Fair framings: arts and culture festivals as sites for technical innovation
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Fair framings: arts and culture festivals as sites for technical innovation Nona Schulte-Ro¨mer
Received: 26 June 2012 / Accepted: 14 December 2012 / Published online: 22 February 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
Abstract The fascination and thrill of arts festivals relates to their capacity to host the unexpected, surprising and new. The economic model of novelty bundling markets presents a rare attempt to account for the potential impact of festivals on innovation. Its cognitive conception of festivals as sites of economic evolution offers a point of departure for this paper. The economic model is criticised and further developed, especially in two respects, drawing on sociological studies on science, technology and society and on empirical data from two cases of innovatively used lighting technology in festivals. First, it is argued that festivals offer a fair space for the simultaneous discovery, display and valorisation of the new that is produced by performers, curators and audiences, and by innovators, intermediaries and consumers alike. Secondly, the production and consumption of newness in festivals is linked to the specific way in which their socio-material setting facilitates what has been termed framing and overflowing of cognitive formats. Finally, the analysis sheds new light not only on the innovative impact of festivals but also on the scholarly reserve to engage with this field of research. Keywords Festivals Innovation Novelty bundling markets Overflows Investments in form Fair space
1 The problem: recognising and valorising the new The new must be brought into the familiar world and enter into exchange with prior experiences. It must be given meaning and evaluated. The new must be N. Schulte-Ro¨mer (&) Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), Unit ‘‘Cultural Sources of Newness’’, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785 Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
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different, but to be recognizable as the new, it requires observers to make a concentrated effort. (Nowotny 2008: 2). Before groundbreaking ideas, novel artefacts or unfamiliar processes can be considered as innovations they have to pass a cognitive test. Only if they are recognised and valorised as ‘new’ and ‘better’, in comparison to what already exists, will they successfully enter the world (Johannessen et al. 2001; Braun-Thu¨rmann 2005; Marz 2010; Canzler and Marz 2011). Studies on science, technology and society (STS) have highlighted how meaning-making results in the emergence of networks of actors and artefacts that allow the social integration and stabilisation of the new. Here, socio-material settings are crucial as the material composition and social fabric of the situations in which the new is conceived influence how it finds spokespeople, audiences and users (Akrich et al. 2002a, b). As networks emerge around the new, the latter links and makes sense to more and more people and things. The transformation of an invention into successful innovations can thus be conceptualised as a
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