Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

Digital Culture Wales

27 March, 2012

Galeri, Caernarfon

We spoke with our own Martin Owen about Wales’s long history of collaborative creativity and what was learned about meeting the needs of Welsh arts communities in the 21st century. And we ended up learning something about Romanticism, wartime art rescue, and an unusual idea for an art museum.

What was the focus of the Digital Culture Wales event?

We had individual musicians, people who run performance spaces, art galleries, music ensembles, and we had people from the National Theatre Wales Community, who are peripatetic. It was a variety of people in the arts and culture space, all there to talk about ways that cultural businesses in Wales can improve their capacity to reach, build, and address their audiences.

We’ll get to the unusual art museum in a minute, but what were some of the problems and digital ideas people talked about?

They need to be able to up their marketing game. We need to help them improve their marketing capacity, find ways to help them get training, better business-to-business networking. They just don’t talk to each other enough across the value chain. So that was some of the focus.

You mentioned a concerted events database for north Wales. Can you tell us more about what that involves?

There was also talk about a good, central repository. It’d be the equivalent of something like Time Out, only digital, and without necessarily needing to approach an editor.

There would be properly structured APIs, so that, say, if I was running a series of guesthouse websites, and you were looking at my guesthouse, you could easily find out what else is happening during the time you would be visiting. And local papers, businesses — they would automatically have this updated database for events.

Wales has a history of loose but dynamic collaboration in the arts. Tell us how you came across a forgotten artists’ colony in Snowdonia

I was on holiday in Norway and I got kind of a shock. I had a day in Bergen, where it’s always drizzling, so I made for the art gallery. In amongst the Edvard Munchs was this painting of a local waterfall in Betws Y Coed.

I hadn’t been to the Norwegian hinterland yet, where there are waterfalls every few miles. But despite all of these waterfalls, this Norwegian artist had gone to north Wales to paint this relatively unimpressive waterfall.

He went, presumably, to hang out with this colony of artists. In this very picturesque mountain village of Betws Y Coed, in north Wales, there was one of the largest artists’ colonies in the world in the end of the 19th century.

What was it called? And why isn’t it remembered?

It wasn’t called anything — it didn’t have a name. But it was a fairly significant Romantic period colony but it somehow slipped from art history and was rapidly replaced by early 20th-century modernism.

The idea [for a collection] was brought up by a local artist called David Woodford, who was at the event. There’s no permanent collection and no collective memory of this fine art movement in north Wales. So you can see things on the walls of galleries in New York or Norway, but you can’t see them on the walls of galleries here.

People didn’t respond particularly strongly to it specifically, but one of the things that interested people is the idea that there’s a lot of “hiding lights under bushels” in north Wales. And it brought us back to an idea for a virtual gallery of fine art.

Can you tell us more about that?

We had a meeting on digital technology and tourism in late 2010, and there was a suggestion that we create a virtual art gallery in a quarry in another mountain town, Blaenau Ffestiniog.

Why a quarry in Blaenau Ffestiniog?

In World War II, the artistic treasures of the nation that were held in London — the Queen’s pictures, the contents of the National Gallery — they were all stored in a disused quarry in this mountain village, to protect them.

So the idea that was pitched then was that we create a digital or digitised national fine art museum with the treasures of the nation. We would have digital images and because it would be completely dark inside the cavern, we could do whatever we wanted, and have interesting ways of displaying these digitised works.

We could juxtapose works of art in ways that other galleries can’t. For example, if you were to take a single subject, say, The Last Supper or St Jerome, in the way that they’re hung in the National Gallery in London. If it’s an 18th-century French painting, it’s with the other 18th-century French paintings. But we could have a space where we could compare the interpretation across lots of artists and periods.

There are so many interesting ways we could use this space to rethink art galleries in a digital form. And it would also be an experience because you’re in an interesting space. One of the things north Wales needs, too, is more wet-weather attractions.

What has happened with this digital museum idea?

It’s an idea that the community around Blaenau Ffestiniog are still addressing. They have some money to support their regeneration. They’re considering a number of ideas.

+++

One of the reasons we love our Inventorium event participants is the way that the growing and ever-changing community and collaborations introduce us to ideas we might not have thought of, or have thought to put together.

