while ago).

The 1992 European TV & Film Forum was my first event, held at the World Expo in Seville. People got together there to find out what was happening in the industry, to escape their office life, and make new connections. And that is what is happening at tech events today. Normal service.

Over the last 30 years, while the internet wiped away industries, established new ones, and drove innovation at breakneck speed, things changed. Events help drive these changes - at least, that's what I think. They are where we get together to discuss what these changes mean and build the shared understanding needed for the creation of a new industry. But there is more to it than that.

The internet connected us all, and we are still figuring out what that means.

With that in mind, I hope to share some observations - not just on the tech conferences I know so well! In fact, what you will find is that this newsletter will often look back instead of forward. And it will be full of asides.

But at the heart of it is the same question over and over again: how will we get together?

More soon!

Time for some homework… feedback welcome!

As for my earlier exploration of online & hybrid events - what they are and what they will be - here are the first 10 issues! You might want to read issue 1 first! Or try Issue 7 which looks at the history of videotelephony and talks about the role of screens, to get an idea of what you can expect.

• Issue 0 is an introduction to the newsletter and has a bit of info about me

• Issue 1 answers the question: what are events for?

• Issue 2 is all about ‘‘unbundling’’ and the ‘‘Tiller effect’’

• Issue 3 shows an example of unbundling - new audiences and new platforms

• Issue 4 looks at the Capitol riots as a digital/physical event

• Issue 5 talks about ‘‘the next best thing’’ with three examples of online events: ITALive, Tomorrowland, Microsoft

• Issue 6 talks about micro-events, digital intimacy, and the Boschbot

• Issue 7 looks at the history of videotelephony and talks about the role of screens

• Issue 8 has eight examples of hybrid events and their use of (really big) screens

• Issue 9 talks about non-events, like ChilledCow & Study with me, Pogchamps

• Issue 10 is all about the stage, with three examples of the performing arts online

• Bonus issue about the 80s subculture in Tilburg, 100 billion cassettes, and more.

Random share of the week

For those that reach the end of the newsletter, there will always be a small treat!

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Prelude

This month Philips engineer Lou Ottens died, 94 years old, the inventor of the audio cassette. More than 100 billion cassettes have been sold since its launch in 1963. Twenty years later, the same Ottens and his team developed the CD. Tip of the hat to Lou Ottens!

My First Events

Let me take you back to 1980, the cassette tape era. When I was 15 I joined a local band in Tilburg called the Big Bamboozle, along with around 30 others - art students quite a few of us, but also people from other schools, other backgrounds, a motley crew.

Some with real musical talent and others like me, invited along for good cheer or perhaps just because I owned a Philicorda electronic piano. Another Philips product!

Early eighties youth unemployment brought along a specific DIY/punk culture. We had our rehearsals in a local nightclub called De Spoel and would dance the night away afterward to the latest new wave tunes.

The Big Bamboozle performances were joyous if anything: we had fun on the bus rides, we dressed up to themes, we interacted with the audience if they turned up at all, and special acts included dance, spoken word, and music, and often transformed into new bands.

In 1985 we organized a whole festival. At some point or other I was part of the Big Bamboozle, Trio Eenzaamheid, the Moniek is Bleyband, Titanic Combo, Schopenhauer Smiles, and the Miners of Muzo. All this without having any particular musical talent. It was a splendid time to be.

Interlude

There is an interesting history of Philips and the NatLab and their role in the digital industry. Below you can listen to composers Kid Baltan (Dick Raaijmakers) and Tom Dissevelt explaining how electronic tape music is made.

Baltan is the inverse of NatLab, which is short for Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium: Philips Physics Laboratory - for a few years a research lab for the brightest minds who could research whatever they wanted.

They hired artists to help develop musical instruments. The Philicorda was one of the resulting products, as were the first synthesizers. Electronic music began in the Netherlands, based on Philips tech.

A famous song with a Philicorda sound? Chris Montez, Let’s Dance, 1966. One of the earliest synthesizer songs is Song of the Second Moon (1957), by Raaijmakers & Dissevelt - a homage to the Sputnik I satellite.

The original purpose of the compact cassette tape was for dictation, not music. Later on a different kind of Philips cassette was also used as the first mass storage device for early personal computers in the 1970s and 1980s. And around the same time, Philips established ASML - now the largest supplier in the world of the machines to make computer chips. One company, one lab.

But let’s go back to neighboring Tilburg and our local scene.

Local & physical & rare

Unaware that we were on the cusp of a digital revolution - we lived pre-digital lives. There is something about that culture I am trying to understand in relation to the world of unlimited connected content that we live in now and the future of events.

I am not sure how exactly we found each other for starters -  we all danced at Swinge bij Dinge at one point? Most of us did not have a fixed-line phone but were sharing one with a group of students. I still have boxes full of letters and postcards.

Our musical tastes were quite random - punk, new wave, jazz, soul... A lot of us took our musical cues from Rinus, a guy at the local record shop (Tommy Records). But we mixed up the genres as well.

 Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Specials, Julie London, Rip Rig & Panic, Nina Simone, Django Reinhardt, I have the records right here in front of me. There also were these small cultural crazes in our network - not just about music. One year, we shared around a copy of the novel Ferdydurke, a discovery by trumpet player Wim. Hewald and friends put on a rendition of Ubu Roi. Eugene Geene sang a Willi Alberti schlager, standing on the stairs of our art school. Both the books and music of Boris Vian were a big hit for a while (Je bois..). Does Carla Bley know there was a cluster of fans in Tilburg so strong we started a cover band? At one time we were all looking for Chet Baker Sings & Plays, considered an unfindable record. 

Eclectic stuff indeed. Just a rare and random selection presented to us from our own in-person super random social network. What we could find was shared locally and subcultures were - even if they were inspired by international waves - super-local cultures. We needed to get together to share anything: ideas, music, jokes, dance moves.

Our performances were hyperlocal as well - the audience had no idea what they were going to hear, we never made a record after all. They just turned up to their local venue, curious for what that evening would bring. We physically passed on objects to each other: books, records, mixtapes.

Digital & ubiquitous

I am not sharing all this to make you dive into this weird culture selection (although it would not hurt you to put on some Chet Baker every once in a while).

Our social objects were rare, hard-to-find cultural objects, that we shared and cherished. Books, records, and the best of all: mixtapes. Your own personalized selection of the world of music pulled together from records & radio recordings - also the best gift ever. (The Guardian published some lovely mixtape stories).

Cue 2021, and with a few taps on our keyboard we can find even all of the above in seconds. My kids - teenagers - have everything that was ever produced on tap - music, movies, series, stories, TV moments, dance moves…which is fantastic. Especially now that local and physical gatherings have been erased from their lives.

However, if everything is available at any time, and anywhere, what is the social object worth? Make digital into physical again by selling merchandise? Just slap on an NFT to create artificial scarcity? (To my delight, Till Grusche's piece about NFT’s this week has a mixtape story as well).

I am not thinking of financial value but value in the sense of important, worthwhile, worthy of our attention. For event organizers, one of the ways to make things ‘‘rare’’ again is to make them ‘‘live’’. And as we are finding out this year, ‘‘live’’ can also be online & live.

It's great that we now live in a world where all content is available anywhere 24/7. All music, but also all talks, all ideas, all conversations, crossing geographical boundaries, time zones, social spheres.

But in that world, events still do something amazing and special: they bring us together in one moment. In a world of 24/7 content, maybe being together like that is even more valuable than it's ever been.

So my take: online events are here to stay as a conduit for being in the moment, a way to create value, giving the gift of the singular experience, something to share. 

We just need better ways to be online together.

Better formats, better online presence, other kinds of connections, and actions, interfaces. This newsletter will be watching every step of the way as we try to figure out what being together online can be.

Great examples? Tell me about it!

Normal service will resume soon….

kthxbye!

Monique

About

Van Dusseldorp’s Future of Events is a newsletter by me, Monique van Dusseldorp. I am a freelance curator and moderator of tech and media conferences (more here). I love to hear from you! Mail me or connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. And do tell everyone to sign up for my newsletter! :-)

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🎵 Postlude

One more thing, the Big Bamboozle! How did the bookers at the clubs find us in this super local physical world? Of course, of course, we sent out demo tapes!

I had forgotten all about this, had it not been for Marco van Dalfsen of Diggin Demos and a rare historical find. From 1980-1985, Amsterdam club Melkweg received almost 1.000 demo tapes, and all of them were registered in the Melkweg Cassetteboek - incl handwritten notes on the music, and whether or not the band was to be booked.

Marco not only published the complete book he also digitized the tapes and put them online. What once was, recorded, to be shared on tape, sent by post, kept for 30 years, now digitized and published and shareable again - 🤟

dear 921 chickens of mine,

This edition is all about the stage. As your personal event explorer, I booked tickets, sat in front of my screen at all hours, and in most cases I contacted the organizers to get a bit of background information as well.  

And if this issue seems a bit long (it really is too long), keep in mind I watched a 6-hours-long play especially for you to make it here. What you will find below, is a short observation based on a select number of performances I visited online recently, and some ideas on what we could learn from them.

Bonus: while trying to figure out what is changing & what is new, I cannot help looking back to what once was. It’s my age I guess, it’s the year, it’s the unexpected space that has opened up for me since I started writing this newsletter.

So with spectacles on nose and pouch on side… I have a personal story as well, which I will send along separately. Skip ‘‘Big Bamboozle’’ if you could not care less about early 80s demo tapes!

It’s also the 10th edition (yay) - you can read all 10 issues here if you like.

All my love,

Monique

One more thing - 921 subscribers? Why not a thousand? Well?

Go fetch your event friends and bring them over! Tweet like Andy Budd, Charis, Nurbek or Tim Leberecht for instance! Or write something like Erwin Blom, Jeroen Verkroost, Brendan Brown and Andrea Krajewski did… (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️!)

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All the world’s a stage

It’s been a year.  Let’s put aside all the online conferences for a moment, that whole world of information babble. Let’s just look at performances that are there to touch your soul. What space has opened up for the performing arts this year?  

Quick take: the world of online performances can sometimes outperform the real one, or let’s just say, bring you a new and different experience, as you can be closer to the performance and the performers than ever before.

But, but….Yes, you do miss the venue, being part of the audience, the social intermingling afterward, and so much more. We all do. We miss big parts of our lives.

The bare essence is there though: you and the act.

If you look at online events, not through the lens of ‘’I wish I was in a theatre/club together with my friends’’ but see them from the point of I long for connection to a work of art: it’s there.

The events I visited range from a straight-forward live-stream to a Zoom call about presence to a motion-capture experience in a digital forest. What they all shared is ‘‘liveness’’. It all happens whilst & at the same time..

There is something thrilling about knowing the people you watch are actually on the stage at that very moment. It matters - a unity of time across screens.

And audiences do turn up! I mostly found this out by calling the different organizers - there is a growing, dedicated, ticket-buying audience out there. Is this perhaps just a lockdown audience? Will they still buy online tickets when venues open up again?

I think they will. We are witnessing the birth of a new space, and this is just a glimpse of what is to come. It's not perfect, it’s new, and everyone is still searching. Slowly, then suddenly.

Let’s have a look at three examples: ITALive with Romeinse tragedies, Micha Wertheim with ‘‘Niemand Anders’’, and the Royal Shakespeare Company with Dream. Plus a few tidbits from other shows.

ITA Live: Roman Tragedies

As I already mentioned in an earlier newsletter, International Theatre Amsterdam has launched ITALive: live performances of plays from the repertoire shared online, subtitled in English and French.

I bought a ticket (Euro 12,50) for Romeinse tragedies, a 6-hour Shakespeare marathon. Yes, you read that right, 6 hours on a Sunday afternoon! I missed the death of Caesar when I had to walk the dog, and quite a few other scenes for other reasons.

I had not seen the original play nor do I know a lot of Shakespeare. I can nevertheless say it was truly a fantastic experience. And this feeling was shared widely. "Six hours have rarely passed so quickly, or been so smart", wrote the New York Times. Or as the Dutch newspaper, NRC said: it’s as if ITA has created a new lifeline for theatre everywhere.

