Photo: Aaron Horsley.

It’s Friday night and the Peacock Theatre space, Salamanca Arts Centre is buzzing.

A makeshift bar is set-up stage left, a wall of technology around the periphery and a group of artists intently operate laptops, hardware and mixers. Another door burrows off into two darker backstage rooms; one is empty of people but full of red theatre seats and a screen emanating white noise; the other resembles a hall-of-mirrors filled with low-tech analog hardware (16mm film projectors, mixers and so on).

In the flickering light I stand inside this door and think how the current renaissance of low-tech analog media is not simply a retro-nostalgic phenomenon, but an artistic reclaiming of social media.

The audience enters and congregates in tight clusters on the theatre seats, waiting first, then exploring the space. The conventions of the event hang halfway between a theatre where the audience is highly regulated (lights fade to black as code to ensure silence, theatre sea…