The more people we meet, the more confident we feel about the creative and exciting ideas and projects that are either happening, or have the potential to happen. So when we’re addressing the digital needs of the culture industry in north Wales, how can we best tap into the strengths of these communities, so they can perform better?

We hosted a follow-up event on April 23 in Ty Menai, for anyone who wanted to take some of these ideas forward, so stay tuned for updates. Martin has also started a discussion on LinkedIn, where the conversation continues.

What happens when you combine experience and youthful exuberance without making young innovators feel they need to choose between education and ideation?

Jenny Dickinson talks about the excitement of working with creative media students from Coleg Harlech and Coleg Ceredigion at our Creative Technology and the Welsh Environment event back in February.

The Workshop

We’d intended to do an event in collaboration with Coleg Harlech because we’ve already been working with Xsportmap’s Chris Headleand, who lectures in creative media there. Coleg Harlech ran a seminar in the morning with a series of great speakers, focusing on creative businesses. We heard from Rebecca Colley-Jones, who talked about the impact of technology on the environment. We had a talk from Tom Beverley and Rhys Jones, who develop mobile applications for education.

At the Inventorium workshop, we ended up with students from Coleg Harlech and a group from Coleg Ceredigion. The idea was to give young people a chance to generate ideas, evaluate them, and look for business opportunities in them.

We split the 18 students into groups, where they played Inventorium Poker, then chose two of their best ideas to explore for business viability. They looked at the obstacles, the market, how to get customers — in general, how to take an idea and look at it like an entrepreneur. They presented the initial ideas to each other, and then spent the rest of the afternoon developing.

Idea highlights

A lot of the students are studying filmmaking, so one group had a recce app, which would make it easy to source filming locations that met certain criteria. For example, if you needed a location by the sea with mountains in the background that looked good at night, the app would help you find that. It would take in tidal information, information about the moon and artificial lighting that would tell you about brightness, etc.

There was a pair of students who want to convert old buses into environmentally friendly and bespoke mobile homes. They’re really keen on doing it, so we worked closely with them on how they would source the buses, do the design and conversion, and market themselves.

Another idea was a farm that would be controlled by virtual shareholders who would control what the farm did. They could watch through webcams and follow online, and make decisions about animals, crops, what to buy, and what to sell.

Young people as natural innovators

We’ve done a lot of idea generation workshops, but this was a different, much younger group than the ones we’ve worked with before. Young people add a really good angle to our events, I think. They have so many fantastic ideas, and they’re really boundless in terms of where their minds will go. They’re really good fun, and not afraid to say stuff.

When it comes to technology, and especially creative technology, they know what they want and they know what would work. They’ve been brought up with the technology, so they’re vital to the process of developing more of it. The challenge is helping them to be creative with the technology that exists already.

They were more aware of the entrepreneurial side of things than I thought they would be, so we’re excited to help them learn how to develop that kind of thinking. I was surprised how mature they were, and not only how interested they were in ways that you could make money out of creative media, but also how much they’d already thought about it.

And their presentation skills were really very good — they were so confident standing up and explaining their ideas. That’s something that can be built on to make them successful entrepreneurs.

What’s next?

We’ve been following up on the ideas and we’re looking at going to Coleg Ceredigion to run another workshop with students who want to take their ideas on further. If they’re interested — which we hope they will be — we’ll help them source people working in industry who might be able to see where the ideas will go, and perhaps develop a product. The idea will come from students, who will always be involved, but the industry expertise can help make it a reality.

We’ve talked before about creating situations where young people are encouraged to make their ideas happen, and we’re hoping that we can help them build on this without feeling they need to leave education before they’re ready.

UK’s Channel 4 seek far sighted rule breakers to create a new vision for public service media in the digital age. Commisssioners for education (Matt Locke) , cross platform media (Louise Brown) and the director of their 4iP programme (Tom Loosemore) told an audience in Cardiff last week that they want to invest in truly innovative projects.

4iP breaks the mould of commissioning. 4iP will invest equity in good teams with good ideas and support further funding from regional development agencies. Some of the first year’s investments are already making waves like the iPhone audio blogging of Audioboo and the location/social mapping of Mapumental. The presenters made it clear that they sought projects that carried the values that Channel 4′s existing brands offered: youth, engagement, public voice, campaigning, social and participative. This is a great opportunity to develop innovative products with the support of one of the UK’s leading media brands.