Technology Residencies for the Arts

Last week I attended a workshop around the Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture, a partnership between Nesta, Arts Council and AHRC. This was a meeting of all the funded projects, and a chance for us to share our thoughts and findings as this early stage of development. This included partnerships such as Battersea Arts Centre working with Videojuicer and The Arts Collective on a digital version of the BAC ‘Scratch’ programme, or the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk working with with MIT to create a mixed-reality, online version of their New York production Sleep No More.

Hearing updates on how the Happenstance residencies are going, something which is clearly shared throughout all three pairs, is the way they have set about getting to know the organisations as intimately and as quickly as possible. Lots of the focus in what they’re making and playing with so far is on understanding how the building is used, how the team interacts, and what happens in each organisation, beyond the fact that they present work to the public.

What feels clear from talking to the Happenstance arts organisations is that they have each been receptive and welcoming of this exploration of their organisation. Openness and trust, which is so crucial to r&d, is visible in the attitudes of all three cultural organisations. Site Gallery admitted they’ve literally let residents access everything and anything – from their business plan and financial details, to sharing organisational challenges and concerns. In our discussion though it did raise a question about openness – how do you protect it, when everyone inevitably has their own agenda too?

It was interesting to hear our own thoughts echoed by several of the other project teams. Punchdrunk talked about how a huge amount of trust had to be bestowed in the team they’re working with from MIT – because of distance there were only 3 face to face meetings. Ultimately they felt their technology partner really understood them and their ambitions, which enabled them to have complete faith. Similarly for Happenstance, Spike Island felt that the fact the residents were really user focussed, as opposed to tech focussed, helped them to trust in the residents and feel they were approaching things in a like-minded way.

The workshop was a great opportunity to hear more about the other projects, but also to talk about Happenstance to an audience, and see what questions and thoughts it provoked outside of the project team. Especially, now we’re just a few weeks away from our three Open House events, which are our opportunity to invite the public into each organisation and hear what the residents have been doing so far.

Everybody knows that innovation and creativity depend on context – what’s old to you may be new to me. Entire musical careers have been built on this. For the technologists in Happenstance, ‘ripping off some old stuff’ might represent innovation in the context of an arts organisation. The creative idea in this process may be about connecting together an old technology with a new problem or reframing two disconnected ideas (bisociation) or simply reviving an old idea by connecting it to a new capability. The idea of putting ‘Site’ on the roof of Site Gallery (and making it visible to Google Earth – hello world!) was something that had been talked about before but now the organisation might be capable of doing it. Technologists seem to be resourceful in this way – recycling old technologies, bits of kit. They don’t abandon ideas that don’t work, they archive them – even the unused offcuts from a successful project might be squirreled away. Ideas that don’t work now might work later. By contrast, arts organisations seem more project focused – they don’t have the institutional memory (or at least the memory doesn’t exist outside the head of one person). Our technologists are coming up with ideas and projects – but perhaps they can also change the way arts organisations capture and retain ideas of their own. One practical example has been the use of Trello – a free online project management tool introduced by James and Leila for Happenstance at Site, and now being used by Laura and Judith for managing projects in the gallery. Trello is a virtual noticeboard where tasks are sorted and prioritised – it captures some of the principles of ‘agile’ working, notably the use of an open ‘scrum board’ for tracking progress of complex projects. This allows members of a team to park an idea and come back to it, and allows an organisation to retrieve and share ideas which don’t necessarily fit with the needs of the moment or the individual.

I think James is writing more about what we’ve been up to, but we’re both a bit pressed for time this week, so in lieu of an in-depth report, I’ve typed up some of the notes I’ve been jotting down over the week. I printed them out using our new thermal printers! Yes, we’ve been loaned two arduino printer kits from our pal James Adam at Free Range, and are enjoying playing with them and thinking how we might be able to use them to help the Site Gallery. Things continue apace.

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After an exciting start to the project last week, things really took off on Monday as Happenstance residents Kevin Walker and Linda Sandvik brought in a whole load of gadgets and spread them across the Associates Space. Linda shares what they’re working on, including two experiments that you can see at next weekend’s Spike Island Open:

We continued to play around with sensors and collecting data. Arduinos, Nanodes, IR sensors and a very pretty motion detection device from Maplin have been added to our kit. Kevin also started experimenting with how to present the data using Processing, a programming language developed specifically for artists (visual designers) – very well suited for the purpose! We are going to do a workshop on Processing for anyone who is interested sometime during our residency.

I am hoping to get some sort of skill swap going on, where people can hold workshops on something they know, and share their knowledge and expertise with the other people at Spike. Personally, I’d like workshops in letterpress and screen printing, and how to work the big scary machines down in the wood shop.

Every day I spend at Spike I fall a little bit more in love with the place. The building itself is a great source of inspiration, and there is a lot of potential in cross-pollination between the different departments/people here.

Kevin has started an Artists’ Postcard Swap project, with the theme “Wish You Were Here”, collaborating with 20 different artists at Spike and the former writer in residence. Postcards with RFID chips, that is. *Exciting*

I decided to have some new age fun with a vintage feel, and finally got my little Polaroid printer working over Bluetooth. People at Spike Island can send me pictures by email or using a specific hashtag on Twitter (#myspikeisland) that will automatically make the printer print out some small, low-quality stickers that will be put on display, sometime, somewhere.

You may have noticed that our plans are a bit loose still. This is fine. We may not know exactly where we are going with this, but in the meantime we keep on hacking, experimenting, playing around, and as we do our ideas develop and change.

We also visited Watershed and the wonderful Pervasive Media Studio where our minds were blown by some of the wonderful projects they’ve got going on. The bar has been raised.

