Here we go for Placard’s 8th edition, third try out of a non-stop three month streaming headphone festival. Placard is a headphone concert festival, playing with concentration, intimacy,time warp,and teleportation.This year it goes on for 97 days non stop, in different cities. It functions under a mode of open program,open for headphone rooms to create performance spaces where performers are welcomed to perform. Both the headphone room ‘owner’ and the performers use the inscription site to self organize the global program. The placard ‘owner’ receives in his room performers who have submitted a inscription via the site , and streams the shows to the other headphonerooms either passive listeners or waiting to perform.The site is designed to simplify communication inbetween the performers and the organizers, using automatic emails notifying of incoming inscriptions , accepted deplaced or refused perfomances; also notifying performers of the creation of headphone rooms in their city.

The ring has grown, last year quite a few new cities got involved ; helsinki , stralsund , benicassim .. (link to last year’s archive) ) .This year has already started with a few prologues (maybe a preview of what might be one day a non stop placard network) - one in berlin during club transmediale - one in bratislava - and one in bologna -(see pictures and line-ups here) The official placard festival opening will be in montreal for the mutek festival and then move on.

During these two past years of a 3 month festival , many new placard ideas have come out of the different organizers, please look at the images section to see some of the most outstanding organizations. Mainly, i think, placard has been, in this format, starting to adapt itself to the different situations of particular scenes in the different cities. London placard has it’s own 20 min set for 12 hours going on well, Tokyo did an out in the Yoyogi park placard under a tree with the phone network there last year .. many different situations for each city involving where you can actually block in your ephemerous space to have a placard going. Ping pong placards were a novelty last year, giving a game making the longest programs ever. Obviously the three month non-stop has not yet been achieved. We have made it from a wednesday to a tuesday so far, a record to beat.

This years site has a few new options, you can now as a placard organiser choose the length of your slots; this came out of london placard , where they prefer the 20 minute format, paris prefers 60 minutes. So now you can make the slots really short, or really long, a whole new game.