What was so special? The play combines three Shakespeare classics – Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antonius & Cleopatra – in a modern setting with monitors, screens, TV studios, and more. As such the play had already transformed these stories into our mediated times.

During the original performance, the audience could wander the halls of the venue, where screens were set up to keep following the show. In the case of the live stream, the viewers at home could see everything that was happening: the camera crew following the actors, all the screens, the crew, actors during their breaks, and lots more. So there was more than the play, it was also how the play was filmed, and shared, and how we were watching.

The live stream was full of layers of information, cultural references, a lot to see on all the screens. And not just that, you could see so much more than you could in any venue - a piece of chewing gum changing mouths, the faces of the actors with every emotion in extreme detail, or a sudden move of camera viewpoint: the recently dead were seen from above for instance.

Short updates on the state of things were read out by a well-known Dutch news anchor, there was a clock counting down the minutes to moments like Caesar’s death, and there is a scene in which an actor actually leaves the theatre, walking onto the still snow-covered Leidseplein, where surprised bystanders start filming him. Extreme liveness.

Furthermore, there was a ticker-tape with the news - Roman news, but also breaking news of the day of the performance, combined with tweets by people viewing the show. (Why do we not have a ticker-tape with tweets at all online events?).

All of these elements made you aware that all this was happening right now. Somehow it felt as if we were in the same space because of that.

As I learned from ITA Director Margreet Wieringa, there were almost 8.000 viewers for this show, with around a third joining from outside the Netherlands. In China alone, around 700 people joined a Wechat group and watched together.

ITA had been planning live-streamed performances to cinemas (like the New York Metropolitan Opera and the London National Theatre have done for years). In the meantime, they have also put on dedicated live performances for audiences in Taipei and Adelaide. And as confirmed in the press, ITALive is already considering new ideas for its new online stage.

I would say that ITALive did indeed offer something new - a new kind of theatrical experience.

• New York Times: A Roman Tragedies for the History Books.

• Volkskrant (in Dutch), Nieuw internationaal publiek, nieuwe mogelijkheden: de theaterstreams smaken naar méér

• NRC (in Dutch) Ik zoek de spanning van de live ervaring

• ITA Live - background info and tickets, right now for dance performance Triptych (April 3)

Micha Wertheim:  ‘Niemand anders’

Micha Wertheim is a Dutch Comedian and podcast host (Echt Gebeurd) who in his shows also plays with the rules of the genre. (He once made a show called ‘‘Somewhere else’’, in which he surprised his audience by not being in the theatre during the entire show - the audience just got instructions on what to do.)

His online show Niemand anders (‘Noone else’) similarly explored the rules and expectations around online performances. Let’s just say: at the end of this show you realize that nothing is what it seemed at the beginning! All those people in the Zoom call that watch the show together with you? Hmm! And that guy that could not get his sound to work, in his conversation with you? Aha! Noone else.

Let’s look at the business side of things. Tickets for this show were €15 (watch together: €22,50), and his show was ‘‘on tour’’ - coming from a different theatre every evening. One lesson: the audience loves buying tickets for their theatre. And two: the courtesy system works. If you ask people to pay a bit more if they do not watch alone, they will actually pay a bit more.

Tom Roetgering of GUTS Tickets confirmed that this is the case for lots of online performances. As Wertheim’s agent Bunker Theaterzaken reported, for the opening night - from Rotterdam - 715 people bought 951 tickets - but for the show from Amsterdam, 2185 people bought 2912 tickets (so almost 3.000 tickets for a venue with 500 seats). And funnily enough, later on, there also was an ‘‘extra’’ show, from a really big Amsterdam venue called Carré :-).

Lesson: no matter how virtual we are, we are connected to certain places and locations, and our connection to them is worth something. Even an online performance is somewhere.

• De Volkskrant (in Dutch), De onlinevoorstelling ‘Niemand anders’ van Micha Wertheim was volgens velen een totale mindfuck.

• De Correspondent (in Dutch). Wat ik mis nu de zalen leeg zijn: de kans om verkeerd begrepen te worden

Royal Shakespeare Company - Dream

Another Shakespeare performance! I also visited Dream, a live performance set in a virtual midsummer forest, developed by the Royal Shakespeare Society in cooperation with Marshmallow Laser Feast. This was a short virtual play performed by seven actors in motion capture suits and animated in real-time. You could see it for free, or buy a £10 ticket to take part and directly influence the world of the actors (which I did).

Under the shadow of gathering clouds at dusk, lit by the glimmer of fireflies, Puck acts as the guide. You’re invited to explore the forest from the canopy of the trees to the roots, meet the sprites, Cobweb, Mustardseed, Peaseblossom and Moth, and take an extraordinary journey into the eye of a cataclysmic storm.

I loved the experiment and the behind-the-scenes footage perhaps even more than the experience itself - which feels too much like watching an animation. But this IS exactly the kind of experiment you’d want right now and as the RSC writes:

The performances of Dream use motion capture as the culmination of a major piece of cutting-edge research and development (R&D) to explore how audiences could experience live performance in the future in addition to a regular visit to a performance venue.

• Royal Shakespeare Company: How will audiences experience live performance in the future? and Live performance and gaming technology come together to explore the future for audiences and live theatre

• The Guardian: The RSC's hi-tech Dream opens up a world of theatrical possibility

Some other tidbits worth mentioning

• On March 13, the 2010 play White Rabbit Red Rabbit (by Iranian theater maker Nassim Soleimanpour) was performed in over 30 countries to commemorate one year of closed theatres, as initiated by Aurora Nova in Berlin. In this case, the special thing was that the actors had no idea of the script: they got a sealed envelope with the monologue right there and then. I checked out Pierre Bokma in Amstelveen (6371 people watching) - here the fact that the actor does not know what is coming also provided ‘‘liveness’’, and the audience got a role as well. (The ‘‘ask me anything’’ format, for the stage).

• The Empty Concertgebouw Sessions are a series of free online concerts live-streamed from the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, one of the top venues in the world of classical music. As Jacob van der Vlugt of the Concertgebouw told me, the most popular show last year was by singer Karsu, whose live performance attracted 500.000 viewers via three platforms: Facebook, YouTube, and especially Instagram. That’s why earlier this year, at the start of the Dutch curfew, the Concertgebouw launched a special daily series on Instagram with live music. The Concertgebouw has just started to sell tickets - not just for live shows, also to get access to the recorded stream.

• Dutch rock band Di-Rect has been live streaming concerts every two months for a year now, selling tickets for 2 euros or more. The pay-what-you-want tickets on average now go for 7-9 Euro, but there are people who add 50 or 100 Euro as well. And they sell a lot of tickets! More than 13.000 for their last show, which they did together with the Residentie Orkest.

• The Opera Forward Festival, live-streamed from the Dutch National Opera last week attracted 12.000 viewers for a family opera A song for the Moon

• I also watched a dance performance, called Shadow's Whispers (€15), by the Netherlands Dans Theater. I loved ‘From England with love’ (1-minute video here), bringing the dancers closer than ever. Joost Poort of NDT told me that up to 9.000 tickets were sold for his evening - he assumes the audience at home to be around 25.000 viewers per performance. NDT has 160.000 followers on Instagram, which helped a lot when promoting the performances.

To wrap it up: bringing live performances to a dispersed audience has long been the realm of television, but now that theatre and music are claiming their space, suddenly we see different formats coming up. More layers, more presence, more experiences.

Shakespeare share of the day: Tuned Chickens

About

Van Dusseldorp’s Future of Events is a newsletter by me, Monique van Dusseldorp. I am a freelance curator and moderator of tech and media conferences (more here). I love to hear from you! Mail me or connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. And do tell everyone to sign up for my newsletter! :-)

Dear 863 sweethearts,

I have been thinking of you. Last week the Amsterdam canals were frozen over, today the city is filled with carpets of flowering crocuses. Croci? I can confirm on behalf of the nation: the weather was the event we were all pining for, the spectacular change of seasons makes us feel alive.

In this newsletter a short observation on… non-events. Plus of course the event of the week! And some follow-up news. All in all, a bit of everything.

I will do better next time. And as always: I love hearing from you.

Monique

Non-events

What is an event? It was pretty clear when we all got together in one location. You know: put everybody in a room where something happens. Joy.

Once you take elements of the event experience online, an event can become a totally different thing. For instance: does everyone have to be present at the same time? No. Does a lot need to happen? Not always. Are online events always video-based? Nah.

The three examples below do not seem particularly relevant for the future of events, but I am convinced they are.

They are more about creating digital spaces than about creating something at a specific time slot. They show how an ‘‘online happening’’ becomes a social object. And they highlight the power of commentary.

Examples 1, 2, 3!

Lofi Hiphop Radio

When I work, I regularly put on the Youtube channel Lofi hip Hop radio, to drone out other sounds. The music plays non-stop and comes with an animated video - an anime girl doing her homework, a cat on the windowsill, different times of the day, kinds of weather, in a loop. That’s all.

Or is it? The channel has 7,75 million subscribers, and as I write this, 46,880 are listening on Youtube. There is a non-stop chat running next to our homework-making girl. There is also a link to a Discord server, with 437.780 members - of which 73.796 people are present when I write this.

What can you find there? All kinds of channels where people chat, share pictures, play games, ask for homework advice, share lo-fi girl fan art, and ‘‘cosplay’’ - upload pictures of themselves reenacting the homework scene.

What I want to point out is: people are hanging out here for hours while doing their homework - it’s a non-stop happening. When ChilledCow’s channel briefly went down recently, people on Twitter bemoaned the loss of their favorite “study group.” (Source: The Verge).

Sometimes a digital offer is not so much ‘‘an event’’ as well as a social object, something around which connections are made. (The term ‘‘social object’’ was coined in 2005 by entrepreneur Jyri Engeström, who wrote The case for object-centered sociality)

And these online digital ‘‘happenings’’ can take very different forms. In this case: music in combination with a specific animation.

They do offer a shared presence, and it is this quality that I think matters for online events. ‘‘Event’’ may not even be the right word - it is more about a space you can dip in and out of, to be in the company of strangers.

Study with me

More or less along the same lines, but more visual: just go to Youtube and search ‘‘Study with me live’’. You will find people live-streaming their study sessions, and they get a lot of views! (See also Vice: The Wholesome Appeal of Watching People Study on YouTube)

Examples: James Scholz from Utah has been studying for 12 hours at this moment, and has 1.100 live viewers for his session. He also has a stream schedule. Or check this one-hour study session by Merve from Glasgow, which has 409,464 views so far. One of the comments: ‘‘The incredible thing is I started to study every day, and it's happening thanks to your videos. Thank you 😊’’.

As an aside: in April 2020, Argodesign actually proposed a screen set up that would work wonderfully well for this kind of ‘‘presence’’ sharing. We just miss the cats on the window sill.

Chess as a spectator sport

Do you know one thing my two teenagers are reveling in these days? Playing chess. All the time. And they are not the only ones. ''For a brief period last week, chess surpassed League of Legends, Fortnite, and Valorant to become the top gaming category on Twitch by viewers.'' What’s going on???

Chess.com offers all kinds of chess options - puzzles, play online, tutorials, etc. They are now also successful event organizers. (See Protocol for the background story).

PogChamps is a series of online amateur chess tournaments and the third iteration took place this weekend. Players in the tournament are internet personalities, mostly Twitch streamers. You can follow the matches live on Twitch, but to access the recorded videos you need to subscribe at 4,99$/month. You get a good idea here of what a game looks like here.

Who would have thought that amateur chess could be a spectator sport? The stream reached a peak viewership of over 100K and during the game I watched, the chat channels were filled with messages as well.

The social object is the game, but - as with most Twitch channels - what it really is about is the live commentary about the game. Is this something we need at more online events?

Dare mighty things

What was THE online event of the week? Flawless execution, superior storytelling, suspense, and everything? Even a secret message? Oh, come on!

I joined 1.457.455 other people on Youtube for the live coverage of NASA’s Perseverance Rover landing on Mars. Somehow, this was not even front-page news here. I mean, seriously, we had live footage from another planet.

