XOXO

The tradition & historical record

XOXO was an annual festival and conference held in Portland, Oregon, that described itself as "an experimental festival for independent artists who live and work online". XOXO was founded in 2012 by Andy Baio and Andy McMillan with funding from prepaid tickets and other contributions via Kickstarter. In 2016, technology website The Verge called it "the internet's best festival". XOXO was held every year from 2012 to 2019 except for 2017. It was not held between 2020 and 2023, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The final festival was held in 2024. ¹

XOXO was an annual festival and conference that focused on indie creators and artists working on the web. Except for a larger conference in 2018, the conference was limited to around 1,000 attendees, and organizers introduced an application and lottery system to promote diversity and discourage attendees who were focused on marketing to other attendees. Speakers at the festivals were most often independent creators, and the festival eschewed the corporate nature of other conferences and festivals centered around technology. Talks at the first two events generally reflected enthusiasm around being an indie creator, while later events featured more reflection on the challenges of being an independent artist, criticism of the web and the broader technology industry, and focus on social justice and activism. ¹

The inaugural event was held in Portland's Yale Union Laundry Building in September 2012 with approximately 400 participants. That year's event was funded on Kickstarter, raising $175,000. Associated events included live music, film screenings, an arcade of independently produced video games, a market, and food trucks. News media and bloggers noted an "impressive list of speakers" and an "intimate tone" missing from other technology-focused conferences. Ruth Brown wrote "the audience was overwhelmingly white, male, middle class and educated." ¹

The festival returned to the Yale Union Laundry Building with speakers, workshops, films, music shows, game events, and a market. Baio described it as being "about artists and hackers and makers that are using the internet to make a living doing what they love independently without sacrificing creative or financial control". To handle increased interest while remaining small (500 conference tickets and 200 "fringe event" tickets), it had an application process with questions intended to filter out people who wanted to market to attendees. Portland Monthly compared the event to the larger South by Southwest festival, quoting Matthew Haughey saying SXSW speakers are "in the business of selling technologies" and XOXO speakers are "creating things". Rachel Edidin described the event in Wired as a "creative incubator" that is "painfully earnest, unflaggingly positive", and criticized the event for high ticket costs that introduced barriers to access that mirrored some of the issues it sought to resist. ¹

XOXO 2014 was held at The Redd, a former ironworks facility in an industrial area of Portland. Conference speakers included feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, data visualization designer Rachel Binx, software engineer Edna Piranha, Welcome to Night Vale creator Joseph Fink, Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani, lexicographer Erin McKean, and technologist Paul Ford. Sarkeesian's appearance was met with controversy from Gamergate supporters, with one protester trespassing the festival grounds and Portland Police being called to the festival. Casey Newton wrote in The Verge about the festival's focus on freelance and indie artists: "this is likely to be the only conference where you see tech CEOs listening to a freelance jewelry designer talk about her struggles paying the rent." Attendance was capped at 1,000 people, and attendees were selected through an application and lottery process that aimed to increase diversity. ¹

XOXO 2015 was held at the Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon. Baio and McMillan aimed to increase the number of talks focusing on the challenges of being an independent creator, and to offer more criticism than previous years. They also capped attendance at 750 people. Speakers included video game developer Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and web technologist Eric A. Meyer. Engadget wrote many talks were "emotionally driven... centered around the difficult issues of being independent." The Guardian attributed the festival's popularity to "its gentleness, its emotive undertone and thoughtful curation, but also its commitment to supporting individual artists over businesses and corporates." In 2015, the festival adopted the chat software Slack, and by the time of the conference the XOXO Slack instance had more than 150 channels. The Verge later credited XOXO for bringing Slack into the mainstream. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “XOXO (festival)”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

XOXO is annual art and technology festival and conference in Portland, Oregon, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 6 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²