Where better to post a “way home” blog post from the final XOXO than a 15-year-old WordPress site that I haven’t posted to or updated in over five years? Look at this shiny new post editor! Anyway…
XOXO is a huge part of my life. And that was the last one. So I’m finding myself looking back on my first leap into joining a community like this.
It was 2012. I was working at New Music USA, a funder for contemporary classical music. I’d launched a website and a half at this point, becoming a product manager inside an arts funder out of necessity. Kickstarter was a couple years old, still on Rivington Street; the optimism of indie creation was riding high. I was producing the occasional avant garde variety show at Exapno. I had a podcast and this blog.
When I saw the Kickstarter for XOXO go live my heart started literally pounding. I had a hunch this was going to be something special. What the Andy’s seemed to care about was what I care about: how culture gets made on the internet. I knew it was going to sell out (which it did in two days), and I somehow overcame my personal financial situation with the power of FOMO and backed the project.
I don’t know what I was hoping for, exactly, but I knew I wanted to be in that space. Life as an artist was getting worse. But something in the internet was hopeful. New things were happening. There were chances to build new ways of making art, reaching audiences, and sustaining both a career and our culture.
The work I was doing at that time was about connecting the existing arts institutions with the new kinds of cultural production that were emerging. I was working to shift the way arts funding worked to serve independent creators. So I wanted to be in a space where everyone cared about those systems and about the creators.
I was really scared to say “I belong here” to XOXO. Still am, honestly.
From that first year I remember how different it felt to be at something structured like a tech event rather than an arts or philanthropy event. I remember the long line for the men’s room (I’d never seen that before). I remember getting an incredible laugh out of a new friend with a joke about historical linguistics and the Velikovsky hypothesis.
It was an amazing weekend in an eventful fall. I had a Kickstarter up myself that month (I have it on good authority that the Swiffer people have seen our project video). I had a work trip planned to Paris that ended with me on the last plane back to NYC before hurricane Sandy happened. Hurricane Sandy happened.
Today, this year, twelve years later, I’m a startup CPO. I’ve built big systems and big teams in public service technology. I’m co-leading an artistic & technical project building choreographic installations, the technology to support them, and a community of artist/engineers. I simply wouldn’t have the career I do without the connections and friends I made at the festival.
I’m writing this on the train from Portland to Seattle, instead of the plane back to New York. I’ve just said goodbye to a huge number of people I care about and admire, but don’t really see outside of XOXO or the slack. It’d been five years since I’ve seen them before this weekend. I don’t if I’ll ever see them again.
The optimism of the early years at the festival has given way to a realism about what corporate social systems have done to our society, and to the people who make things. One of this year’s speakers quoted Mariame Kaba, saying that “hope is a discipline.” It’s clearly a discipline that the XOXO community has. But it’s an effort this year in a way it wasn’t at the beginning.
As usual post-XOXO, I’m thinking about what I could make next. I’m still thinking about the systems of cultural production, of aesthetic experience, of joy in community and of what lasts. It’s a feeling of freedom, of potential. I know this feeling will fade, but it’s worth savoring while it’s here.