“The Last Tag Show, a live “net performance,” took place on Last.FM on April 14, 2007. Last.FM is a social networking site centered around tracking its users’ music listening habits and creating a profile based on that data. As a user listens to music, the track title and artist name are sent to his/her profile and listed publicly, allowing the service to create connections between users and the musicians they listen to. Another notable aspect of the service is its reliance on user participation, through wikis, in the creation of artist profiles.

The Last Tag Show cleverly took advantage of Last.FM’s technical structure to pull off a 24 hour performance. As the allotted time progressed, viewers saw tracks and artists appear in succession on Last.FM user profile lasttagshow’s profile page. These were no ordinary songs however, the artists instead altered the metadata of audio tracks such that when they were uploaded to the Last.FM servers they appeared as a multi-character dialogue. The principal personages in the performance include “Moderator,” “Hannah,” “Voiceover,” “Instructor,” “Marck,” “Zita Vass,” and “Gregg,” with occasional guest stars like Thom Yorke. Since each of these characters take the role of a musician in Last.FM’s data-centric view, each of them have a dedicated user-editable artist page, which The Last Tag Show took full advantage of by developing the identities of their subjects in these spaces. As such, Moderator, for example, existed beyond his archived snippets of speech, complete with a photograph and short biography.” Continue reading The Last Tag Show by Nathan Lovejoy at Furtherfield.