GEAR R' US! Staging Gear in Trade Shows

Drawing on research to published in our forthcoming book, Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies (The MIT Press), this paper focuses on gear staging in trade shows. Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates first introduce ’gear’, hardware professional audio recording technologies, and ’gear cultures’, those being ’milieux where sociability is centred around audio technology objects’ (Bates and Bennett, 2022). With special focus on Part III of our book, this paper examines the myriad ways we see gear ’staged’ - in large-scale trade show events including AES (Audio Engineering Society) and NAMM (North American Music Merchants). So much of the fetishistic and technostalgic qualities associated with gear today exceed the materials and design; and it is precisely these fetish ideologies that become central to gear sociability. So how does gear become social, and where do gear cultures gather? Since the mid
1990s, we have seen technological objects transformed into gear when staged within these trade show milieux. In these spaces, gear is gassed to the point where it attains fetish status. When staged, gear is sometimes framed in sex and war metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), and heavily draws on heritage, canon, and iconicity to amplify and maintain gear discourses. In all these trade show fora, we see the erasure of women’s labour in order to maintain hegemonic masculinities that gear cultures rely upon. In this paper, Samantha and Eliot use a range of examples - from brand new gear being marketed as old, to Foxy Stardust selling us a DAW - to show how gear is called upon to do extensive work in structuring social relations, and how these gear-centric social formations produce gear cultures.