Forget 2015, Onyx Ashanti is a 2050 street performer. From his mind altering “Beat Jazz” (that’s a link to his TED talk) – music created with two handheld controllers, an iPhone and a mouthpiece, and played with the entire body – to his use of Bitcoin donations in the street, Onyx is pushing a new technological age in street entertainment.
Below is an online interview we did with him. Enjoy! And let us know your stories about the most futuristic buskers you’ve come across (or the methods you employ in the street).
Nick Broad: Could you give us a little overview of your ideas on bitcoin?
Onyx Ashanti: From reading your blog on the site I see the same problems are still part of the equation all over the world. But, the biggest changes now are:
- the ability to sell music non-corporeally online
- everyone has a smartphone
- maps and social networks
NB: Why maps?
OA: We as buskers feel that we must play into the hands of supposed authorities, by playing the high streets and other highly trafficked areas.
But art is the reason not the result.
I’ve been experimenting with bridging my online and offline worlds on the street by playing somewhere that no one goes on purpose, like an alleyway in an industrial area, that one can only find by google maps, bringing artist friends with me and doing our sets there for as long as we want. Basically a little busker fest mixed with a flash mob.
NB: You’re sort of losing the “spontaneity” part by organising busker gigs, no?
OA: Using the internet to draw people to a place does a few interesting things:
- they are already online and sophisticated enough to find you via google maps, which means a differnt conversation can be had
- part of that conversation can be tipping and sales that stay completely in the digital realm.
- bitcoin becomes viable as a means of doing this.
I’m investigating wireless broadcasting and wearable systems to subvert any ordinances against busking.
NB: You mean arrests and fines?
OA: Authorities get you because you stop in one spot and set up merchandise and a tip container. But if you are a point on an online map and are moving, and can’t be heard except with a radio or device, getting tipped in cryptocurrency, there are no laws to govern you yet. Bitcoin and wireless technology completely redefines busking.
NB: Amazing. But this still requires and educated audience, right?
OA: In this regard, I tend toward busking for groupings of “Bitcoin people” while also showing my qr codes while normal busking, to start the conversation about alternative currencies.
NB: People appreciate art in different contexts. The surroundings will have an effect on the consumption. How do you feel busking in industrial spaces for tech-enabled crowds is different than in a tourist destination?
OA: We must realze that we are the thing that gives life to a space. We can go to a warehouse in the middle of nowhere with our rigs and just rip for days on end and eventually people will know that that is the place to be…
…Then the money people will come and buy up the space because it is now charged with life, then they will kill it by trying to capitalize on it, then the cops will come and say youre breaking the rules. In other words, the game doesnt end ever. We simply mutate and take the life to new places.
NB: Love it. If you don’t mind me asking, what about the financials of it all?
OA: When I busk for bitcoins in normal space I don’t make so much, but at Bitcoin meetups I do extremely well because Bitcoin people really like playing with this new transaction modality.
It’s important enough that I no longer have a bank account, nor do I use PayPal either. Just Bitcoin, for better or worse. Interest in evolving now but people need something to spend their bitcoins on so busking merch and tipping could be a killer app.
To be honest, I don’t make that much money from busking. The people that don’t get it don’t really tip that much, but the ones that do either buy my merch and show up for my shows/talks, or book me for much bigger events. It’s kind of indirect in that way. I make a living “because” I do it rather than simply “when” I do it.
NB: The people that “get it” probably know that your show is full-on technologically awesome (among other things). If I were a mime, or an acoustic singer/songwriter, do you think the Bitcoin community would have the same response?
OA: The first mistake of that statement is in bringing a pre-existing archetype into a new context. For instance, am I a musician or a dancer or a programmer or a designer/inventor who uses bitcoins?
The answer is all of the above, which means I am none of those things but a hybrid of all of them, also modulated by the era that we are embedded within. So if you go in as an archetype, you will get that archetype’s programmed response, but if you create an archetype, you get to program it in peoples minds.
As such, when I do meetups, I play a bit, talk a bit, show n’ tell a bit, Q&A a bit, play some more, maybe print something…it’s a new modality which makes people interact with me, and it, differently.
In that way, busking becomes more of an interaction layer to you and your expression. A bridge and a sustainability conduit. When incorporating technology for the purpose of propagating your expression, you mutate, and the expression mutates as well.
So a bitcoin enabled mime is automatically something else, defined by the interaction of these modalities, meaning that once you de-corporealize the tip bucket, it becomes a completely different game from that point so don’t try to shove the genie back into the previous lamp when the new lamp has more room to manoeuvre.