And from an event point of view: they included a secret message. Just in case you missed it, see below.

For the virtual audience files!

In the previous edition, I wrote about various ways to make the audience visible on the screen. In the UK, audience interaction specialists Hypothesis Media used the ‘‘virtual seat’’ tech from The Famous Group for the popular TV show Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. The short video below is a great look behind the scenes, as presented by the show hosts. One of the biggest screens so far!

As mentioned before, The Famous Group (‘‘A Fan Experience Company’’), also provides the World Wrestling Entertainment channels with a virtual audience through 1.000 vertical led screens.

See how they also use those screens for theatrical effect - in this video, fighter Rand Yorton is being mocked by the face of a certain Alexa Bliss, on ALL screens. (I spent too many minutes of my short life trying to figure out the storyline behind this piece of pop culture… you get the idea). Look at those screens though!

Ambient share of the day

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About

Van Dusseldorp’s Future of Events is a newsletter by me, Monique van Dusseldorp. I am a freelance curator and moderator of tech and media conferences (more here). I love to hear from you! Mail me or connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. And do tell everyone to sign up for my newsletter! :-)

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Dear all 715 of you!

Lots of snow here in Amsterdam… It makes me want to share some Dutch winter specials with you (not really on topic for this newsletter, and the links go to Dutch language sites, I know, I know…)

• you can live track all the Dutch gritter trucks at work (26.249.526 kilo of salt was put on the roads before 7 PM today).

• the Dutch Cyclist Union has published a set of recommendations for cycling through the snow (lower the saddle, release some air from the tires)

• and the government has put out a special set of Corona rules! Snowball fights only allowed between household members. I am not kidding!

To put it all in perspective, I also want to share this gem by photographer Thomas Schlijper (do follow him if you long for Amsterdam city life in your stream).

At 5 AM this morning, just after curfew, when people came out of their homes to admire the world: a snowball fight between some police officers and a few members of the public on Dam Square. This is the kind of event we need right now.

Ok, ok, here we go, you and me, back to our screens! As promised, in this issue some examples of video screens as used by events - to illustrate the previous issue’s thoughts. I have collected eight examples for you.

One, two, three go!

Monique van Dusseldorp

(As always - I love hearing from you. Tips, comments, suggestions… And do send me more examples of innovative use of screens!)

New visuals

Yes, the Muppets. Or paintings depicting collections of paintings (‘‘Theatrum Pictorium’’). Or the 1960 picture by photographer Ormond Gigli of models in the windows of a to-be-demolished brownstone. We have seen examples of lots of people together in a grid before.

But let’s mark the year 2020 for bringing us grids with live video feeds of people. A dispersed audience united in a grid, sharing their combined live presence.

1. Audience video wall applause - Serbian rally

What could you do with this? Well, for one, let the audience admire you! See this clip from May last year, an online rally by Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. I thought it was a remarkable translation of the new Zoom grid aesthetic to the political domain. See for yourself! Just a few seconds will do to get an idea.

2. Audience video wall interaction - Even tot hier

Around the same time, the Dutch TV program Even tot Hier - previously recorded with a live audience - also decided to bring in the audience via a video wall.

The Zoom input was transferred to studio-quality with options to group the callers with the best video quality and a few more tricks. (Here is a picture of the studio set-up as seen from the other side).

The audience, in this case, is not here just for applause but also for interaction. The wall allows the hosts to play a weekly knock-out game with the audience - they answer multiple-choice questions by showing something blue, green, or red. They also sing along when asked, and there are small conversations with audience members. It works remarkably well!

On a smaller scale, the same screen setup was used for a professional event that combined people online and at the venue. The result was live-streamed. How we combine people on video and people in the room is an event design issue.

3. Speakers on-screen - DeZwijger

How do you show a live stream with speakers both in the room and online? Amsterdam venue Pakhuis de Zwijger puts out ‘‘live cast’’ session almost daily. The remote speakers are visible on the main screen behind the speakers present in the room. Look at the difference in scale! The video guests, towering over the people in the room, get more presence that way. Somehow that works. The design of screen presence matters.

4. Audience on iPad - Ruimte om te Raken

Let’s look at an interesting experiment. In March 2020, Nils Roemen of Experience Experts together with a.o. LiveLegends organized Ruimte om te Raken: a series of live performances - music, theatre, talks - shared online. For each show, 50 people could attend the event via an Ipad. Their faces were visible to the speaker or artist. The rest could simply watch the live stream.

I was part of the audience for one of the shows and followed both streams. The live stream was as slick as any TV show, with different camera angles, smoothly edited, highly professional.

If your online presence was through an iPad, it was a completely different experience. Your point of view was now fixed. And you were very aware that the artist could see you - so you had to keep watching! As one of 50 people in the visible audience, I felt I had to stay put.

This set up was great for the performers - they could see part of their audience in the room and interact with them. The moderator could even walk up to you and ask a question. Delegates were not just present on the screen but also in the space itself.

5. Business event - Denk Producties

The idea to bring delegates into a room through video - not just on a Zoom screen, but really into a room - was taken one step further by Hans Janssen of Dutch event organizer DenkProducties. (Disclosure: I am on the Advisory Board of Denk Producties).

A recent event with Duncan Wardle (ex Disney) on creativity combined a talk with small brainstorm sessions. Above, you can see an example of the setup in Central Studios in Utrecht. Wardle was in the US, and the delegates were at home. The host was on location, surrounded by screens. They saw Wardle speak, they saw each other on video for group work, and had a view of the whole setup.

Delegates were aware of each other as well as their own screen presence in the room.

6. Business event - Tony Robbins

The first virtual Unleash The Power Within event by motivational speaker Tony Robbins attracted 22,500 people from 143 countries, visualized in an immersive 360-degree virtual studio. The next one is in March, and tickets are $395-$1795 for a four day (!) program.

Let’s say, we are now way beyond just another Zoom call projected on a big screen. As described by producers Immersive Design Studio,

the studio set-up combines real-time game engine technology with video capture and playback, all kinds of cloud-based tools, and ‘‘custom AI neural networks to deliver ultra-high-resolution interactive content at a massive scale’’.

Robbins could move around freely, with the screens showing dynamic 3D environments for the audience, integrating live performers, music, lighting, and visual effects on the fly.

You can see a bit of the set up in this video. Or in other words: a whole new category of events has turned up in the last six months, and it looks like they are here to stay.

7. Mega events with screens - WWE & BTS

For some events, the excitement of the audience is a big part of the show. The World Wrestling Entertainment Network (WWE) has set up the Thunderdome, with almost 1,000 LED boards to recreate the arena experience. They also added pyrotechnics and drones to the show, something not possible with a live audience.

WWE ThunderDome will virtually bring fans into the arena via live video on massive LED boards for every Monday Night Raw, Friday Night SmackDown, and WWE pay-per-view event. 

Here a behind-the-scenes video of the Famous Group that is now selling its ‘‘virtual seat’’ technology worldwide. Special tickets are sold for fans to be in “attendance” - and see themselves on the video stream.

Another mega-scale event: the latest BTS virtual concert Map of the Soul On:e last October. BTS is a Korean boy band with dedicated fans across the world. The tickets were about $45 for a one-day pass and around $90 for the two-day pass, and according to Big Hit, BTS’s record label, 993,000 viewers tuned in from across 191 countries (Source).  For the fans, being part of the show is a dream come true.

8. Screen destinations

Spaces with really big screens had already become destinations of their own before the pandemic. Those immersive environments may become event hubs in the future, and combine live and virtual experiences.

Take The Atelier Lumieres in Paris with its giant screens, a proper tourist destination. Imagine an event in that space, with live feeds from the speakers/artists you want to be close to. Other examples are the Mori Digital Art Museum in Tokyo and the NXT Museum in Amsterdam. Or consider Universal Tongue, by artist Anouk Kruithof, a video installation with eight channels with four hours of film each.

The size and quality of the matter of the screen matter.

It’s early days, but I am sure that the most impressive visual language for screens is being developed by artists right now, experimenting with size, proximity, and interaction.

Yes, of course, screens are getting smarter as well. We should be keeping an eye on venues with ‘‘surround screens’’ - and what kind of new get-togethers may appear in this setting. Just before the pandemic, Microsoft opened a Customer Experience Center in its office at Schiphol: the Holosuite.

With immersive technology, smart technologies are used to connect the physical world with new digital developments. By using advanced, interactive 360° projections and Mixed Reality experiences, the Holosuite offers the opportunity to show specific industry scenarios in practice. This fully immersive experience completely surrounds visitors in their own environment, in their own story.

That’s it for today folks!

About

Van Dusseldorp’s Future of Events is a newsletter by me, Monique van Dusseldorp. I am a freelance curator and moderator of tech and media conferences (more here). I love to hear from you! Mail me or connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. And do tell everyone to sign up for my newsletter! :-)

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Dear 711 co-travelers,

Where shall we go today? I prepared a short trip to the past for you, followed by some first thoughts about today’s screens.

• Before we do so, I have to tell you about the Sangria & Secrets experience we discussed last time: it was delightful! Intimate, interactive, funny… and a real business. Our fabulous host Lexa Black told us Dragtaste can run more than 30 shows per day from their studios in Lisbon. And as for the mood: most of the participants in our group were celebrating a birthday. So this is really a thing: people buying each other tickets for a live interactive experience together with strangers from across the globe.

• Also: do you want to join me for another platform exploration? No need to dress up for this one! Audio events are the new new thing.. Join @davidmattin and me this afternoon (Friday 5 February 16:00 CET) on Clubhouse, if you can, to kick off the new NewWorldSameHumans club.

As always, I would love to hear from you.

Here we go!

Monique

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Once upon a screen

What was the very first screen in your life? In my case, it was the black & white Philips X24T751 TV. Our cat sitting on top of it, enjoying the warmth of the cathode ray tubes, his tail swinging back and forth in front of the screen. Me hiding behind the couch, truly scared of Orimoa1, a Dutch children’s series.

While I sit here reminiscing, let me tell you there is a wild world of Philips aficionados out there - all Philips TV brochures from 1953-1992? Check!

Around the time we got that TV, Philips was also experimenting with videophones. The technology was there, the vision was clear, and the phones look great. I especially love this feature: the phone has a real small fold-out mirror for showing documents on-screen. (The video link below starts right when they demonstrate the mirror).

From the Teletroscope to Hole-in-space and CU-SeeMe

The dream of ubiquitous videotelephony starts 150 years ago with the imaginary Teletroscope (1873), and we have gone through many concepts, pilots, and services since. It took decades to make it real. It still feels like magic to me.

Just two more examples for you! An art project from 1980 and an education project from 1994.

In 1980, artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz created a "Hole in Space" by linking bigger-than-life displays in New York and LA with a NASA satellite feed. (I include this one because I want to show you something about the newly discovered size of the screens for events.)

Suddenly head-to-toe, life-sized, television images of the people on the opposite coast appeared. They could now see, hear, and speak with each other as if encountering each other on the same sidewalk. No signs, sponsor logos, or credits were posted -- no explanation at all was offered. No self-view video monitors to distract from the phenomena of this life-size encounter. Self-view video monitors would have degraded the situation into a self-conscience videoconference.

[…] Hole-In-Space suddenly severed the distance between both cities and created an outrageous pedestrian intersection. (Source: Ecafe)

The Hole-in-Space project was only available for three evenings, dependent as it was on costly satellite links. Video call services for the longest time failed to reach a mass market. They were expensive to run and needed dedicated hardware. There were not that many people you could call.

In 1992, twenty years after Philips’ failed videophone, the University of Cornell put out CU-SeeMe, the first free videoconferencing program for personal computers. No need for expensive hardware anymore!

requires only a Mac or PC with a screen capable of displaying 16 grays and a connection to the Internet. (CU-SeeMe info page)

What did it look like? Cisco supported this education project in 1994. Ah, Zoomish, right?

Omnipresence is an eternal human dream. We have had decades of experiments with video communications. And we have had all the tools lined up for a while as well: broadband networks, video compression, smartphones, social networks, high-quality digital cameras…

Just add a global pandemic to the mix! Now, let’s jump to the present to see what happens with the screens.

