infonet-economy

With the rise of the creative economy and the growth of urban tourism cities around the world became part of a new organizational logic. In order to become attractive for the creative work force as well as for weekend tourists new galleries, museums and libraries were built in many city centers during the past decades. Furthermore, seaside promenades were opened, inner city districts were cleaned and cultural festivals of various sorts became part of many cities' yearly rhythms. With this shift towards a logic which performs a city's culture as economic resource museums, tidy walkways and beautiful piazzas are no longer seen as simply being public services for a city's inhabitants. Rather they become necessary economic investments which are expected to produce a sizeable return for the city's economy. In this regard the atmosphere of a city becomes a tangible asset that has to meet certain requirements and has to be performed according to specific rationales.
In order to understand how this mode of organizing unfolds in relation to multiple other logics of urban life the paper presents a case study on a young string ensemble in Berlin. The ensemble focuses on prising open established formats of performing classic music and explores experimental formats of staging their music. One of the ensemble's predominant interests lies in how public spaces can be appropriated through their music and how they can (or cannot) intervene musically into the organization of urban life. In so called "Guerrilla concerts" they explore various public spaces in Berlin and try to reassemble them aesthetically. While in some places their performances resonate well with other rhythms of urban life, in others cases the ensemble fails in making their fantasies come true.
Through an audio-visual ethnography of the group's rehearsals and performances the paper raises the question of how the production of new atmospheres becomes im/possible. The study is based on an understanding of atmosphere as performance in which human and non-human actors participate. Therefore atmospheres are addressed as aesthetic practices which assembles a wide range of objects, people, narratives and music. The process of assembling new atmospheres is then a process of carefully crafting and negotiating the relations between sets of heterogeneous actors.
Conceptually, the research draws upon the vocabulary and methods of Actor-Network- Theory and its developments after (Law, Mol, Hassard, Hennion) as well as upon some ideas of Non-Representational Theorizing (Thrift, Anderson, Harrison).