Projects

Chasing Utopia:  Ethnographic Sketches Unpacking Discursive Changes in Berlin’s Electronic Music Scene (2016)

For my final college course, I conducted first-person ethnographic research on how Berlin's electronic music scene originated and has been shaped by economic changes. Berlin has been touted as a musical utopia, where artists can live cheaply and focus on their art rather than commercialization. To excerpt myself:

Entering the city as a foreign musician, I immediately sought to speak with other DJs and producers to better understand the music scene here. I was surprised to discover conditions vastly different from the touted community-and-music rather than status-oriented electronic scene. People expressed feelings of transience in the music scene, a lack of pay for artists, intense competition, and generally feeling unwelcome. Nothing new for musicians in most places, but Berlin was supposed to be different. I began searching to understand why Berlin changed, and how it fostered such a unique techno and electronic scene in the first place. At the same time, I questioned why Berlin had such a low cost of living. Ultimately I found that the two questions were intrinsically related, and set out to examine the historic and current economic and cultural context of the electronic music scene: what has shaped it, and what has changed?

As it turned out, what changed was a huge number of economic factors. I uncovered the tip of the iceberg during my interviews and attempted to chronicle it. 

This paper is a focused examination of Berlin’s changing socio-economic context, with the aim of understanding how the unique electronic scene was established and subsequently changed... The economic context of electronica in Berlin is rich and intersectional, posing questions about the inevitability of capitalism, the nature of “art”, the role of subculture, the effectiveness of city housing policy, the concept of “selfishness”, and the impact of environment upon art. Most of all, it is evident that Berlin’s electronic scene thrived in response to unique local economic conditions and has changed as global cultural norms have begun to permeate the city. Advances making music more accessible have reduced its value, though collectively music has never been more valued. Paradoxes abound in the attempt to protect artists and culture; “Berlin is a victim of its own success” (Katherine 2016). 

My favorite finding was the rise of clubs into "gatekeeper" roles as traditional music gatekeepers have had their power eroded (labels). It begs the question of if gatekeepers are a necessary part of cultural enterprises, a bad guy to say "you shall not pass". Artists receive higher pay outside of Berlin due to the label of "Berlin" attached to their name, and must play at some of the large Berlin clubs to have that proverbial stamp on their passport. "These clubs are aware of the weight their names hold, and at times manipulate artists into lower fees in exchange for the exposure." Artists rely on venue endorsement because they must play shows outside Berlin in order to make enough money as a full-time artists. Within the city, pay per show is lower, competition much higher, and top venues block artists from having any other performances around a set there. 

"As venues have gained more money and power, they have “turned it around and made damaging informal policies. Like nearly all major clubs require that you don’t play other clubs within a certain amount of time when you play there. It’s not all clubs, very specific ones, Berghain is the most famous one who started it but plenty of others have been happy to follow” (Ariel 2016). The clubs have created these exclusivity requirements in order to ensure their event sells well, that audiences have not seen that DJ the night before elsewhere, but this rule is exceedingly damaging to artists’ autonomy. Artists now depend on shows for income, often needing to travel outside of Berlin to get better pay and show quality. They rely on playing at significant venues in Berlin to get shows outside of Berlin, and are blocked from performing at other Berlin clubs around the dates of a performance at the “gatekeeper” clubs. Additionally, playing at some clubs can block them from opportunities at the best clubs. Artists in other cities would not be shocked to hear about the reliance on marketing, booker relationships, and venues to succeed, but this marks a drastic departure from the egalitarian, talent and authenticity-oriented mindset Berlin became famous for."

You can read my entire study here. 

Smart Parks Whitepaper

One of my major responsibilities as Data Strategy Lead at Soofa was creating research materials for inbound marketing and internal decision-making. We realized all the research we had on parks and technology could be turned into a whitepaper useful for parks departments and citizens alike. I was the sole author on the whitepaper, which included performing market analysis estimates for multiple different economic components of parks. The Smart Parks paper was peer reviewed by industry professionals from NYC Parks to Microsoft Civic Technology. The paper was sent to prospective clients, yielding tens of thousands in sales. This is one of three whitepapers have written for Soofa. You can see the entire Smart Parks paper here. 

Selected excerpts:

Soofa Bot (2015)

Try it! Text "fortune" to 617-219-9123. (No guarantees how long the servers, see below, will be maintained.) 

I am very interested in conversational UI interfaces and exploring the ways we interact and "communicate" with objects around us. At Soofa, I applied these questions to how city-dwellers might interact with their city. Could the bench be the urban oracle, a hub for hyper-local recommendations? How could we use the Soofa Bench as a digital geocache, leaving information there for others to see? Most of all, how could we best harness the urban real estate we had to radically alter the way people interacted with the city? I wanted to explore how text-bots could be used for Soofa. We tested with 2 different "bots", the more advanced of which was my Soofa Fortune-Telling Bot. 

Technology

I built the Soofa Bot using PandoraBots, they have a really easy-to-understand natural language processing tool. I then created a bot on the Pandorabots Server and deployed that to a Heroku web server. I uploaded the brief code for the bot to Pandorabots. From there, I connected a number from Twilio to the bot.