Dutch Jazz World Meeting

Interactive Cultures @ Dutch Jazz World Meeting

Birmingham City University: Interactive Cultures

We're the team from a research unit at Birmingham City University. We're media academics who happen to be jazz and world music fans, and we're working with the Dutch Jazz and World Meeting 2010 to develop online resources that represent the vibrancy of the bands showcasing their music at the meeting.

Our idea is to capture the spirit of the music showcases, using a range of techniques, including photography and text - but also handheld, personal digital video. We intend to give small, cheap, portable video cameras to selected audience members and musicians and have them capture whatever they think is interesting: the buzz of the audience, the surrounding environment, snippets of the music performed, and discussions around jazz and world music.

We'll gather together the bits of video, photography and writing and build a website that experiments with the ways in which the stories we captured can be navigated to give visitors a real sense of what goes on at the Dutch Jazz and World Music meeting. Because we'll be working with a bit of composed structure and quite a lot of improvisation - in a way, it's just like jazz.

Although we've worked on projects like this before, with Aftershock in Italy and Manchester, with the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, the Scarborough Jazz Festival, and touring musicians from the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts we don't have a fixed idea of what we're going to end up with - but this is what's going to be so interesting about it. We're looking forward to working with you, and assure you that our interest is in promoting jazz and world music, that we won't use any of our material for commercial purposes, and that we're not going to get in the way and make things difficult for you.

If you'd like to find out more about us, you can visit us at http://interactivecultures.org