Transmedia Festivals

This book takes its readers to worlds located between clubs, galleries, and cultural spaces. The author illustrates and conceptualizes a new festival format, characterized as transmedia festivals, that has increasingly established itself in major European cities since the 2000s. In this long-term ethnographic study, ten selected European festivals and their audiosocial communities are examined, which present avant-garde experiments between art, music and technology. The fascination of these hybrid art forms is vividly explored. In addition, the ethnography highlights the efforts of those involved to cope with the risks and challenges of an economized cultural sector. The resulting disruptions and ambivalences of a present in which gentrification processes and platform capitalism have profoundly changed the concert and event landscape are analyzed and illustrated. This creates a multifaceted portrait of art and cultural work in the present and how it is interwoven with the transformation processes of the 21st century.