PORTLAND, Oregon -- Last year, the XOXO festival and conference made waves in the arts and tech world, becoming the highest-funded convention ever on Kickstarter after raising $175,000 and bringing together 400 artists, technologists, and makers in Portland for a four-day celebration of "disruptive creativity."
The conference returns to Portland this weekend for its sophomore iteration, which will likely determine whether the success of the festival -- the brainchild of Andy Baio and Belfast Build conference founder Andy McMillan -- is a one-time fluke or a sustainable phenomenon. WIRED sat down with XOXO co-organizer Baio to talk about where XOXO is headed, and what it means for independent creative culture and commerce in the digital age.
The goal of XOXO, says Baio, is to bring together independent artists and the developers building the platforms and systems that can enable them to operate outside of traditional production and distribution models. "First and foremost, XOXO is about independence. It's about artists and hackers and makers that are using the internet to make a living doing what they love independently without sacrificing creative or financial control."
XOXO focuses on the intersection of art and tech, and its speakers straddle both worlds: developers and coders who use tech tools to build communities and arts platforms; artists and musicians who self-publish online. Long-term, says Baio, he hopes to see the fest foster cross-field collaborations, and change the shapes those collaborations can take. "You are starting to see a really interesting trend, which is not just coders that are working on stuff for artists, but artists that are then entering into startups."
One such artist is a speaker at XOXO this year: musician Jack Conte. Conte is half of the indie music duo Pomplamoose, and one of the founders of Patreon, a platform where fans can offer subscription-based donations to fund artists with ongoing or serial creative projects. He'll be joined by designer Max Temkin, who created the smash-hit Cards Against Humanity; musician Jonathan Coulton; cartoonist Erika Moen; Julie Uhrman, founder of the controversial microconsole Ouya; ROFLcon and Breadpig co-founder Christina Xu; hip-hop vlogger Jay Smooth; and many more.
"We thought originally that XOXO would be a one-time thing," said Baio. "We never anticipated the reaction." That response is what has kept the momentum of the fest going, but the press coverage and visibility also presented new challenges. Suddenly, there was interest from venture capitalists and marketing and PR firms who hoped the fest would give them access to a digital and creative elite. "It wasn't about what we were doing here, the speakers on stage or the creators. It was about tapping into a demographic."
To counter that shift, XOXO decided to start vetting applications — not just for speakers, but for attendees as well. Would-be registrants had to answer three simple questions: "What do you do?" "What's something you've made that you're proud of?" and "What are you working on right now?" The goal was simple: to find the people who were actually making things, from designers and artists to developers and founders.
The attendee directory for XOXO is organized by name, but when I met with Baio on Wednesday, he had just finished a hack that let users reorganize the list based on which of their fellow attendees they followed on Twitter. Here, social media and social networking aren't casual tools; they're a web of connections and resources vital to the collaboration and resource-sharing at the heart of the conference and the community around it; points of junction between the tech and arts communities.
The conference — 18 speakers in two days — is the heart of XOXO, but there'll be plenty happening in the fringe as well: a four-day festival whose tendrils extend throughout Portland, includes live music, screenings, electronic and tabletop freeplay gaming, an "unmarket," Kickstarter labs, and a whole lot of parties. Last year, XOXO sold 400 passes, exclusively through Kickstarter. This year, in addition to 500 all-inclusive conference tickets, XOXO also offered an additional 200 fest passes, which give attendees access to the fringe events only.
What's next? For now, Baio is focusing on the present. "Last year, I described XOXO as a consensual hallucination: All these people who saw the Kickstarter project, they all kind of could visualize it enough to put their money and time and energy into it. That was a huge outpouring of trust. And it worked. Now we are here to see if we can do that again."
