The Flicker Man piece intrigues me mainly as I have some familiarity with the ARG format and how advances in communications technologies has created a new form of storytelling, whether through playing characters on image boards or blogs or the like, as well as through video uploads and video games or whatever tools available to create art that blurs the line of fiction and reality, and most importantly includes the audience participation in its existence.
With the flickerman, the medium it took was that of radio primarily, and then would continue through social media, as a lot of ARGs did during ther inception, with Lance Dann explaining radio’s relationship with its audience;
“Audience is the commodity that contemporary radio produces, a commodity
that is sold to advertisers or, in the UK, exchanged for the right to demand a
licence-fee. Station content is produced simply to attract that audience,
programming is programmed and risks are rarely taken.”
With the Flicker Man’s concept being to direct listeners to Flicker images on their site using the tagging feature, he would engage the audience in a different manner than usual programming, not entirely demanding audience participation, but working best with the audience digging through the information provided by Lance to follow him to Facebook conversations and Google Maps locations in order to tell a narrative this way.
With the ARG concept being interesting already to me I am interested most by what he has to say at the end, that “for radio what really matters is not sound, it is the act of broadcast”, describing radio as a “precise and direct communication with a listener at a particular moment in time. This is why ‘live’ radio is so appealing, because you as ‘listener’ know that there is someone out there talking to you at that precise moment.” This had me think about what the appeal of our pre-made pre-recorded and assembled work could have seperate from the ideal liveness, and how to tune into this idea of radio as a direct communication to the listener, and involving them in a similar sense that the ARG idea does. While I don’t think this exercise will shape the idea of the project, it is something to think about regarding how to go about including the audience beyond the appeal of liveness through familiarity and honesty, or perhaps feigning liveness to remove the need for anything greater. All things to take into account further into this project.