Screens in the age of quarantainment

The day after the Biden/Harris inauguration, James Cordon invited poet Amanda Gorman onto the Late Late Show. You can see the scene if you click on the image below. He introduces her like this:

‘‘And I am so honoured to say that she is here on the show, please welcome the incredible Amanda Gorman, everybody! …[applause]…. Amanda I am so ridiculously happy to talk to you tonight on the show, how are you?’’

There she is, across from him, Amanda on a huge vertical screen, her head four times the size of his. What struck me in this: he does not inform the audience they chose this solution - he knows they will understand. She is really there, and he will talk with her. No problem.

Another example, last week on Dutch TV. The Voice is a talent show with four judges, who turn their chairs after listening to the contestant singing a song. Just in case you did not know! (Duh! The show is in its 11th year, 20th season, in 145 countries.)

One of the Dutch judges is Anouk. There she is - on the right. She is on screen, the same size as the other coaches, interacting with them as if she is present. No problem.

If you accept that someone present on screen is as present as you need them to be, anybody can be anywhere.

What does that mean for events? And what kind of screens do we need to make this work? Three quick observations connected to different types of screens and their role in our lives.

Screen presence for delegates

How can an event bring together delegates on screen?

Venues with big screens are now home to new kinds of hybrid experiences. Some entertainment companies are already exploring this and are selling tickets for the experience. Different types of business events are also looking into this, to get people more involved. These are mega productions!

Delegates want to see the show and they want to be visible on the big screen and be part of the show. Will we see new types of screen presence for both audience and performers? Some early signs…

Lean back/background screens at home

The screen situation is also changing at home. People are getting used to putting their internet streams on the main screen in the living room, and at the same time, they are also adding widescreens and second screens to their desks.

Both setups influence the experience of an online ‘‘event’’. For a live stream consumed as a lean-back experience, you need all the qualities of a TV producer.

At the same time, live events can also become something enjoyed in the background, the video stream as a companion to other activities. Or just the audio! A very different experience for a different type of event.

Vertical screens?

When I talk on the phone, my kids mock me - I still move my arms and hands to underline what I am saying. To experience a space, widescreen screens are wonderful. But humans are vertical.

TikTok has a point: the vertical video format gives us a much better feeling for the people on the other side of the screen. Anouk and Amanda, in the two examples above, are both visible on vertical screens for a reason.

Let’s have a look at some examples?

Uh oh! Substack tells me this newsletter is too long. So you will get two issues this week! Yes, yes, I will hone my editing skills and be as succinct as a poet soon. Expect a haiku of a newsletter someday.

Window-to-the-world share of the day

About

Van Dusseldorp’s Future of Events is a newsletter by me, Monique van Dusseldorp. I am a freelance curator and moderator of tech and media conferences (more here). I love to hear from you! Mail me or connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

And tell everyone to sign up for my newsletter! :-)

Share Van Dusseldorp's Future of events

dear sweethearts,

Still working on issue 7 of the newsletter!

For now just a quick reminder of two events this evening…

Hope to find you there!

Kind regards

Monique

Tonight, 2 February of the year 2021 at 19:00, I will be a guest on a Club House session by the House of Beautiful Business, to talk about the future of events, together with Benedict Evans (new things), Lisa Choi Owens (TED), Felix Zeltner (Remote Daily) & Edward Cooke (who worked on the Burning Man multiverse). Join us if you can!

And right after I will hop over to Sangria & Secrets with drag queens in Lisbon, which I talked about last week. Join us at 21:00 CET on Zoom if you are as curious as I am. You have to buy your own ticket though (Euro 35).

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Dear 646 souls in lockdown,

Thank you again for joining me in this exploration of the future of events!

This is not a very newsy newsletter, to be honest, so if it is your first time here, you might want to visit some of the previous issues, like the one on why we organize events at all.

Anyway! Today I want to share some thoughts about really small events and why they are such a joyous part of the present hullabaloo of online events.

Zoom in, zoom out… there is real treasure there.

A personal story first, then three examples of events to underline the idea, two questions for all of you, followed by a random share of the day.

And as always: I love hearing from you. E-mail me!

Kind regards,

Monique van Dusseldorp

p.s. This newsletter is quite long. Too long?

Show me your micro-adventures!

[Skip this section if you do not care for my musings]

A night-time curfew came into force in the Netherlands this week. I mentioned before how we have all become 14-year-olds, under an endless curfew, no longer part of the world, just yearning for something, somewhere.

I know, I know. We left 1980 a while ago and have by now truly arrived in 2021. We no longer yearn for random media appearances of our favorite artist… we have all the world on tap!

Any movie, TV show, podcast, concert, game, all there, all the time. Netflixing your life away is easier than ever. Or TikTokking, Among Us-ing, Substacking.. & visiting an endless series of online events of course (that would be me).

My adventurous daughter is 14 right now, and she may well be on her third run of How I met your mother’s 208 episodes. Well!

As Tim Leberecht wrote a while ago in The Beauty of Things that don’t scale:

When everything that’s said is recorded and exploited, when everything’s explicit, rehashed, and hash-tagged, we lose a sense of aura, exclusivity, and elation. When everything is predictable and automated, we abandon the thrill of strangeness outside of our “filter bubbles,” of unfamiliar experiences that have the potential to disrupt our daily lives and grant them an awesome shock of meaning.

One recent day, my daughter set her alarm clock extremely early, got up, and cycled to a cold and dark Amsterdam park to watch the sunrise together with her friends. A bit of ‘‘nightlife’’ if you will, albeit on the other side of the night. She organized her own micro-adventure, an unfamiliar experience to disrupt daily life.

What does this have to do with the future of events?

If you unbundle events and take them online, it not only means you can scale them to your heart’s content, as discussed last week. It also means that you can use all the tools available for something really small.

And that is exactly what people are doing. There is a new space opening up somewhere between the world of private online video meetings on the one hand and the world of professional online events that look like television-with-a-chat-channel on the other.

In a way, this time reminds me of the joyous early days of blogging: suddenly we all have tools to express ourselves in new ways. Anyone can organize an online event, anyone anywhere can contribute, and anyone anywhere can join! Ain’t that magic? The tools at our disposal are awesome.

Let’s have a look at three examples:

1. Visit a Japanese craftsman in his workspace, organized by Gianfranco Chicco in London

2. Online talk by a fashion designer in Miami, organized by Manon den Dungen in Amsterdam

3. Cocktail hour with drag queens in Lisbon, Portugal by Dragtaste and other Airbnb experiences

Visit a Japanese craftsman in his workspace

Gianfranco Chicco is head of Content & Digital at the London Design Festival and the Curator of The Craftsman Newsletter, a labor of love that highlights Japanese craftsmanship in particular. (In What is enough, he writes about what we can all learn from these highly skilled professionals).

In 2020, with all plans to travel to Japan out the door, Chicco did all his research online. Last month, he turned a private video meeting with Japanese master craftsman Takahiro Yagi into a public conversation by inviting his readers to join their Zoom call.

Yagi is a sixth-generation tea caddy maker at Kaikado. During the hour-long conversation, Yagi explains how he learned his craft, how tacit knowledge is passed on, but also what new ventures they have, such as a tea caddy for a wireless speaker. There is a lovely moment at the end where he gives a small demo of how he makes the tea caddies.

I was part of the call and enjoyed the experience immensely! I reached out to Gianfranco, who was equally delighted with the result. As he said

I intend to carry on with these online conversations (they are not exactly interviews) and keep most of them open to the public.

You get the idea: this is not strictly a meeting, and it is also not an event recording; it is something in between.

The fact that you get together with a small group of people makes the experience stronger. If there were hundreds or thousands of people, it would still be an interesting videostream but less of an experience.

We also talked about what you need to make an event like this work. One thing that helps to establish the feeling of digital intimacy is the quality of the video. Light, sound, should all be carefully planned, but..

The most significant difference is made by the lens, which can give you an excellent depth of field (that's the weak spot of webcams). You can connect a photographic camera or get a 4k dongle.

We will dive into the tools and equipment some other time - but it is clear that super high-quality video is now available to more people than ever before.

Let’s go to our second case!

Geek out with a fashion designer

Manon den Dunnen is a digital transformation specialist at the Dutch Police, who also runs IoT Sensemakers Amsterdam, a volunteer-based community that brings together tinkerers, inventors, developers & other people that love to make things. Every month they have presentations, open mic & discussions about IoT-related subjects - or sometimes just a ‘‘let’s work together’’ day. Everything is now online, of course.

Last week’s event was about two speakers, hacker Jilles Groenendijk and fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht - she develops robotic wearables and is based in Miami.

What can I say? They both had great stories, and I stayed around for the full 90 minutes of the event, which ended with a lovely Q&A in which Jilles, Anouk, and some audience members exchanged tips on hardware options & software choices.

Creative people talking about how they create happens to be something I enjoy more than anything. And I am sure you can find an online event that reflects your predilections.

Here too, the recorded video does not do justice to the ‘‘liveness’’ of the session: the closeness to the speakers, the feeling of being part of a conversation even when you do not ask anything.

As I was sitting close to the screen, the robotic dresses were visible in great detail, and Anouk herself had her camera set up in a way that you could also see her hands and her arms move. We were there with her.

I checked with organizer Manon afterward, and she said

Our meetups are actually not that organized. The main thing I do is making sure that the speakers also have questions for the audience, as we do have an excellent audience full of knowledge. In the past, this has frequently resulted in concrete solutions based on suggestions of the participants.

Once the conversation flows and there is no need for any moderation, you know the event ‘‘works’’.

In both of these two cases, an existing community of interest got their hands on the tools 2020 has given us, to organize an event that could never have happened in real life with a group of speakers and delegates across the globe). They shine because of the digital intimacy experienced.

It is no coincidence that both of these events are ‘‘side projects’’ for the people involved, a labor of love like this newsletter. Nevertheless, it makes you think: is there any money to be made with these small events? Well….

Cocktail hour with drag queens, and more with Online Experiences

Indeed there is! Let’s dive into the wondrous world of virtual travel! On 8 April 2020, barely 2 months into our global pandemic, Airbnb launched their Online Experiences program:

a new way for people to connect, travel virtually and earn income during the COVID-19 crisis….. and bring their transformative virtual Experience to millions of guests.

And what are ‘‘transformative virtual experiences’’? Ticketed Zoom sessions!

That’s right: Airbnb launched a platform for paid Zoom sessions, and right from the start, the program offered all kinds of everything. The Airbnb hosts came up with sessions that included meditation with a Japanese monk, cooking lessons from Italy, a walk with the Chernobyl dogs, magicians sharing tricks, etc. (The sessions are curated in the sense that Airbnb selects what will go on the platform).

Right now, you can choose from around 500 experiences in 15 different languages every single day, with most of them charging between $10 and $40— although there are experiences up to $300 (like a podcast course or a Tarot card reading).

Experiences are group activities, where you are joined by others on Zoom who might be located anywhere around the globe - unless you book a private or group session.

As for the ‘‘virtual experience’’ itself: sometimes it is just a live stream or a series of prerecorded video clips presented by a live host. Yesterday, I took a tour in the latter format, traveling the streets of Tokyo.

What struck me: all the people in my group were sitting on a couch, looking at a big screen. Instead of a movie, they had decided to take a virtual trip and had set up their living room for the experience.

One of them was celebrating her birthday- so we as a group learned how to say お誕生日おめでとう: o-tanjoubi omedetou. And after the trip, we all got a photoshopped picture of ourselves in Japanese dress. It was… eh. Nice.

But let’s look at one of the biggest hits on the platform, which takes an entirely different approach. That would be the wildly popular “Sangria and Secrets with Drag Queens,” hosted by Lisbon-based Pedro and his six roommates:

Fabulous Drag Queens will teach you how to make the most authentic, fresh, and delicious Portuguese sangria, ALL from scratch, step by step! We will not only share this traditional secret recipe, but we’ll also be serving up our unique live performances on stage! It’ll be a cabaret-style digital cocktail class you’ll never forget. Get ready for fireworks, smoke effects, lights, and AMAZING costumes that we created, especially for you!