While Kevin and Linda worked, I (Spike Island’s communications manager) headed up to Nottingham on Wednesday to take part in the Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture workshop where I heard about the other funded projects and shared what we’ve learned so far. Partnerships between cultural organisations and technology companies have resulted in a range of outcomes from a ticket-buying app for students by the London Symphony Orchestra to a new immersive way to experience Punchdrunk’s production Sleep No More online.

There was a lot of discussion about what research and development means: while for some of the technology partners it’s an essential element of their business, its place within arts organisations is a bit less clear. It was suggested that within the context of Happenstance the residents are perhaps more focused on process, while we as a staff team are (or at least feel) obliged to produce outcomes – we don’t usually spend months working on an exhibition and then decide not to do it! In a way, it’s true that we don’t always have the time, headspace or resources to do the sort of playful experimentation that Kevin and Linda have been invited to do here. On the other hand, maybe R&D should be seen as more of an ongoing thread of our work than a standalone activity. We certainly are always thinking, reading, talking and planning whilst actually delivering the programme, welcoming visitors and supporting a community of artists and designers.

Whichever way you look at it, my hope for the Happenstance residency is that it not only opens up the world of digital tools to us as a staff team, but that through this it inspires new ways of working and of seeing Spike Island for the whole organisation. Just today we’ve had a fantastic response from people across the building to Kevin and Linda’s invitation to participate in the projects described by Linda above!

Nat and I started properly at Lighthouse last week. We came straight into a big team meeting, where everyone in the organisation lays out what they’re up to and where various projects are headed. The Otolith Group show at Fabrica has just opened, and as well as that Lighthouse are coordinating a number of events around the Brighton Festival, including a show from Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, and Invisible Flock. Various props for the latter, including ship parts, navigation equipment and soon-to-be-augmented telescopes started arriving at Lighthouse yesterday and we’ve been staring at them enviously.

As we get to know the team and start looking for site-specific work we can do, Nat and I have started work on a small tool to help generally. One of the briefs for Happenstance was to help artists and art organisations communicate better what they do: the process of putting together work and exhibitions. We’re building something to make chronicling this easier and more public, and we’ll have something to show for it soon…

We’ve come to the end of our first week of the Happenstance project and residents Kevin Walker and Linda Sandvik have had a burst of ideas about how to collect data from around the building and use it to make exciting, intriguing and maybe even beautiful visualisations and objects.

Happenstance is an experiment to see what happens when creative technologists are embedded in arts organisations. Already we’ve been invigorated by Kevin and Linda’s fresh approach to seeing and thinking about the complexity of the organisation – for example, they’ve identified the shared kitchen areas as spaces rich with interactions. Linda’s planning some experiments using the kettles and Twitter, so stay tuned!

Kevin’s sent some of his impressions of their first week here:

Our challenge is to find ways to use technology creatively to represent Spike Island as a whole, where interesting data and content are being produced every day. Our approach is to apply ‘computational thinking’ to link the digital and physical; coincidentally this week Linda also launched Code Club to teach primary school kids how to code. We are hackers – we like to take things apart to see how they work, then make new things.

In our first week we began to survey the current state of information and communication at Spike Island, for example mapping places in the building where information is shared and collaborations take place, and tracking people’s activity and movement in various places (watch the video). An unexpected highlight was sitting in on Write Club; as participants read unfinished stories we realised that in a way that’s what we too were making/documenting. And we also realised that the best data input is qualitative – it comes from people, not computers.

I’m trying to think of fun/clever ways to represent my weekly blog posts during my time at the Site Gallery. We’ve only done three days so far, so I’ll start that next week – but in the meantime, here are some pictures of things I’ve seen and done since I moved here last week. I also hacked a combination lock and watched The Full Monty but I don’t have pictures of THAT. Anyway, hope you enjoy.

(I recommend starting from the top and scrolling down one by one…)

I moved in.

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I’ve just got back from a few days of induction to the project, met lots of new people, and experienced some of the achievements and challenges of the Site Gallery and the city as a whole.

The Site Gallery is a contemporary art space on an extraordinary street packed with maker hubs, artists’ studios, arts centres and university buildings. I can’t stress the intensity of creativity in the area. My first impression, at least, is of an under-funded area that wants, more than anything, to make. The urge to create is in the air, it’s normal and doesn’t need to be justified – so it’s not spiked with competitiveness, it’s laid-back and friendly. People have huge amounts of time for each other. They walk down the street and they talk to each other face-to-face. As a result there is a massive amount going on. Unlike London, there are things on here that I’d go out of my way to do or see, every single night. It’s hard to sound genuine saying this, but I really think that something wonderful his arising out of this culture of default friendliness.

It helps that the Site Gallery’s new management, Laura and Judith, and the whole team, have put a massive amount of time and energy into connecting with the community. I’m glad they’re there – they’d be wasted in London. My co-happenstancer James Jefferies is exceptional, and while we don’t know quite what we’re going to build yet, we have found several things at the gallery we’d like to put our skills behind. James is a great developer and I sort of shepherd and articulate technological mash-ups. It’s obvious that we’re going to have a lot of fun working together, whatever happens. Keeping this short, but the full post is over on my blog, here.

We’re very pleased to announce the six Happenstance residents, who will be taking their posts in April. Chosen from a brilliantly strong field of candidates, each of the six has something special to bring to the programme and to the organisation they’re working with. They’re a very exciting group of people, and they’ll be blogging and sharing their experiences of working with Site Gallery, Lighthouse and Spike Island over the next few months. Stay tuned for updates!

SPIKE ISLAND: Kevin Walker and Linda Sandvik

LIGHTHOUSE: James Bridle and Nat Buckley

SITE GALLERY: Leila Johnston and James Jefferies