# VideoVortex #3 7. Michael Liegel

Most research on interaction features discourse in one way or another (interviews, conversation, talk in interaction). Furthermore, it often focuses on settings, where instrumental, strategic or teleological action occurs, for instance “operating together” (Mondada, 2001) or “telling a joke” (Sacks & Jefferson, 1995). Language and the rationality of teleological action, it seems, are steering mechanisms needed to transform a mere gathering of people and things into orderly situations that can be socially accounted for. The setting I would like to talk about seems to lack those two fundamental features. In my paper I look at video footage from an extended ethnographic study of a New York based Media Collective and their weekly “Multi-Media-Open-Jam-Session” . Here, friends and strangers gather every Sunday night in an 8 hrs Session, producing non-structured audio and video /together./ In this setting there are up to 16 participants, playing simultaneously digital, analogue and acoustic instruments. Sometimes sounds and images are produced in a computer mediated collective environment (several networked laptops), sometimes there is even streams coming in, or remote collaborations taking place simultaneously with the local jam. Since the setting provides non-idiomatic improvisation it could be argued, that it is lacking fundamental accountability (Garfinkel, 1967), making it a difficult border-line case of the social, the comprehensible and one might argue, the sane. An…

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2010
- Runtime: 36 min
- By: Instituut voor Netwerk Cultuur
- Genres: History
- Archive: [Open Images (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision)](https://www.openbeelden.nl/media/47366)
- Licence or status: [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/nl/) (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Instituut voor Netwerk Cultuur
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/openbeelden/47366?play=1)