Here we have a totally professionally produced experience, far beyond just showing how to make sangria. According to a recent post, the show is now seven days a week, with over 30 live sessions per day. DragTaste claims to have had more than 100.000 guests already, and with tickets at 35 Euro, that could be close to… 3,5 million Euro in 10 months?

Not bad! A lot of interactive, personal, small size events, day after day… together they make for a big audience.

It does not stop there. Who would have thought of Airbnb as a platform for online events a year ago?

This week, Airbnb’s “Inside K-Pop” Online Experiences offers 14 experiences in English, Korean, Chinese, or Japanese. Those include sessions like Secrets of the perfect K-pop star makeup, K-pop photoshoot with Kevin Woo, or the highly intriguing Making beaded bracelets with The Boyz (sold out!).

So what does this mean?

If you are in the event industry, your primary concern around online events may be audience size and reach. For an event visitor though, the experience was always a combination of moments, a series of small size group interactions: hanging out at the bar, being part of a discussion, meeting your favorite people over coffee, pick up some industry banter, walking down new streets, etc.

Now that online events tools are available to anyone at little or no cost & we are all stuck at home, we develop new ways of interacting online. We can step out of our bubble and search out new and unfamiliar experiences easily. Or just find our posse, and enjoy their presence. Flashes of concentrated interaction!

There is plenty to learn from the plethora of new formats and interactions that small groups are exploring. And there is so much value in small meetings themselves.

Two important questions for you!

Question 1. How can we explore event formats, platforms, strategies in a hands-on manner?

Time to set up a ‘‘Future of events’’ series of online meetings! Right? Tips, ideas, suggestions, more than welcome. (Studio space in Amsterdam, anyone?) I will present my little plan in the next issue and would love to include your feedback!

Question 2. Should we not explore some of the world’s top experiences for inspiration, like real tourists of the digital age. I myself have not yet visited the Lisbon Drag Queen bar, have you? It’s the new Eiffel tower.

Why don’t we go together?! I just booked my ticket for Tuesday, Feb 2 · 9:00 PM − 10:30 PM (CET). There are 27 tickets left for that session. Hope to see you there as a Popcorn or an Apron guest! :-) Don’t wait too long to buy yours!

Metaphoric share of the day

If you spend time on Twitter, make sure to follow Boschbot. Your Twitter stream will show random details of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch. You could spend hours in front of the painting in the Prado in Madrid and not get this close… You get flashes of visual fantasy between all those word tweets. Consider every BoschBot appearance an unbundled micro-event!

Keep reading

• Tim Leberecht: The Beauty of Things that don’t scale

• David Pogue, New York Times ‘I Spent a Weekend Bingeing Airbnb’s Virtual Experiences. Was it Worth It?

• L. Kelly Fitzpatrick, BoschBot: Twitter Bots, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and the Distant Reading of a Painting (And if you want even more goodness, check the interactive documentary Jheronimus Bosch, the Garden of Earthly Delights by Dutch public broadcaster NTR).

Showtimes!

• If you are on Club House, the drop-in audio platform that is making waves these days, I will be a guest this Tuesday, February 7, 19:00-20:30 CET at a session run by the House of Beautiful Business on the future of events. Hey! That’s my topic!

• and that same evening, I will hop over to a bar in Lisbon. Tuesday, February 7, 21:-00-21:30 CET Still a few tickets left...

• Since the beginning of time, I have been the host and curator of the Cross Media Cafes series of events. The next one up is about Synthetic media (in Dutch, Tuesday, February 16, 15:30-16:45 CET)

• And I am a Co-host and curator of the What’s Next series of events. Last week we had a great conversation with venture capitalist Albert Wenger on social media services as protocols, the distribution of moderation tools, and ''programmability'' as an asset. The next one up is Laëtitia Vitaud on the future of work (in English, February 18th, 12:30-13:30 CET).

Thank you

If you got this far, you are my favorite person of the week. A special welcome if you found me through a link in Azeem Azhar’s wonderful Exponential View newsletter, Benedict Evans’ fantastic newsletter, or via a mention in the fabulous New World Same Humans newsletter by David Mattin (to which I contribute). Go check them out, they are brilliant.

About

Van Dusseldorp’s Future of Events is a newsletter by me, Monique van Dusseldorp. I am a freelance curator and moderator of tech and media conferences (more here). I love to hear from you! Mail me or connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

And tell everyone to sign up for my newsletter! https://futureofevents.substack.com/

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Hello, dear 543 subscribers of mine!

Monique van Dusseldorp here, with a few more meandering thoughts on the future of events. Bear with me!

In this issue, let’s talk about ‘‘the next best thing’’, and how this can grow into a new category of its own. But first! Memories…

When I was 14, we were the biggest fans of Herman Brood & his Wild Romance. 

There was no internet, remember? 

We played the one record we had, again and again, spent many hours waiting for new music to be played on the radio, and paged through music magazines without buying them to see if there was any news.

And once or twice - how lucky could you get! - we witnessed a rare performance on TopPop, the first regular dedicated pop music TV show in the Netherlands.

It’s not that TopPop had any live music: the acts just lip-synced their songs. And if an act could not make it to the show, they showed dancers doing a rehearsed dance.

Videoclips had not been invented yet, or perhaps I should say: they were being invented on the spot. TopPop offered the ‘‘next best thing’’ to witnessing a live performance by putting the stars in a specially designed decor, with a scripted act, light effects, the girls dancing, surprising camera shots, quick edits, and more...

Or not. The ‘’Saturday Night’’ recording above shows Brood and his band just sitting around, for the most part, drinking and reading the newspapers. 

Back to 14-year old me. One fabulous day, we found out that Brood and the band were going to play in ‘‘de Pul’’ in Uden, and you know what, Uden is just 50 KM away from my hometown! We were overjoyed! Of course, we were going to buy tickets and see the band! Right? 

We were 14. None of the adults were willing to drive us there. There was absolutely no way we could take the bus and be back in time. And it was too far to go by bicycle (we did consider the option). We were stuck. And we were devastated. I very clearly remember how unfair it all felt.

We could not access the world we wanted to be part of. TopPop was all we got.

Well, Monique, why on earth would you bring this up in a newsletter on the future of events? 

If you love going to events - conferences, concerts, theatre shows, anything - the online version of it is so very disappointing. Online, the event is just another video stream. It is no longer an event.

Entering the venue, the physical anticipation, the crowd you see around you, the interactions after the show - sure, a video of a talk will get the content out there, but really? The difference can be so stark it makes you wonder why organizers bother at all.

But see this from the point of view of the 14-year-old. If there is absolutely no way to go, and suddenly you can be part of an event that you love, or be part of a conversation you want to be part of - that is a different matter. You just got yourself a digital ticket to the world.

And once that happens, the ‘‘next best thing’’ can evolve into a category of its own and reach a far bigger audience than you could ever imagine. Lip-synched pop songs birth video clips, live streams of conferences become online gatherings, and much more.

We are all 14 years old now, under permanent lockdown.

We cannot access the world we want to be part of. Let’s see what this means for events: today I have three examples for you! Theatre, music, business.

Kings of War - how to attract a new audience

Like any other theatre anywhere, ITA (International Theatre Amsterdam) had to close down under the present lockdown rules. ITA decided to go online, and after a few months of preparation now has started to offer highlights from its repertoire via ITALive: live performances in Amsterdam are shared online, subtitled in English and French, tickets are Euro 12,50.

Last Sunday, ITA put on the show Kings of War, in a 4,5-hour marathon live stream. Friends were watching. Kings of War brings together three Shakespeare plays ‘‘into one explosive performance about leadership’’, and it was created to be experienced in a dark theatre by an enthralled audience.

Right? So what happens when you put all this in a 4,5-hours live stream?

Well…. it becomes something else. As one of the glowing reviews (in Dutch) said:

this was not just a live stream, this was a full video production, with multiple camera views, in a mix of total shots, close-ups, and medium shots, with crystal clear sound, and details you would otherwise not notice

Digital intimacy, being closer to the actors than you could ever be in a theatre, was an important part of the appeal.

..the production made Kings of War something new, somewhere between a cinematic theatre performance and a recorded play.

And yes, there is indeed a whole new audience for this kind of performance, as reported (in Dutch) by ITA director Wouter van Ransbeek.

Normally, a sold-out performance at the venue is capped at 800 people. ITALive now gets up to 6.000 viewers per show. And it does not stop at sharing live streams to viewers at home. In March, they will perform and live-stream Medea to 2.000 people gathered in a theatre in Taiwan and 1.000 theatre-goers in Australia.

So no surprise there: ITALive is here to stay, also after the lockdown.

Without the cost of travel, hotel, time spent away from work and family, some events see an entirely new audience turn up. The event itself is transformed into a live stream. In essence, a lot of events are turned into… television? Or cinema even! Or into the new cinematographic thing that is being invented right now.

Let’s have a look at another example.

Music festivals online

Music festivals are big in the Netherlands, and ID&T is one of the biggest players, with 80 festivals every year. Just watch 10 seconds of Defqon to get an idea of something that is the ultimate offline experience. Honestly, why bother with something online?

Because you can?

In June, the Defqon Weekend Festival transformed itself into a free 72-hour online broadcast, with 8 million viewers from across the globe. Living rooms became mini campgrounds, Zoom calls showed dancing attendees and the 3-minute end show was all fireworks. (Earlier this year, I interviewed (in Dutch) ID&T’s chief digital officer Michael Guntenaar).

In July, the first edition of Tomorrowland Around the World, the digital festival, took place. Attendance cost €20 for the weekend or €12 for a day ticket, and more than 1 million people tuned in and had a good time. The organization also shared how the event was produced:

Tomorrowland has built four different large green screen studios in Belgium, the USA, Brazil, and Australia. More than 60 artists recorded their performances in those studios.

So real people were involved and did their performance, and almost everything else was digital.

The digital 3D environment of Tomorrowland Around the World has 10 times more polygons and lights compared to a modern computer game. There are more than 750 virtual lamps per stage, all drawn by hand. […] In addition, special effects, spectacular fireworks, impressive laser shows and realistic crowd and sound effects were added to the DJ performances.

They also needed all the qualities of a great TV crew:

On top of the 6 4K Ultra HD cameras, a number of virtual cameras were created per stage, allowing the director to choose up to 38 cameras during the recordings.

Take that one step further, and the event IS a movie. In November, the special hardstyle show Qlimax: The Source took place, with tickets at €9,95. In this case, Qlimax sold around 20.000 tickets to people from 80 different countries. What did you get for that? In the words of the organizers:

Qlimax The Source immerses you into the mystical world of Qlimax through an online audiovisual experience that transforms your home into the temple of hardstyle. […] The combination of the biggest hardstyle acts, brand-new music, and groundbreaking visuals make The Source a unique cinematic harder styles trip.

So, the same thing, music, and visuals shared online in a video stream. And in this case, they did such a good job that, indeed, Netflix picked it up: a 60-minute digital edition of the festival is now available on-demand.

Let’s have a look at the business side of things as well.

Microsoft Build

Going digital: Lessons learned from six months of digital events

Bob Bejan, Corporate Vice President Global Events at Microsoft, recently shared his lessons learned from six months of digital events in a short video. For Microsoft, online events are incredibly effective: an event like Microsoft Build attracted 6200 people in 2019, whereas for the online edition in 2020 no less than 197.000 people joined. ‘’So the scale is crazy larger and it is much more inclusive globally’’. Bejan believes that the digital work they are doing now will be the centerpiece of future live event experiences.

An interesting remark is the one about the cinematic relationship:

‘‘What you are making is not a theatrical presentation…. but instead, a cinematic relationship with the frame that creates a one-on-one conversation with every member of your audience at the same time’’.

A cinematic relationship…. So what developments in the television and cinema industry are relevant for event organizers? Let’s have another look at that in the next newsletter!

Not so random share of the day

From the Top Pop archives, let’s listen to my other hero at the time, Nina Hagen.

