Collective practice and digital mediation Andrew Dubber At Tau Scene, a former brewery turned cultural performance space in Stavanger, Norway, there are ten musicians on a stage. All are members of an improvised music collective known as The Kitchen Orchestra. Nine of them hold or sit behind traditional jazz musical instruments. There are two drummers, a couple of saxophonists, a double bass player, trumpets and so on. However, they are also surrounded by electronic equipment. Their microphones are routed through a range of electronic effects units and pedals. The tenth musician – one of the two composers of the piece - stands at a podium waving a drumstick in front of a laptop. At the mixing desk on the far side of the room stand a producer and engineer. Beside them, two Japanese visual artists are responding to the music with drawings and collage that are projected onto the musicians as they play. The electronic effects that are shaping the sound of the music respond in turn to the interplay of the colour and movement of the images. The room is otherwise empty. The group is in rehearsal for a performance at the Mai Jazz festival of the composition, entitled ‘Pulse’, which consists of many highly improvised elements within arranged sections. The musicians play their jazz instruments and control a wide range of electronic effects, as well as computer-generated and affected sounds mediated through Max-MSP software, programmed to respond to input from the laptop’s built-in camera – hence the stick-waving. A collaboration between the Kitchen Orchestra and visual and video artists Tetsuya Nagato and Hiraku Suzuki, the rehearsal is part of a week-long lead-up to the concert, allowing the musicians and artists to become familiar with the music, the parameters of the experimentation and improvisation, the technology, and the process of working in conjunction with the visual artists. There is one further technological element to the mix. Each of the musicians, the artists, the producer and the engineer has a small, hand-held digital video Flip camera, with instructions to capture “whatever you find interesting”. This intervention is a practice-led research project which adds an additional component to the collective’s activities: the mediation of, and public engagement with, the Kitchen Orchestra’s ‘Pulse’ online. The Kitchen Orchestra’s status as a ‘collective’ (noun), and the extent to which their activities are ‘collective’ (adjective) highlights the already problematic nature of the term, which is inevitably subject to the discourse that contextualizes it. While there are instances in the literature of collective practice being primarily an oppositional or emancipatory political stance 1 , a collaborative approach to making music or a form of organization characterized by its ‘outsider’ status to the conventional, mainstream music business 2 , what I mean by the phrase ‘collective practice’ here is a more broad idea which includes these perspectives, but which primarily focuses on the activity of people (performers and audiences) working together towards a shared (though by no means predetermined) mediated performance process and end creative artefact (whether tangible or experiential). The approach to this online mediation is informed by theories drawn from Social Historical Action Theory which posits communicative