How The Light Gets In 2020 — pros and cons of watching a festival from the comfort of your sofa
For those of you who don’t know and haven’t been, How The Light Gets In is an annual Music and Philosophy festival in Hay on Wye. As they years have gone by, the entertaining, challenging and informative programme has become less and less financially accessible. An email came in advising that earlybird tickets were available. Surely they weren’t still running it even as socially distanced? No, the festival would be online.
I was curious how this would work, and at £30 a ticket for access to every event thought it good value. I booked the ticket and put the date in my calendar.
Time went by and I made my first mistake, not checking my calendar. It was my wife Bizzy who said part way through Friday evening, “you know how the light gets in has started?” so I turned on the laptop and had a browse through the setup. At first I couldn’t see how it worked but when I logged in on the correct email I could access the live feeds without even a queue. The website was ok but as a new format I was still a bit confused. Perhaps the disorientation was part of the festival experience? I usually feel a bit freaked out at festivals. We found a DJ on zoom, and logged in without putting the camera on because we were already in bed. People were dancing on their cameras while the DJ spun funky tunes. It was a bit weird really. We decided to go to sleep, but there was some drunk bloke outside shouting into his phone and it was disturbing. I wondered if this was part of the ticket price and he was an actor, making me feel like I was camping.
I eventually got to sleep, and woke up late having missed the breakfast events I turned up at my laptop about 1130 to watch a talk I liked the sound of — The Mystery of Reality. Unfortunately it was just a blank screen. Mysterious indeed. When it loaded, I was treated to a feedback loop where the introduction was repeated over the first speaker and then the speaker spoke over himself due to a ridiculous technical error. This technological meltdown served as an opportunity to navigate to a different venue and hear David Nut talking about psychedelics and psychology. He seemed to be a very interesting man and might have been more interesting if the interviewer would stop talking over him, as Bizzy observed. He may have been trying to keep the conversation ‘on track’ but the most interesting pearls come when these great minds improvise, and you can overguide an interview. One perk of watching these videos online is you can walk out without looking rude, just close your laptop and put the kettle on.
For the rest of the morning I drove to my parents and had a coffee and picked up my daughter who was over with her grandparents for the night. I got home and chatted to Bizzy in the garden, the luxurious squandering of a festival ticket from the comfort of your own home.
We ‘went’ to another event. Patricia Chruchland talking about “The Moral Brain” and how neo-Darwinian approaches to neurochemistry can explain the majority if not all moral behaviour from an evolutionary context. Her arguments were intelligent and well articulated as well as very structured but the talk came into its own when she started answering questions. We had a question about the role of oxytocin in bond making, and typed it in via Vimeo (all these apps coming together here) and by the magic of the internet had our question answered live by an expert without the fear, armache and frustration of holding your arm up in a crowded seminar room. When she was improvising revealed the depth of her knowledge and it was all the more powerful hearing about infant mother bonding watching my wife feeding and burping our little girl on the sofa. I would never take a baby to a festival, even such an apparently civilized one as HTLGI. I don’t think people do generally. Overall, despite the technical issues such as the audible countdowns before meetings, the online festival experience meant world class content from the comfort of our own home, and it’s not over yet. Maybe tonight we’ll set up the webcam in the kitchen and overcome our shyness and get on the virtual dancefloor, maybe…still, it doesn’t beat the real life experience of talking crap with your mates and wandering between venues and food stalls. Some other summer.