Zugabe!

Stop reading here if you are only interested in the future of events. I need to wrap up the story! Nothing will stop me now!

So back to Herman Brood, and our days of despair. Months later, @puntmutsaers and I staked out hotel De Swaen in Oisterwijk, following local rumors. When Brood finally came outside with his manager Koos, he invited us to join him in the cafeteria. He ordered himself an uitsmijter and a vodka-jus (oh wow, what is an uitsmijter, is what I remember thinking) and drew me an ‘‘Otto’’, like this. Yes!

Van Dusseldorp's Future of events is an exploration of online & hybrid events - what they are and what they will be. I’d love to hear from you!

Send me feedback, comments, recommendations, tips, ideas… just mail me at monique@vandusseldorp.com

And if you know anyone that should join, please do share!

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dear 503 lovely people!

That’s a big conference room full of you already! (If you live my life, that’s how you count people). If you know anyone else that should sign up, do tell them!

On with the news. To be honest, it’s hard to write a newsletter with all the spectacle on the world stage. Constantly checking Twitter and CNN does not help anyone, but we owe it to the world to witness it all don’t we?

Today’s edition reflects that. This is a newsletter about events. And the Capitol riots were a hell of an event. 

In issue one, I listed experience, expression, connection as essential reasons to go to an event. Well, bingo.

Symbol and sensation and spectacle and more. People dressed up for it. They took pictures. And live-streamed their moment in history. They felt seen. 'We love you. You're very special'

As we were all witnessing the horror, it struck me: this was a ‘’digital’’ event as much as it was a physical get-together. It started online, with online storytelling, community building, crowd coordination, all resulting in a piece of deadly performance art.

If You Were on Parler, You Saw the Mob Coming.

Kara Swisher interviewed the CEO of Parler, the right-wing social network that played a big role in getting this event set up. (Amazon, Google, and Apple are no longer servicing Parler now). In the interview, John Matze immediately linked Parler to the right to assemble. From If You Were on Parler, You Saw the Mob Coming

if people are just trying to assemble or they’re trying to put together an event — which is what a lot of people tried to do at this event today — there’s nothing particularly wrong about that.

Citizen investigator Melissa also provides insight into how the communications online took place, with little coordination from the top but a lot of smaller groups making plans. She calls it ‘‘stochastic terrorism in action’’.

The Pro-Trump Mob Was Doing It For The ’Gram

What about the actual experience of being right there? Buzzfeed described the riots as a meme-making social media performance. As reporter Elamin Abdelmahmoud writes, the pro-Trump mob was doing it for the ‘Gram:

They have been so influenced by experiencing the world on social media that when they go out into physical space they seemingly think foremost of this, a revolution as a branding exercise — the photos of the QAnon Shaman, the photos of the vaping rioter, the photos of the man with his feet on Pelosi’s desk, the ricochet in the far-right internet as proof of victory. 

They were making content as spoils to take back to the digital empires where they dwell, where that content is currency.

Real-life is full of facts, but online anything goes. QAnon claims that a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring. Or something.

Seth Abrahamson (Attorney, Professor, Journalist) who this week also did a scary line-by-line break down of Trump’s speech to his mob, wrote a really interesting analysis of the gamification of reality by the Qanon crowd. He describes the Trump era as the First Reality War.

And now?

You are here for thoughts of the future of events. And the future of events is connected to how we live online.

People find each other online first, the event follows, and the tools for organizing and distributing are in the hands of anybody. An event still needs a script or a call to action for the participants to understand the plan. It’s just that different actors may get involved at any time.

I have the feeling that his digital world we live in will more and more influence not only what kind of in-person events we want to organize or attend, but also how we experience them. We will experience them as part of the digital realm, we will experience them together with people not on the spot but still there.

Let’s revisit that notion in a future edition of this newsletter.

If you have ideas, suggestions, if you disagree, do let me know!

Conversations

Do you organize an online/hybrid event that you are proud of? Invite me! I’d love to have a chat to find out what works and what does not!

Really totally random Share of the Day

And if you like this newsletter…

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Time is ticking away, and I write ten times more slowly than anticipated. TickTock. There goes the year.

In this edition, another look at the ‘‘unbundling’’ of events - how speakers and acts are finding new audiences online - and where this could go. In short: you can reach new audiences, and what you unbundle may not look like an event.

Speaking of audiences, if you know anyone else interested in the future of events, tell them about this newsletter!

And, of course, a big thank you to everyone who already did.

Feedback, suggestions, tips also most welcome!

Mail me at monique@vandusseldorp.com

best wishes,

Monique van Dusseldorp

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p.s. If you just signed up for this newsletter, you might want to check out the first three issues. In issue no zero, I set out what I want to do, no 1 zooms in on WHY WE ORGANIZE EVENTS AT ALL, and in no 2, the Tiller effect and ‘‘unbundling’’ are briefly explained….

p.p.s. I admit some of my writing only tangentially deals with the future of events. I am exploring myself what works and what does not. Just a warning. What is Tilburg anyway?

Tilburg on my mind

The house I grew up in has the most beautiful light in the world. Trees outside, old glass. I took a picture last week, seasonally aware of the transient nature of all things. It is December 2020, after all.

If the house is no longer there, will I still remember the light? The moment reminded me of a Facebook group with people from Tilburg, my hometown.

The group works like this. Someone will post a picture of some street, ask for a picture of a specific shop, or say, ‘‘do you remember this pub?’’

Others will respond. Yes, I used to live there. Or: my brother-in-law was the bartender. Someone may remember the lyrics of a local song about that shop, or they will share a bit of decades-old gossip or anything else they remember of the people they used to know, the ones who lived in the house next to that house actually - or maybe just around the corner.

Here an untranslatable impression of those comments for my Dutch subscribers.

‘‘ik ben in de exotabar geboren boven den orgel, naast de paardenslager’’ - ‘‘Hier heb ik 8 jaar gewerkt op zaterdag en op koopavonden van 1975 tm 1983. Kassa 32 was mijn favoriete kassa... ‘‘ - “Tweede van rechts is berry van ome theo… Zijn vrouw Riet werkte bij de MIDI bioscoop.” - ‘‘Daar kunde alles halen. Zonder te betalen. Daar kunde alles jatten. Zonder da ze oew vatten!!!!’’

A while ago, someone posted this picture of the Voltstraat. The houses on the left were demolished sometime last century. The post got 190 comments - and I remembered this exchange:

Someone: I used to walk to school through that street. Someone else: on that corner, you could hear organ music. A few other people from the group now remembered that the occupant of the house on the corner had an organ in the shed. You could hear the music wafting through if you walked that street.

Deh huskuh links wonde den ouwe swachte mee zun urgels warre. En ik denk dettie daor stoï mee zun huutje

Yup, that was a bit of Tilburg dialect for you. Organ man identified, actually. Mee zun huutje.

The shared memory of a sound in a street that no longer exists. Why share this small moment of local connection in this newsletter? (I did warn you)

In this case, the connecting tissue of the internet illuminated a memory there all along. How can I say this: if an event works well, this happens sometimes.

You become aware of something you individually did not realize you knew. A thought, an idea, a plan - it is yours, but it is only there because, for a moment, you were part of this group of other people with their own ideas and memories. It seems as intangible as the light or the sound of an organ.

Let’s put this in event terms: that’s how you would unbundle a local birthday party! Forget about the cake, take out one particular type of conversation (‘‘Do you remember..’’) to a place where friends and strangers hang out. Or in fact, this is in a very narrow way beats the birthday party, as there are more people, in different places and at other times, who are now part of the event.

New bundles

Enough about Tilburg already! Let’s get down to business.

When you ‘‘unbundle’’ a product or service, you come up with stand-alone offerings that were not previously viable to sell separately. It is the story of the internet - see what happened to shopping malls and e-commerce, record companies and streaming music, newspapers and classifieds, etc.

Once you ‘‘unbundle’’ a service, you can usually reach a far bigger audience for it. And it no longer matters where they are. And the organizer of the old bundle has to make a new plan.

Conversations

In a way, seen from the perspective of the event industry, social media interactions can be seen as one of the first ‘‘bundles’’ that provide a splendid stand-alone offer.

What previously could only be shared at an event - a group of people in the same place at the same time - chattering away about their industry - is now available as a conversation across time and space.

Think of all the industry banter we love to listen to at events: find your people, and conversations will follow. Visiting Twitter is like visiting the conference bar, listening to discussions of friends and strangers, picking up stories, background info, getting an idea of the person tweeting, be it your hero or your pals. Zoom groups offer a video version of that, Clubhouse’s drop-in audio chat is in the same league.

Many people like listening more than talking, but they too will occasionally chip in, share someone else’s remark, or dole out a like or two, follow a link to more insight, etc.

So some of the conversations once exclusive to industry events moved online. Scott Galloway (Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern) describes the business and societal complications as a result of this endless unbundling and as for social media, he says:

Social media is a form of dispersion, enabling connections, competition, and debate despite physical distance, print, and paywalls — the dispersal of community. It has also removed healthy friction (truth, science, editors) resulting in an afterburner for misinformation and conspiracy. 

New audiences

What can you do for a dispersed audience? One of the first and most logical things easily offered online: video. Take your event and live-streaming it. Let’s take some examples of new audiences reached this year.

• The ESC Congress usually brings together around 30.000 cardiologists to the city of Amsterdam. This year over 116,000 cardiologists from 211 countries took part in the online event. (Source: production company Live Legends). So it seems that all along, there were almost 90.000 professionals who were not going to make it to the event, and now they finally could take part.

• Dutch author Rutger Bregman did a local theatre tour and ended with a live stream performance - he sold 18.000 tickets for that final lecture at Euro 7,50 (Source: newspaper FD, in Dutch). Just think of that - imagine a venue with 18.000 people joining for a single lecture by a historian. The seats, the catering, the parking services, the security… the budget. This event could only work online.

• Esther Perel - world-famous therapist, author, speaker - sold access to three sessions on death, sex, and money in November for $75. (I have no idea how many tickets she sold). Perel has already taken the next step and is building a full subscription service around her online talks.

• Of course, all this works best if there is a strong community in place already. In October, Korean boy band BTS performed a concert for over 993,000 people from 191 different regions worldwide - who all bought tickets. (Source: Soompi) The live event featured virtual fans on stage, 4K video, AR/XR effects, and multi-views that enabled audiences to feel like they were part of the show. Stans rule the world.

If you unbundle events, you can connect some elements to worldwide audiences. For speakers with the appeal of rock stars, why bother being part of a conference program? That bundle is no longer necessary. The artist can sell tickets without touring. Anyone with de

So I guess that we will see a lot more direct audience-to-speaker connections - and the platforms that facilitate both the relationship and the transactions around it are growing fast this year.

Platforms

Let’s have a look at some of the new platforms that facilitate some of those direct connections. Let’s continue our little detour to the world of entertainment.

• Want to send someone a birthday wish recorded by accountant Kevin from The Office? Actor Brian Baumgartner is poised to earn more than $1 million this year from videos requested via the Cameo app (Source: Kara Swisher/NYT Sway). Celebrities of all types create personalized video messages for any occasion - for a fee. Cameo makes money by taking 25% and is expected to turn over $100m this year. (Source: The Sun).

• OnlyFans is another one that is making waves at the moment. The app lets creators charge fans for access to content and interactions. Until recently the creators on OnlyFans were all offering adult entertainment - but now, musicians, athletes, and artists are invited to use the same tools. According to Bloomberg, the OnlyFans app adds up to 500,000 users a day and pays out more than $200 million a month to its creators. Cardi B is said to make $8M a month on the platform (Source: Film daily).

• Super is a new Facebook video product that will let people pay content creators or celebrities for the chance to interact with them during a live broadcast. (Source: AdAge).

• And the good old newsletter is making a comeback as well, cementing connections between authors and audiences. Substack makes it simple for a writer to start an email newsletter. Here we are!

