Honk! (in space)
Honk! (in space)
Exploring virtual socialization & performance in the Somerville festival’s first test-launch.
Last week, the annual Somerville-based activist brass festival Honk! entered virtual reality for the first time in its 13-year hxstory. While normally taking place across Davis, Union, and Harvard squares and drawing thousands into the streets—this year Harvard’s Music department & AR/VR Lab collaborated with Honk! founder Ken Fields to create a hypothetical new location: space. I was was lucky enough to be included in this first concept test as a volunteer contributor to the newly founded Honk! archive at the Cambridge Public Library.
This outer world was hosted via VRChat which allows for free public access—however in this case limited locally to the headsets in the room on campus due to technical limitations. Students from the course attended en mass at Holden Chapel, where dozens donned Oculus Quest headsets with the help of the Harvard VR lab. Meanwhile in the visualization lab on campus, live musicians, including one of the Honk! festival founders, Ken Fields (who was nice enough to volunteer for this experiment), were streamed live into the digital realm. When all these moving parts came together, it was quite spectacular—and incredibly strange.
(Me, on a metaphysical musical journey through space--led by a giant mushroom and a goose.)
Located somewhere in a galaxy far, far away—I entered the VRChat room to find myself on a desert-like landscape surrounded by strange looking avatars. As I looked up, I saw a sky full of stars and distant planets. In the distance I saw the “stage” for the event, which comprised of a floor with a large mirror as a backdrop. As I walked closer I realized where the music was coming from. Our space band for the festival was comprised of a giant mushroom and a goose. Together they were laying down a solid saxophone-guitar jazz combo set. It was very good, and I could hear them clearly as I milled about looking at all my fellow attendees and their strange avatars. It certainly wasn’t hi-fidelity sound, and there was no chest-shaking bass, but it did have a kind of endearing lo-fi quality to it. Frankly though, after a few minutes of initial listening, I barely paid attention to the music for the remainder of the event.
What truly became enthralling about the experience was the social interactions I witnessed and participated in with other “audience” members. I say this in quotes because the division between performer and audience quickly broke down as so much entertainment came from random concert goers simply interaction. And there was so little visual stimulation from performers that it almost eliminated any need to really visually pay attention to them. After all, they were just a giant mushroom and a goose, and without stage production they are largely upstaged by users in sexy-cat avatars playing catch with bottles of vodka and blasting off together in jet packs. Conversations and goofy attempts at making useful hand gestures took up a massive amount of my attention, and once I got into one of the jet packs I found myself violently spiraling through space just trying not to vomit.
There is something weirdly beautiful about an event like this because of a strange freedom one feels in the virtual festival space. Unlike in physical gatherings, there are really no social norms to follow in VRChat. One essentially opts-in to the normal walking up to other attendees, waving, and saying hello—but it’s in no way required because of the mask of anonymity each player maintains in their avatars. It reminded me in part of attending interactive theatre like Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More in which all non-actors must wear masks at all times. This creates much more space for uninhibited behavior due to the anonymizing of participants, and it allows for much more in-depth immersion in the experience.
(Students wander the Honk! planet in VR space. So close to one another, and yet so far away.)
Because of the sense of surrealism, of play, and of fantasy, the concepts of performers and audience deconstruct in really exciting ways. VR festivals prioritize interaction between audience members (or “players”) because none feels obligated to give full attention to the performance, they do not feel pressure to act as they “should” in public. Therefore their attentions are free to wander without it being some sort of insult to the performance. The event is the creation of an engaging play space, not necessarily in the on-stage performance itself. That is the most critical difference between in-person and virtual reality concerts that I personally felt.
While I certainly would not suggest that Honk! ever replace its community festival with virtual reality—the physical edition of the festival is critical to its roots as a Somerville community celebration of public space—I would certainly recommend they add it into the annual festivities and expand access. Whether or not it’s a viable option for full-scale events, it’s just plain fun. Their biggest struggle will undoubtedly be finding easy ways for people to join in given the complexity and cost of VR headsets. Not to mention that the effects of virtual reality on younger folks have not been officially tested in the long-term as of yet. The primary goal of Honk! is to be free, full access, and highly participatory—and if it is to achieve this in virtual reality then it must find ways to give access to this technology. But if organizers can find ways to get VR access into more hands, I'm convinced it can open up some fascinating opportunities for the future of Honk! and public digital space, more generally. Virtual Reality is not a replacement for physical gatherings, but it can act as an equally interesting and engaging platform for human connection—and I hope to visit Planet Honk! next fall.
For more information the Honk! Festival, please visit their website.
Current Harvard students can access the VR Lab’s rental gear in Cabot Library.