Virtual Gatherings at Scale
2021. A year of multi-thousand-person virtual gatherings. Before the playbook existed.
Summary
Across 2021, directed several multi-thousand-person virtual gatherings in different formats and venues. The flagship was a Cryptovoxels event co-hosted with Ben Lakoff that drew enough concurrent attendance to overwhelm the platform's networking layer. IMT Haikou ran a separate livestream production that pulled a comparable audience in a different format. Different productions, same thesis: virtual gatherings could pull real-world attendance at real-world scale, well before the tooling stack was ready for it.
Why it matters
2021 was the moment virtual venues went from speculative-conference-panel to something you could actually run a cultural event inside. Multiple productions across a single year, each pulling multi-thousand attendance, was a body of evidence that 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 — much of it had to be invented in production.
What was noteworthy
The honest takeaway from the year: 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 or a livestream feed.
Photographs
Next in Cultural Events → Cacophony Society