  One of the top writers is Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of 19th century American history at Boston College - her Letters from an American provides a daily news overview of US politics and now has 350.000 free subscribers. Over 15.000 pay 5$ a month for some additional functionality. Or as the NYT writes in a profile.

  based on public and private Substack figures, the $5 monthly subscriptions to participate in her comments section are on track to bring in more than a million dollars a year 

Tech analyst Benedict Evans also just provided some insight into the economics of newsletter publishing. His newsletter has around 150.000 free subscribers and almost 2500 paid subscribers - at 10 USD a month. He started seven years ago.

Huh?

You are right. Newsletters are not events, social media discussions are not conferences, music performances to a dedicated fan base are hard to compare with your end of year Zoom office party.

If you unbundle events, some independent parts of the bundle are not events. And if you unbundle events, you can reach different audiences. And we will see a lot more direct connections. What we have now is just a start.

Let’s explore what is to come in the next newsletter!

Random share of the day: Distance Disco

It’s 31 December 2020, and there are online New Year’s Parties everywhere. Not sure where to go? Put on your dancing shoes and head over to DISTANCE DISCO this evening from 10 PM CET! It is a digital matchmaking dance game that asks you to find the person dancing to the same song. Gelukkig nieuwjaar!

Monique van Dusseldorp

monique@vandusseldorp.com

Van Dusseldorp’s Future of Events Newsletter https://futureofevents.substack.com/ 

While most of the world has by now closed their laptops - here we are, you and me. Still online. And yes, I am truly delighted you are here and would love to hear from you.

Today I received a few great tips. I am going to add a whole section to this newsletter with links to your activities. So do send me your press releases, your recommendations, your preferred topics, or any other feedback.

I was also delighted to hear that my newsletter got as far as Australia and Oman, to name two countries. Even after 30 years online, it feels completely and utterly magical to hit the ‘‘send’’ button and then, just imagine, have your very own thoughts turn up in someone else’s brain, oceans away).

So if you have time, mail me!

And… if you know of anyone who should also read this newsletter, do tell them!

Kind regards!

Monique van Dusseldorp

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Online events are hard

This is what we know. This is what our first pandemic has taught us. We are at home. We stare at screens. We are part of an endless series of online ‘‘events’’. Sigh.

From Zoom meetings with the team to webinars with professionals, from online conferences to university lectures, from theatre shows to music festivals, from funerals to parent-teacher meetings or the end-of-year office party - everything is now taking place online.

And all these video streams share the screen with emails, notifications from our social networks, apps from colleagues, and lots more. We sit behind those screens in our homes, with all of the other distractions the home offers. It gets hard to focus on anything in particular. We go for a walk.

At the same time, we are all involved in the re-invention of what online events are and can be. And everyone is an online event organizer now. Consumer brands, research communities, your local music stage or theatre, educators, shops, musicians, funeral homes, publishers.. anyone.

Bundling and unbundling

Events are bundles. A conference is a bundle that brings together speakers, delegates, sponsors, and - in some cases - exhibitors. For each of these groups, there is a value exchange. Time, money, attention. New connections, a break from the daily grind, visibility for a product or idea, etc.

Bundling and unbundling are driving forces in the digital age. And as industry analyst Benedict Evans put it in his analysis Solving online events:

A physical event is a bundle of different kinds of interaction, but it’s also a bundle of people at a certain place at a certain date - as soon as you take these things online, that bundle has no meaning.’ 

This pandemic year is an accelerant for trends that were already visible before. My Next colleague Martin Recke also wrote an analysis of the unbundling of events: How the big event unbundling changes everything.  

As he points out, different functions of in-person events had already been taken over by online services before COVID hit:

The show part of the bundle started to go digital in the noughties, when livestreaming became feasible and YouTube was born. Today, a plethora of conference talks, presentations or panels is available on demand and for free, making the hassle and cost of travel increasingly hard to justify. […]

Networking was unbundling roughly at the same time, with the advent of tools like LinkedIn and Twitter. Ironically, this led to even more physical events, since people wanted to meet their digital acquaintances in person (and vice versa, add physical acquaintances to their digital networks).

Event unbundling leads to digital reaggregation and back in a cycle.

The last 10 months have been a huge creative experiment to find out what the new bundles are and could be.

How to get online events wrong: the Tiller effect

If you have a strong brand, a committed community, and a format people love, most event organizers will try to emulate this as much as possible online.

As a result, virtual conferences and meetings are suffering from what designer and author Ben Sauer calls ‘The Tiller Effect’.

As Ben continues

We have a habit of doing this. Over and over again, as a new medium or technology emerges, we struggle to think beyond our existing metaphors. […]

Video-based meetings/events are going through the same thing right now. They’ve existed for a while, but mostly as a poor substitute for the real thing. […]

So when someone says… “The best bit of conferences is socialising” - we automatically start thinking about how to reproduce things like coffee breaks remotely. That’s entirely natural, but we may need to think differently.

The serendipidous social element of an in-person event *might* be reproducible, but it won’t happen in the same way (if at all), because the new technology has different constraints, possibilities, and social norms.

What does not work

Let’s have a look at some online event habits that are old metaphors.

• Online 3D spaces that try to mimic a venue, forcing the audience to click arrows to find the virtual door behind which their session is taking place. If you have the online ease of a point and click menu, why the cumbersome interface? Going from ‘’room to room’’, from talk to talk, is easier than ever before!

• Live video streams with a camera at a distance, seeing people on stage as if you are watching the scene from the last row. What works much better, of course, is having your speakers in extreme closeup, seeing their faces and expressions like never before. 

• An event platform that plays a video of a real person who briefly welcomes you to the event - as if they are giving you a badge. Online participants don’t ‘‘arrive’’ somewhere to stay around all day - they move in and out of the event all the time. With the same video repeated endlessly, the cute welcome moment becomes an annoying barrier to entry. 

• Video streams that look like television can work really well - as we are used to television. But maybe for future online gatherings, the video should be vertical, not horizontal, providing a better view of the speaker and their movements? TikTok has a point.

• Session formats that follow the standard session formats: speaker keynote followed by moderated Q&A with host, panel, break, opening, and closing words - the way you would build up a program when you are all in a venue. But now we are all online - what new formats could work in this setting? I am thinking of online excursions, ask me anything sessions, studio visits, seeing someone in their workspace, and more.

• A schedule that works if you are all joined in a venue, but not when you are working from home with a million other things going on. Allow for people coming and going.

  Also missing the chance to run events in new available times (e.g. in the evening, and on weekends). Transforming events into weekly or even daily shows, to become a fixture in the life of your audience. Where in their life do you want to be

• The event is taking place on a specific date, but people sign up before that time. Most event organizers invite the delegates over to sign in right before the event starts - as you would in real life: be on time, but not three weeks early. Online, however: why not give them access to the platform right away?  To connect, put together a profile, find out who else has signed up.. Get the conversation started.

  What examples of old event metaphors in a new world have you seen? And what examples of the truly new do you see on the horizon? Let us know!

Leave a comment

Keep reading

• Martin Recke: How the big event unbundling changes everything

• Benedict Evans: Solving online events

• Ben Sauer: The Tiller Effect in 13 tweets

As co-host of the What’s Next Show I was delighted to have both Benedict and Ben as our guests earlier this year. Feel free to check the Ben Sauer interview in the Next Show (starts at 9:45) or the Benedict Evans presentation (starts at 2:20). Both also contributed to The Great ReDesign publication we put together this year.

Lovely share of the day

(and also an interesting new format that turned up on TikTok: Duet me! What about ‘‘Debate me’’!)

Comments, suggestions, ideas - let me know!

Mail me at monique@vandusseldorp.com

and as always…

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Why events?

Bear with me, all of you, my first 186 lovely subscribers.

My working life started when the internet started. (Yes, I lucked out).

I have 30 years of events under my belt, and now I want to put it all in one newsletter. So I want to talk about why events exist at all.

You may feel this is not really the ‘‘future of events’’ you were looking for.

I understand. This newsletter might be more for me than for you, sometimes.

Anyway. It’s 22 December of the year 2020, the year we will never forget.

An eventless year, that as well.

But lovely things happened online.

Here goes!

Monique

Let’s get together

Let’s start with what I think most of us see as a solid justification for putting a group of people together and have them listen to a few selected others.

Bringing people together from different industries and different professional backgrounds is how we build new industries and new worlds.

It’s how we advance ideas, how we share our experiences and knowledge and doubts - events often are the place where the validity of ideas is weighed and contested. Events are labs, events are platforms, events are meeting places. In a field that is developing rapidly, events are definitely useful. Comprende?

If anything, that is what I need to believe. Those 30 years are gone now, and all those events are forgotten. Cross my fingers I got it right.

But why, why, why?

Let’s focus on a more personal level, as there is also something deeply human about these events as well.

For sure, being on stage is a thrill of its own. I love it. It is easy to understand why speakers and sponsors value events. Look at me!

But why do people go to events? After all, you basically sit in a room and listen to talks you can also find online. You are back in school, sigh. So why go at all?

Focus, experience, expression, connection maybe...?

• Focus. Sitting with other people, in a room in the dark, brings a unique focus that you don’t get sitting in front of a computer screen. The location, the effort, the setting, all of these things provide emphasis. If a talk is done well, you sit in that room and start thinking new thoughts. You mute your calls. You know you cannot leave now, so you might as well listen. You need the setting to get this focus. This is very hard to accomplish with an online event.

• Experience. That shared moment in the dark is only part of the event experience. When you visit the Next conference in Hamburg for instance, walking down the Reeperbahn on your way to a workshop, sipping a drink on a boat trip through the harbor, or enjoying some new music in the evening - all that is an essential part of the event as well. And not simply for entertainment’s sake.

  Our bodies need to move around, walking is the time when new information gets processed. We love new sounds, the streets of another city.  Events are mini sabbaticals for screen people like us. The last thing we need is another Zoom session.

• Expression. When I started putting down the notes to write this, the US election results had just been announced. People were dancing in the street to share a jubilant feeling. Despite a raging pandemic, there was this incredible need to do this with others.

  Sitting in a room at a conference is an expression of emotion as well. Not the exhilaration of ‘’I think we just saved democracy’’ but the more subdued but equally strong ‘’we think this is interesting’’. Going to an event signals this conviction to both those in the room as well as those elsewhere. We actually care about these topics, and this is an expression of our convictions. Who cares what video streams I watch?

• Connection. Of course, events are also social. But let me make it clear: I think they are not about ‘’networking’’.  That implies some kind of transactional plot to meet new people of use for one’s career. Sure, it is a welcome side-effect if it happens, but is it really what draws us there?

  Events are perhaps not so much a place to meet new people, as a way to get away from the familiar ones - to for a while be away from those we know us too well so we can be someone else. We love being near strangers as a welcome relief from the daily grind.

  Benedict Evans recently compared a mass event like Web Summit to the Gay Pride: events as a conduit for finding the people that are ‘’your people’’.  You do not even have to talk to them. It is simply reassuring to find out they exist. Online, most of the time no one knows I am there.

Focus, experience, expression, connection. But to get that, you really have to be IN that room. Breathe the same air. Right? You can leave this newsletter right here if you want…

Focus, experience, expression, connection

Seriously, how can any of this ever be replicated online?

You and me: that is impossible.

The internet: hold my beer.

Let me share four examples of events that I think managed to establish focus, experience, expression, and connection with their online events.

This is not ‘‘the future of events’’, this is what happened this year.

In 2020, we focussed on getting existing events online, and these are four examples - same delegates, speakers, partners, and sponsors. Same bundle. But online.

Focus: Playgrounds

One of the first events I signed up for this spring was the online Playgrounds Festival.

In a normal year, Playgrounds brings around 4.000 visual artists from across the world to the city of Eindhoven. Artists present their latest work, young talent gets the chance to get feedback on their portfolio, digital tool makers show off their wares - and people hang out.

A good time is had by all. Focus, experience, expression, connection, in droves.

For the online edition, held in the first month of a global lockdown, Playground went where their audience hangs out: the multi-day ‘’festival’’ was now one evening with online presentations, held on 2 Twitch Channels - video plus chat - with an after-party on Discord.

