Bars employ all types of marketing practices to lure in SXSW attendees, such as employing bouncers with giant beards. (Graham Clark/Neon Tommy)

The best performance I saw at South By Southwest last night was by Kim Steele, at the intersection of 7th and Red River.

There, she offered the toasty host of her nibbled-on funnel cake to a pedestrian, who’d just inquired as to where such treats could be procured. Her used pastry was accepted with delight, and the recipient was pushing powdered sugar into his mouth as he exited down the street.

It wasn’t the first time that day Steele dropped a random act of tasty food on passerby. “I gave Sake macaroni and cheese to a pedi cab too,” Steele said.

For those of us who chose to attend SXSW without purchasing an official ticket, informal interactions like this, on the streets of Austin, make up a big part of the overall experience. This freeform side of things is centered on 6th Street, where food carts, tourists and boisterous marketers cluster together in such density that traffic is stymied. These personal collisions happen with frequency 

throughout the downtown area, and will increase in consistency and intensity as more folks manage to amass in Austin between now and the festival’s final hours.

READ MORE: Neon Tommy On The Road To SXSW

The scene is akin to New Orleans’ French Quarter, with a marked twist. Given the nature of this cultural event, any anonymous soul wandering the street may in actuality be indie rock’s newest darlin’ or a world renowned underground superstar. The otherwise passive activity of strolling down messy, overrun corridors of Austin has keener edge when that floppy-mopped, skinny white dude may in fact be the floppy-mopped skinny white dude of some innumerable fame.

This activity — placing outstanding individuals in an accurate context, as mere human beings — had proud supporters among America’s founding fathers. Benjamin Franklin was one such believer, asking that monumental commemoration of his accomplishments employ accurately-sized representations of his figure. Recognizing the actual, physical limitations of any historical figure is a timeless way of squelching impractical idolatry. A similar phenomenon happens when the opportunity arises to participate genuinely in interactions with impressive performers in any field. It’s the chance to stick with or punch through rote communication practices as independent agents that electrifies the air in downtown Austin, and it mingles with the atmosphere’s booze fumes, cigarette smoke, vaporized grease runoff and clattering bass reverberations in breathless harmony.

Requiring basic, ostensibly random person-to-person interaction at a foundational level means attending SXSW is defacto a humanistic experience. That's not traditionally why people buy into a mass-entertainment spectacle, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Click here to read all of Neon Tommy's coverage of SXSW 2013.

Read more of NT's show coverage here.

Reach Staff Cartoonist Graham Clark here. Follow him on Twitter here.