Everyone can be a critic, and everyone can get the latest reaction to shows in the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival thanks to cell phones and texting. The new hot-on-the-hoof reviews by Jane Q. Public will be displayed online at Phillyfunguide.com and at livearts-fringe.org.
The cell-phone program, from the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, will not collect any personal info from the texters–just their comments, and then display them at the events themselves as well as on the web sites.
I asked GPCA’s John McInerney if he knew of others ever using this kind of technnology for instant audience reviews. “I don’t know of any.” So this may be a first! (The real firsts could be said to be Libby and Roberta when, as the Zero .1 Percent for Art Commission, distributed real world Bad Art Obliteration Tools at the Fringe–really little blinders that people could use to block their view of bad art. But we were low-low-low-tech).
The way the Turn Your Cell Phone On! program works is people in the theater get a code for dialing in, and then they can rank the show from awesome to yuk (well, really from Amazing to Not So Great). The program is supposed to work with most cell phones. Then in the lobby, a computer immediately tabulates the results and displays them on an LED screen.
Those results will also be fed to the two web sites.
The system was deemed too hard to make happen for the many Fringe events, but the juried-in Live Arts performances seemed do-able, said McInerney, and seven of the 16 Live Arts groups agreed to subject themselves to the rating system–mostly it’s several dance troupes plus Pig Iron plus the Dean Wareham & Britta Phillips Andy Warhol event.
Meanwhile, we are thinking about how this technology can further democratize art criticism on artblog. Well, that’s for manana, but we may eventually get there.
You can see a preview of vote counting on the front page of the Live Arts site. Just click on one of the choices below the big red donate button.