(Discord is a popular group-chatting app, originally made to give gamers a place to build communities and talk, and Twitch is a live-streaming platform that allows gamers and content creators to build communities around their streaming). 

And they did something unusual. It was clearly communicated that sessions would not be recorded to be published later on. This made people super focussed - and they started to alert their friends - you have to come to check this out now. 

The most compelling sessions also had this clever ‘’live’’ feel. They were the sessions where you could see an artist make work on the spot - digital drawings, short animations, showing off personal skills as well as the digital tools of their craft. You have to see it to believe it, but this was absolutely fascinating. 

Dutch artist Loish - she has 2,2 million Instagram followers - talked about her work in a very informal setting - how she started, what decisions she made, when she takes on commissions, etc - and then turned the camera to her tablet, to give a demo of her style and actually create a work on the spot.

I was there. For those watching, this was a colleague at work, talking you through the different steps - an ASMR/Bob Ross experience so to speak. You think you want to just see the beginning, but then you stay on to see the end result.

This closeness, where you can see every detail and follow every step in the process - with the artist talking you through her every decision - this worked incredibly well online. The result?

Over 30.000 people from 30 different countries visited the event that evening. 

Festival director Leon van Rooij later shared how unexpected this was, and how he got mails from digital artists from places like Venezuela and Rwanda, indicating not just their delight in taking part, but also pointing out it was the first time where they felt equal to all the other visitors.

There you go, thousands of people mesmerized, watching someone make a digital drawing. A new kind of gig, something that worked better online than in a room.

That certainly provided focus!

Tweakers - expression

Let’s take another example. Tweakers is a Dutch technology website for computer enthusiasts - with news, best buy guides, classifieds, and more. With over 700.000 members its carefully moderated tech forum is lively as ever and has over 29 million posts. The annual summit usually brings together over 500 developers and the ‘’Meetups’’ tend to be a bit smaller.

In November, Tweakers hosted The Privacy and Security Meetup online - in this case, I was personally involved as I selected the speakers.

The platform used in this case was Let’s get digital. Around 500 people logged on around noon, listened to the talks, asked lots of questions, some chatted with each other, and almost everyone stayed around until the end. On a Saturday afternoon! 

My guess? This is an audience that does not particularly care for small talk, has a razor-sharp focus on the content itself, and feels confident interacting with others online.

That’s where they always meet after all - on the Tweakers forums. And by getting together, they also signal to each other, to the speakers, to themselves: this is what interests me.

In fact, the event was evaluated as one of the best so far. There was one particularly relevant question in the feedback form: ‘’what do you prefer - an in-person event or an event online?’’ Over 65% said: I prefer online events. 

Taking part in the event was a signal for the delegates, who by their presence communicated their love of tech, the importance of privacy and security issues, the relevance of the topics discussed.

Showing up was a vote, ‘’this is important’’. 

Alex Lindsay’s Office Hours - Connection

’Finding your people’’ is as important for adults as it is for teenagers grappling with their identity. An example of an online event that provides delegates with that feeling is Office Hours hosted by Alex Lindsay -  I stumbled upon this series by accident.

Lindsay is an American computer graphics and video production specialist. He has a multiple hour Zoom call every day - it starts with an hour of Q&A, and then an hour with a guest. To get an idea of the kind of topics discussed, see 10 Things I learned from office hours.

I tuned in a few times - and I really enjoyed the format. The info that is being shared is highly relevant if you are in the video/streaming industry - discussing equipment, software, set-ups, and more. So for the people that log on, it is indeed useful - the kind of info you could pick up at an industry event when chatting at the end of a session, or in an online forum or in the bar talking shop.

But what comes through, even more, is that this is a club - it is where you go to hear your peers talk about the stuff you like, it is a place to find ‘’my people’’ - and hang out with them, chatting or just listening. Conversation and connection - somewhere between the club and a podcast.

House of Beautiful Business - experience

The hardest thing? Experiences. We crave experiences. No matter how fascinating the content is that online events come up with - from talks to online workshops, conversations, and brainstorms  - it’s not much of an experience right now.

After all, there is a good chance that your daily work makes you spend long chunks of time behind the screen, and now that so many other activities have been canceled - who knows, you might spend some of your free time with even more screen time. How can an online event break that mold?

The House of Beautiful Business is an industry event that has a strong focus on experiences. (I visited their event last year).

Normally they bring together a crowd of curious people to Lisbon, for no less than five full days of presentations, workshops, dinners, city exploration, and more. The range of activities goes from listening to interesting tech speakers to making music together, meditating, walking blindfolded across a Lisbon square, eating Pastel de Nata, and spending an hour in each other’s presence in silence - how on earth could you translate any of that to an online experience?

Honestly, they had the delegates sing ‘‘Bella ciao’’ last time round. I got up early just to be part of that.

What HoBB did over the many months of lockdowns was first of all bring their community together in a series of Zoom sessions - with talks, music, dance but also some joint activities - like journaling, everyone in their own space.

When it came to their annual event they put together an impressive four days of online activities and offered an abundance of formats and topics. 

Insightful panel discussions with top speakers from across the globe: check! Lots of people hanging around in the Zoom calls: for sure.

But the more interesting elements were the format experiments. The great wave actually managed to create an experience.

The ‘’event’’ offered access to a virtual world designed by Waltz Binaire, it offered podcasts to listen to while doing other tasks, and it had active sessions - like one where delegates made masks - which they wore in the next hour that was reserved for dancing. Or the time in the schedule where everyone was invited to join while having dinner.

In addition to that, local hubs gathered people outside - or in other settings where the Covid rules could be followed.

One of the things that worked very well was a guided conversation on Zoom while everyone was taking a walk outside. A group of acquaintances and strangers talking about dilemmas while walking and listening (no video), occasionally sharing a picture. The format was so good, that it is now a monthly walk-and-talk meetup. 

After four days together at the Great Wave online event, the delegates shared messages on-screen waving goodbye, as if they were saying goodbye to family. They had experienced something together.

That’s it for now! Four examples of events that worked.

Tomorrow, I will share some examples of what does NOT work.

And maybe after that, we will tackle the future..?

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Mic-drop share of the day

If you know other people that could be interested in the future of events, do tell them about this newsletter!

Share Van Dusseldorp's Future of events

Monique van Dusseldorp

Curator/Moderator

monique@vandusseldorp.com

Tel: +31 655 364 699

@dusseldorp

• Sign up for my Future of Events Newsletter https://futureofevents.substack.com/  (news and views on new events)

• Sign up for my Van Dusseldorp Updates Newsletter https://vandusseldorp.substack.com/ (irregular overview of my projects)

Life is digital 

‘’Travis Scott has a gig on Fortnite tonight!’’. ‘Really?’, I tell my teenage son, ‘that’s interesting. I’d love to see that. Can you tell me when it is on?’ To which he answered ‘’No, of course not. I am going with my friends’’.

That evening, he closed his door, and logged on to Fortnite, as did his friends, all from their own homes. They even ‘dressed up’ for it – which means they spent some game money on a digital Travis Scott skin for their online representation.

The show itself? It lasted all of 10 minutes, and was an interactive, pre-rendered 3D music video tailored specifically for Fortnite – it was seen live by over 12 million people who logged in for the occasion in shifts, and who could move around in a separate area of the game world they know and love. The subsequent recording on Youtube generated another 120 million views.

‘’I am going with my friends!’’  Life is digital whether we like it or not. Digital connections are real connections. The basic needs underlying our desire to get together are unchanged.

So what is the future of events?

Welcome and intro

This is issue number zero of my newsletter on the future of events - with nothing more than an introduction to what I want to do. Tomorrow you will get issue no 1 in your mail. Now, as for Travis Scott, let me remind you..

Still there?

That’s wonderful! Let’s start with a quick introduction. My name is Monique van Dusseldorp, and I am an Amsterdam-based curator of events and seminars on media, technology, and innovation. Over the last 25 years, I have dedicated myself to finding interesting people, projects, and ideas, and provide them with the audience and the platform they deserve.

For a quick overview of recent work…In 2020, I worked on a series of online and hybrid events, always part of a team. We transformed the Next Conference in Hamburg into the What’s Next Show and the Great ReDesign book, we turned the Dutch Media Week into 40 online talk shows and a drive-in experience, and we organised 8 Cross Media Cafes on media innovation as online and hybrid events. The Next Generation Internet Policy Summit for European policymakers was also turned into an online event, just like the Partos Innovation Festival on digital civic power - with hundreds of delegates from round the globe. I also joined the splendid New World Same Humans newsletter as Editor at Large and I joined the advisory board of Preparation Tech and Denk Produkties. Also new this year: hosting online events! I love hosting/moderating events on tech and innovation. Find me on LinkedIn or Twitter for more info on what I do or mail me if you would like to work with me!

The events I have worked on over the last 25 years have all been part of the global digital transformation that touches every part of our lives. I think of events as places where we can look at the future and discuss it - as temporary labs even - and also as welcome meetings of kindred spirits. So events matter on both a personal, industry, and society level. And I see the world of events through that lens.

Just so that you know! And then…. all 2020 events got canceled.

What did I do? Same as always.

Do research online. Have random thoughts. Miss deadlines. Worry about the future.

And I signed up for as many online events as I could - online conferences, theatre shows, seminars, dance performances, webinars, concerts, debates, exhibitions, and more. I made screenshots, recorded videos, and started taking down notes.

Tracking how this segment of our digital world is changing has been a delight. There is a new space opening up with new platforms, new formats, and new interactions. And the field is wide and deep. What happens in the world of entertainment, design, education, software, or business - it all seems relevant for the future of events.

Suddenly I was not just researching new tech and new speakers, but the new tools of my trade. And it is time to put some of that down in writing.

Invitation to come out and play!

In Five trends for the 2020s David Mattin writes

Under lockdown, we’ve watched a new world glimmer into life. Now, millions will take to the metaverse to serve fundamental human needs such as social connection, wellbeing, and status.

It’s that glimmering world that I would love to research together with all of you.

Over the next 10 days, I want to share some first ideas and observations - and I invite you to send in examples, feedback, and your own ideas. I would love to make this a shared resource (with full credit to anyone contributing)!

There are 172 of you out there already. You are my very favorite people in the world right now.

First of all: here are the topics I have lined up for you..

• Online events are hard. Some examples of what does not work..Let me know if you have been there..

• Why do we organize events? Examples of online events that do work. Give me your finest events!

• Unbundled events: new audiences and direct audience-to-speaker connections. Examples?

• New interfaces, new platforms! Tell me all about it…

• What events can learn from the worlds of television, games, and education Let me know..(this is an endless category)

• The power of audio as an enabler of off-screen event experiences Audio is the new frontier! Examples?..

• Computer vision / AI and the future of video communications Super interesting, let me know if you can point me to more examples..

• Our virtual representations - from virtual lipstick to full-on avatars Tell me!.

• Video walls and more - new representations of audiences More examples welcome!

Sharing my network with you..

• Have you published or read an article or report on the future of events worth sharing? Let’s build a resource!

• Have you organized or attended an online event we should all know about?

• Anything else you want from this newsletter?

  Let me know.. or

Leave a comment

Random fact of the day

The winter solstice is today - it is the shortest day in the Northern Hemisphere but not the day with the latest sunrise and earliest sunset. How is that possible?

Kind regards,

Monique van Dusseldorp

monique@vandusseldorp.com

Tel: +31 655 364 699

@dusseldorp

Sign up for my Future of Events Newsletter https://futureofevents.substack.com/  (news and views on new events. This is issue zero)

Sign up for my Van Dusseldorp Updates Newsletter https://vandusseldorp.substack.com/ (New. Irregular overview of projects)

Welcome to Van Dusseldorp's Future of events by me, Monique van Dusseldorp. Amsterdam based event curator with more than 20 years of experience creating events that explore technology and innovation.

From virtual spaces to audio-only events, from concerts within game worlds to a sign language for video calls, every aspect of the event industry is changing this year – but the basic needs underlying our desire to get together are unchanged. So what is the future of events?

This newsletter combines my observations on the new world of events with an overview of relevant developments in the event space.

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