Virtual Gatherings at Scale
2021. Cryptovoxels. Co-hosted with Ben Lakoff. Before the playbook existed.
Summary
Co-hosted with Ben Lakoff in 2021. Thousands of concurrent participants in a single virtual venue, enough to overwhelm the platform's networking layer and produce the kind of instructive breakage that comes with running a real production at the leading edge of what the tooling can do.
Why it matters
2021 was the moment virtual venues went from speculative-conference-panel to something you could actually run a cultural event inside. This was an early proof point that distributed-virtual gatherings could pull real-world attendance at real-world scale. The limits were infrastructural, not cultural. The playbook for running events of this kind didn't yet exist.
What was noteworthy
The honest takeaway from the production: most of the work was operational, not creative. Programming, partner logistics, comms cadence, on-the-night moderation, recovery plans when the platform struggled. The cultural content was the easy part; the production discipline was the hard part. That's true for events at this scale regardless of whether they're in a museum or a voxel grid.
Photographs
Next in Cultural Events → Cacophony Society