A tiny gathering of artists has become the most interesting weekend in tech

How XOXO Festival pushes the web forward

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By the time the police were called at XOXO Festival in Portland, there was already a sense that anything could happen. People were swinging from a set of 20 Playstation Move controllers suspended from the ceiling, in a game named after Tarzan’s creator. They were coaching animated cats in bodybuilder-style posedowns, and playing a 16-person version of speed chess where rounds end in three seconds. The South by Southwest Interactive Festival, which began as a similar playground for misfit artists, was a frequent reference point: this is what SXSW used to feel like, before it devolved into a cynical brand-marketing conference.

A place where ideas are dangerous and culture matters

Then a lone protester trespassed onto the festival grounds to voice his complaints about Anita Sarkeesian, the cultural critic whose analysis of video games has resulted in death threats against her, and who spoke at the festival on Saturday. Next thing you know, Portland PD had been called, and the man fled the scene, leaving behind only a screed he had typed up arguing his view that women are more abusive than men and likely to round up the patriarchy into concentration camps. (The screed really said that.) After the incident was announced on stage, to somewhat nervous laughter, it seemed to encapsulate much of what has made XOXO one of the most interesting gatherings in technology. It’s a place where the ideas are dangerous, where culture matters, and where art, not commerce, lies at the center of everything.

Portland is at ease with its own strangeness, and XOXO happily took it up a level. Andy McMillan, one of two Andys who organizes the event, calls it "a beautiful catastrophe"; the other, Andy Baio, prefers "consensual hallucination." It took place at the Redd, an abandoned iron works in east-central Portland recently converted into an events space. The Andys had the exterior painted with murals, then surrounded it with food carts, rental drones, and a library of old photography equipment. Nearby blocks played host to rock concerts, a film and animation series, an evening of storytelling, and an indie arcade. During the conference portion of the event, mostly independent writers, artists, and other makers of web culture step forward to confess their biggest problems. Between talks, everyone hugged.

XOXO is an embrace of independence and creativity, but it’s also a rejection: of soulless day jobs in corporate America; of the received wisdom of the TED talk; of the glib startup hucksterism of TechCrunch Disrupt. Rachel Binx, a designer who specializes in data visualization, gave a talk about how freelance culture-making can leave you perpetually on the brink of financial ruin. She illustrated her point with a looping GIF of a dolphin rising out of the water only to splash down in the jaws of a shark. In this world there is no safety net. "Be your own fucking hero," she said.

Andy McMillan (left) and Andy Baio.

Making it weird

The actual program at XOXO is a reflection of the kind of coolhunting that Baio has been doing on his blog, Waxy.org, for more than a decade. Baio popularized the supercut; created an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis called Kind of Bloop, and was an early adviser and chief technical officer to Kickstarter. (More recently, he began working on the re-launch of Upcoming.org, a social calendar.) Baio was one of the earliest link bloggers, and he frequently shares art projects, essays, and other bits of web culture at Waxy. XOXO can feel like a link blog come gloriously to life — strange pieces of the web are everywhere at the festival, and they are meant to get lost in.

An evening of tabletop games included Marrying Mr. Darcy, a board-game version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Two Rooms and Boom, a turn-based party game where you played Secret Service agents trying to stop a bomber from killing the president. A venue devoted to film and animation showed off Empire Uncut, a fan-made remake of The Empire Strikes Back. And during the conference, creators described their own strange obsessions. Edna Pirahna described the rise of Meatspace, a chat network where you log in with your face. And Joseph Fink detailed the unlikely success of Welcome to Night Vale, his fictional podcast about a desert town populated by aliens and ghosts.

Edna Piranha

The number of people who experience XOXO in person is small: the festival is limited to 1,000 attendees, including 750 with all-access passes, and 250 who attend nighttime events but not the talks during the day. Each year it becomes a bit harder to attend; this year, for the first time, the Andys used a lottery system. The limit is a bid to make the festival retain its intimacy.

XOXO draws lots of designers and artists, particularly of the freelance variety, along with a significant number of Silicon Valley tech employees: this year there were attendees from Google, Adobe, Pinterest, and Kickstarter, among others. The twist is that they’re sitting in the audience; this is likely to be the only conference where you see tech CEOs listening to a freelance jewelry designer talk about her struggles paying the rent. The attendees include many people who helped to shape Web 2.0 — Matt Haughey, who founded Metafilter; Anil Dash, an early blogger; Gina Trapani, founding editor of Lifehacker, and Stewart Butterfield, who founded Flickr and Slack.

Pushing through the noise

When speakers talked about more traditional topics, they tended to approach them from oblique angles. Trapani built a data-mining app to ask questions of her Facebook and Twitter feeds that those companies never would answer for her. How often do we say "thank you" online? How often do we engage with men, vs. how often we engage with women? Trapani told the audience that the app she’s building with Dash, called ThinkUp, is a way to help us make better use of the time we spend online. "These are facts that Twitter and Facebook won’t ever reflect back to me, but it’s stuff that I want to know," she said.

"We just want more people making amazing things."

The Andys say they’re not sure whether there will be another XOXO. The planning process is all-consuming, and the events themselves can be emotionally draining. But every attendee I spoke with believes there will be another one next year — and if there is, here’s hoping more people get to see it.

"Independence is hard," Baio told the crowd at the festival’s end. "Independence is lonely. And it takes a unique kind of bravery to create something and put it out in the world in this unfiltered way that is enabled through technology." The overarching theme, he said, is that creators are not alone. "Every one of you needs to remember this when you are getting pummeled out there by morons. It’s so easy to be the knee-jerk contrarian, the anonymous internet commenter that tears you down. And it’s so hard to make something new. And that’s a lot of what we’re celebrating here. We just want more people making amazing things and pushing through the noise."

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