Socio-spatial authenticity at co-created music festivals

From the early days of hippie counter-culture, music festivals have been an important part of the British summer. Today they are commercialised offerings without the counter-cultural discourse of earlier times. Drawing on participant observation, interviews and focus groups conducted at a rock festival and a smaller boutique festival, the paper examines how their design, organisation and management are co-created with participants to produce authentic experiences. The paper contributes to research on authenticity in tourism by examining how authenticity emerges and is experienced in such co-created commercial settings. It presents the importance that the socio-spatial plays in authenticity experiences and how socio-spatial experience and engagement can also be recognised as a form of aura.     

Searching for a lost aura: a Naxi Dongba’s spatial practices and space remaking in touristic commoditization

This paper explores how space remaking of tourist destinations erases aura of place. Two questions are discussed: (1) where does the aura of a tourism destination originate and (2) why/how is the aura of a tourism destination erased. Ethnographic research was conducted in 2011, 2012, and 2016, in Lijiang, Yunnan Province, focusing on the life story of He Zhenwei, a Naxi Dongba, and the spatial practices of his daily life in his workplace, home, and town. It indicates that more attention is paid to representations of space than to the aura of place in the space-making of tourist destinations. I argue that this kind of space-making tends towards the disjunction of the inherent systems of symbols of physical space, resulting in the loss of the aura of place. The most innovative aspect, in which I draw on Lefebvre’s space theory and Goffman’s theatrical stage, is the juxtaposition of ritual space, life space, and staged space, which elucidates the correlation between meaning-remaking of tourist destinations and the aura of indigenous cultures. The commoditization of heritage tourism is subject to the pursuit of the ‘Other image’ of culture as well as landscaping of place which gradually leads to the annihilation of aura.     

Aura: Aesthetic Business Creativity

As markets all over the world are becoming more and more surplus-markets, competition is gradually taking new forms. At the same time as markets are overloaded with products and alienation is growing, companies that produce feelings that tries to give meaning not only on the level as a marketing concept, is growing. Introducing the concept aura in marketing, this article explores the process how values becomes tangible in the mind of the customer. Aura is defined as a cover that is related to the feeling-experiences of beauty, exclusiveness, unique and authenticity that a product, service or a brand creates. Aura-production describes the building-process how aura is produced and factors that influence the outcome of the aura.     

"Aura","陌生化"概念对现代设计的启示

现代设计包括实用性和艺术性,其中艺术性体现着一个民族传统文化的积累.然而,现代形态的大众消费文化正在对传统文化内核进行着消解和改造,同时我们的现代设计又缺乏自我.要解决这些问题,Aura和陌生化可以给我们一些启示,即用现代的思维与理解展示我们传统的文化,通过对传统文化的陌生化处理,在传统与现代的悖论张力中显现出现代设计的张力美,从而创造新的Aura,这样既可以使传统文化得以延续和发展,同时也是建立属于我们自己的现代设计文明的一个契机.