The following statements may not be true: Technology = agile, opportunistic, ad hoc, process-driven. Arts organisations = risk aware, accountable, strategic, project-based. Artists are a bit like technologists. Arts managers are a bit like managers.
Once you look at these particular arts organisations, artists, technologists, generalisations like this start to unravel and other patterns start to emerge. As researchers we trade in generalisations. We are expected to amplify details into generalities (not the other way round) and to weave generalisable truths into a story, aka our final report (no pressure there, then). Over the next few weeks we will be posting some of our (possibly true) generalisations on this site. We hope you will find time to disagree with us – just to show you’re listening. Or even (occasionally) to agree.
One such pattern emerging across the projects is the idea of making the virtual physically present. How do you make the invisible parts of a creative process visible? How do you help an organisation see itself and be seen by others? There have been ingenious solutions – using motion sensors to capture and represent the human traffic of Spike Island, using a bot to animate conversations in Lighthouse Media, using mini-printers to capture social media chatter about Site Gallery. Creative technologies can show the activity which precedes an exhibition or an installation, in the studio or the back office. They can open up another way of engaging with audiences and visitors beyond a moment’s interaction with an exhibit, exposing the workings under its skin. They can allow organisations, and the people who work in them, to become more attuned to each other and to the world around them, making virtual interactions physically present. They can bring the outside in and the inside out. McLuhan described media technologies as ‘extensions of man’ – computers and phones are so much part of us that we don’t notice them. By giving them a tangible form and location, technologies can remind us not only of their own presence, but also of the creative and organisational processes which connect us.