About the 'party'

The project, presented as a sort of ‘ethnographic party,’ is trying to answer how the use of digital technologies affect DJ’s views of London, but also the ways in which dynamics of London affect DJ’s uses of digital technologies. While I was ‘in the field’, following the participants of the research and talking to them, I had the strange sensation that London was getting through the door into the party. That is, migration dynamics, circuits of lifestyles (Magnani, 2007), and the city’s vibrant musical scene were very present in the events and in the DJs' perspectives. Parties are a messy experience in which practices, technologies (digital and analog), and imaginaries of the city are co-existing and influencing each other. DJs have to modulate, build, and maintain the amosphere produced by all those elements together. My aim is to invoke the messiness of the events; and the practices of modulation, control, and creation of the DJs.

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Between November 2016 and March 2017, I followed the practices, both online and offline, of Carlos and Russ -two Latin American music DJs. I did participant observation mainly at The Forge, a bar in Camden where the two of them work regularly —although I also attended other Latin American bars and talked to other DJs and people in the places. I tried to understand their practices as DJs, and their ideas of what being a DJ in London means, which implied following their posts and updates on Facebook. But I also tried to describe the experience of being in a party organized by them, so a focus on a specific bar allowed me to understand the messiness I encountered in each party I attended, in which digital technologies played a role between other objects.

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The concept of 'event' was useful for my methodological approximation (Pink et al., 2015, p. 147-165), because it focuses on meaningful and repeated activities where multiple points of view are present or emerge (as in a ritual). But most importantly, it also takes into account the entanglement of the online and the offline, and the material and immaterial. Thus, in my case it was a useful category to think through the assemblage of digital technologies, analog objects, and perspectives of London that create situated experiences of what a Latin American party is.

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The project is also focusing on digital technologies in other ways. This 'ethnographic party' is a way to understand digital technologies in 'the field', but it reflects on the way digital technologies affect our representations of 'the field' as well. In that sense, digital technologies were also present as tools for my research. In order to understand the ‘events’ I was observing, I started using (for the first time) different social media and digital platforms installed on my phone and laptop (e.g. Instagram, Snapchat, Wix, Facebook 360). Instagram and its app Boomerang, for example, allowed me to capture gestures and movements of the DJs and the audience —elements of the atmosphere I wanted to evoke—, that were very difficult to describe otherwise. Furthermore, Wix was a very useful platform for organizing the information in the form of a webpage, in a user-friendly way that did not require advanced technical skills. However, Wix is designed mainly to create businesses webpages, so many of the ideas I had were impossible to do because they did not match with the expected narratives that guide customers through a commercial webpage. With those experiences, I realized how active are digital platforms in allowing or constraining ways of understanding and representing our field-sites.

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On top of that, digital technologies were also present in the way I wanted to link the form of the project with my participant’s views and practices. As Annelise Riles (2006) notes, ethnography can be used as a response to both our participants, and “to the artifacts —the knowledge, the commitments, the practices— others introduce to us in the ethnographic encounter.” (p. 24) In my case, I encountered CDs as a valuable object through which my participants mediated between their practices as ‘party builders,’ and the several elements present in the event. So how could I translate CDs, used in that way, into a digital format?

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When looking for examples of digitization of CDs, as record shops do in their webpages, for instance, I found that they are content with digitizing the sound, as if the digital file was perfectly replacing the experience of hearing a song from a CD. But as Haidy Geismar (2015) suggests, the process of digitization also allow us to think how new social relations emerge through this process, and how we can explore ways of researching and representing that are not purely visual and indexical. In reflecting on those insights, I chose to use CDs as an aesthetic and as a (rather linear) narrative structure, in which the CDs become chunks of the ethnographic experience I want to evoke, and all is presented as a ‘party’ that is also trying to describe Latin American parties in London.

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This means that I am not using digital platforms in order to 'translate' neutrally and exactly. As digital platforms bring specific affordances and limitations, I want to create both a response to my participants, and a different way of relating with the visitors of this webpage. The hyperlinks, maps, images, and other interactive devices are tools available in digital format. With those, I tried to both conserve the linear narrative of CDs —go forward or backwards to change the songs—, and give the visitors other possibilities for sensorial explorations that can go beyond the textual and the visual (without assuming that those experiences will be more authentic or real).

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Finally, the limitations and failures digital technologies bring can also be used for unexpected experiences and relations. This is the case with the 360° image that I placed as a ‘virtual space’ of the party: I conceived it as closer to the experience of 'being there', but I could not post the image correctly. Besides the result of being impossible to recognize the image, when I showed it to some friends they were amazed of the quasi-psychedelic experience that it triggered, different (but at the same time related) to the experience of the party I was trying to recreate. 

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Digital technologies are inhabiting the world we study and influencing the way we study it. This project is a partial and somehow playful attempt to address this complex presence of the digital without focusing on it directly.

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Enjoy the party!

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References

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Geismar, H. (2015). Post-Photographic Presences, or how to wear a digital cloak. Photographies 8(3), 305-321.

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Magnani, J.G. (2007). Jovens na Metrópole: Etnografias de Circuitos de Lazer, Encontro e Sociabilidade. Sao Paulo: Terceiro Nome.

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McIlwane, C. (2012). The Colombian Community in London. London: Queen Mary university.

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Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., & Tacchi, J. (2016). Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. Los Angeles: Sage.

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Riles, A. (2006). Introduction: In Response. Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge, Annelise Riles (ed.). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.