ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the deeply mediatized experience of place and space within the lived practice of events by studying two annual Dutch cultural events as cases: Oerol Festival (2017) and 3FM Serious Request (2017). Drawing on substantial datasets containing online and offline participant observations, both short in situ interviews and longer in-depth interviews with a total of 248 interviewees and large datasets from Twitter and Instagram, this chapter demonstrates that media concurrently de-spatialize, in the sense that they diminish spatial borders and overcome distance, and affirm embodied experiences of being-in-place. I argue that it is liveness - the potential connection, through media, to events that matter to us as they unfold - that creates the closeness between the near and the far elements within the “eventsphere” and binds it all together into one event-space.