NB: Bitcoin lets you earn without anyone knowing how much. Signage lets you sell merchandise without needing a vendors license. GMaps assembly lets you avoid crowds – and the authorities. And yet, to make it all work you need smartphones, and, I assume, accounts with Apple or Google. I assume this is uncomfortable?
OA: To whom? For myself, not really. The cops don’t care when their mainstreet benefactors aren’t making them come after you. And they aren’t slick enough to track you for busking violations via map points and when they are the technology will mutate again.
You might not think so, but actually, bitcoin makes it very easy to track donations. The amount of bitcoin within a wallet is very easy to show. blockchain.info does this. All wallets do. So if you make a wallet for each performance, the total can be updated with each tip.
You can also do nice things like send donors an automated thank you with a download link to some of your digital artefacts (music, books, files, videos, CAD designs, etc) as part of it.
NB: This whole interview is blowing my mind. Thinking about the future of busking…is this it?
OA: I see these tools as the beginning of a new modality of programmable interaction between persons, groups and expressions. There is no need to worry because it’s all out of control. The only thing you can do is make sense of your own polygon within this new matrix of possibility.
It never gets to be fair, or right, or any of that, because you, as a busker, represent freedom and expression in its purest, non-corporate form. In the right places, that is a respected archetype. In the wrong places you are the seed of dissent that must be legislated and controlled for fear of firing up the masses and giving them too many ideas. The only thing you can do is be the light, whether you are in the right place or the wrong place.
And with many smartphones increasingly capable of decentralized networking (meaning the phones talk to each other rather than to the internet first), current threats to free expression in public are reduced to street harassment, because they cannot keep up with the rate of progress in policing the explosion of possibilities we have at our fingertips.
NB: Love it. Okay, could you tell me a little bit about your busking guide, and volumes 2/3?
OA: Well, I’ve been busking on-and-off for 23 years, and along the way I began to think more and more about what it actually is rather than what we think it is.
It occurred to me that we help shape the public morphogenetic field. Although, so does advertising and fire engine sirens. But, we are extremely powerful because we can sway minds toward varying states of consciousness. In that way we are a representation of an idea that is a persistent beacon to all who resonate with it. Advertisers pay millions of dollars for that ability and we just have it, hence some of the animosity toward our presence, i.e. refusal to die.
A-21st-Century-Electronic-Musicians-Guide-to-Busking
So the philosophy part of the book is concerned with what we are in a historical context and in a modern context. Also, why we are important to societies and to each other. Briefly, I believe that busking is the last free art that exists anymore. Everything else has a price tag. Busking and buskers are adept at not getting a barcode tattooed on their ass. They represent a glitch in this matrix, but the technology is giving us new ways to invent new expression modalities that cannot be stopped because we can be purely mobile now. Think “digital magic”.
This is where the theory part of the book kicks in. This goes into rethinking what sales are and what merchandise is, virtual reality overlays, wireless broadcasting and decentralized systems, all the way to shamanic social calibration.
These are the subject of my current investigations. I don’t want to write about them until I’ve lived within the modalities for a while. But the future is bright for those buskers who can become an ongoing process and evolve beyond current outdated definitions of what we are.
NB: Okay, how do people find your next show? Give us links.
OA: I am in Detroit experimenting with some new busking modalities, including bartering rather than money. I post on Facebook and Twitter when I am going to a place. It doesn’t usually mean anything, but sometimes I am surprised to have a small crowd waiting for me in some obscure map-pointed location. Its a lot of fun that way. I just pop up somewhere. I still do “concerts” but that is quickly giving way to just being ready to express anywhere, anytime, literally I am walking around.
NB: What should we be looking out for in 2015? What’s your next step?
OA: Buskers will take over the silent disco concept this year. This will kill most noise ordinance attacks because if you don’t have an amp, the cops can only tell you to move on – but without amps you are probably using things that can move easily, and you and your audience can investigate completely new busking modalities like a walking, singing tour of an area while they listen to you with your effected sounds and voice coming from their phones.
Bitcoin will allow for monetizing all those “free” pictures everyone takes. each one will have your QR code (or should) and someone could tip you years later for some YouTube video you didn’t know existed. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Check out decentralized dance party
My next step is to investigate these ideas in places where you usually do not see them, like in poorer neighborhoods, where the expressions of life are more needed than in the high street. I am working toward the release of my exo-voice/beatjazz prosthesis as an open source project (it already is, but this version is more evolved than the last one) so that it might become part of a new distributed, decentralized conversation. And a couple of film projects, so its gonna be a really interesting year.
