‘Meeting differently’: Indian Independence Day celebrations in the digital diaspora

Highly programmed, digitally-enabled outdoor public spaces for social gathering and cultural performance are now common features of urban environments. These spaces are popular because of their low barriers to entry, and because they facilitate casual, serendipitous encounters between a range of different publics. Entering one of these spaces is to inhabit an ‘ambient’ participatory mode: multi-centred, mobile and multi-sensory, conforming neither to the formal viewing experience of ‘the audience’, nor to the casual, distracted disposition of ‘the street’. Their success in terms of widening public engagement and stimulating urban vitality has informed major policy shifts in creativity-led urban regeneration and creative place-making. However, a deeper understanding of the kind of cultural participation they shape eludes prevailing critical and evaluative frameworks. This article is based around a large-scale event celebrating India's 70th year of Independence held at Melbourne's Federation Square. We use ambience as a conceptual tool to expand common notions of cultural participation, revealing the complex socio-spatial relationships that coalesce through the event. Capturing ‘ambient participation’ reveals, in Paul Carter's (2005) terms, the potential of these networked spaces to ‘model a different kind of political community, to open up a place of meeting differently’ that exceeds the celebratory rhetoric around global mass culture, normative frameworks of multiculturalism, and romantic notions of community.