Remote drawing

On October 24 2009 Fabrica will be taking part in Brighton and Hove Council’s White Night event. White Night is based on the French Les Nuits Blanches and involves cultural organisations in the city staying open until 2am when the clocks go back, giving you another whole hour to play. There’s lots of good stuff happening in galleries, other venues and on the streets too. Check the website for full details.

At Fabrica we will be offering a number of drawing activities through the evening for those that can make it to the gallery but we also wanted to use social media as a tool so those that can’t can still participate. To that end we are setting up a remote drawing activity that will be driven by Twitter. At certain points in the evening we will send out a word via Twitter as a prompt. We are then asking people to make a drawing based on that word, photograph it and send it back to us via Twitpic, we will then project the images in the gallery during the evening. The images will also be available to view via Twitter so if you take part you’ll be able to see what other people are doing. We want people to use anything they have to hand to make the drawing and don’t expect you to have any particular talent for it. If you’re in the pub draw it on a beermat or the condensation on your glass, do it with pebbles on the beach, in the dirt on a van if you’re out and about or with your kids’ crayons etc etc. The possibilities are endless. We’ll keep it simple in what we ask you to draw but your response can be as elaborate or as casual as you want. Long term we’ll put the images on our website so they’ll become part of Fabrica’s archive of the event. It’d be great to have an idea of anyone that’d like to join in so if you are interested send us a DM.

We’ve also set up a collaborative playlist on Spotify with the theme of ’emotional contagion’ which reflects one of the ideas behind the exhibition. Have a listen and feel free to add something. Chameleon

And the winner is………

Mark Barkaway

Big congratulations to Mark, this is a great picture. We were looking for something that delivered a different perspective on The Elephant Bed and this certainly does that. All the shortlisted pictures are great but this one came out a clear winner when the votes from the panel were collated. Mark’s £50 Amazon voucher will be winging its way to him shortly and I’m hoping to record a boo with him in the next couple of days so keep a look out for that. It may even prompt me to write about Audioboo, which I’ve been meaning to for a while now.

I just wanted to take some time to reflect on the competition. Firstly, I should say that I set the whole thing up really badly. I do have a habit of thinking of an idea and rushing in. We asked people to post photographs on Flickr and to tag them fabricacomp so that we could find them, which was fine but did cause a couple of problems. We asked people to submit a maximum of three images but a few people entered more and during the competition I tried to contact them to reduce the number of images, but the only way to do that was through Flickr comments and that isn’t very efficient. The upshot was that when it came to shortlisting, a couple of people had to be disqualified. The second issue was that after we had shortlisted, I needed to be able to put together a document containing all the images to email out to the panel for their votes. Once again we were obliged to contact everyone via Flickr to get a low res version of their image that we could send out. This all took time and has made the process much slower than I had hoped. The next time I think that I’ll ask people to email the images they want to enter and we’ll post them on Flickr. I think that’ll iron out the wrinkles and speed up the process. If anyone has a better idea or wants to point out that I could have used Flickr better I’d be very happy to hear from them I’m clearly no Flickr expert.

I’m discovering that it’s difficult to quantify success with social media, so although I blithely said in an earlier post that I’d report back on whether the competition had delivered what I had hoped it would, I’m not sure how to do that. I can talk about the number of entries (135), quality of entries, (v high), people in the gallery talking about it (a lot) and more, but I’m not sure that they are a measure of success when what I’m really interested in is deepening engagement, in driving creative participation. This is a tricky question and something that will undoubtedly need to be addressed in depth at some point but at the moment I’m sort of enjoying the fact that it is difficult to quantify, that no one really knows and that there’s no one standing over my shoulder demanding meaningless stats. I’d be interested in talking to Mark about his response to the competition and his relationship to the gallery and I’m sure it’ll be part of our boo. One unexpected result is that John Grade has asked permission for some of the images to be used on his website, which is fantastic. There will definitely be more competitions and games coming up so watch this space.

In the meantime congratulations to Mark again.

Shortlisted Photos in competition

Thought it would be nice to post the shortlisted images from the Elephant Bed photo competition, which I blogged about earlier. Will post some more thoughts on how it worked soon. Along with the winner of course.

Sara Ingman

Jo Stevenson

Adrian Powter

Adrian Powter

Perry French

Maura Hamer

Emma Gray

Perry French

Joe Wilkins

Mark Barkaway

Inhabiting the tangled hedgerow

It’s been a while since I posted on here. Sometimes I feel like I have so much to say that I don’t know where to begin without it becoming an incoherent mess and I get slightly paralyzed and end up saying nothing. But today I read something that really clarified for me the answer to an issue that I’ve been thinking about a lot.

I read an executive summary of a report commissioned by HSBC, The future of business: The changing face of business in 21st Century Britain. It’s not the sort of thing I normally read, though maybe I should, but I read it because the report names Brighton as one of the five supercities of the future and hey, I live and work in Brighton so it’s relevant to me, and once I got past the hilarious and frankly slightly desperate jargon, I learned something.

The issue I’ve been thinking about is this- How do arts organisations inhabit this new world? This crossover world, the overlapping space between an organisation and the online world, the tangled hedgerow to steal my own analogy. I was at an event called Shift Happens a while back and one of the speakers was Bill Thompson, he’s a commentator on The Digital Planet a BBC world service programme about digital stuff and describes himself on Twitter as a hack and a pundit. One of the things that Bill talked about was what he believes is the challenge for arts organisations in the future, which was to pitch camp in that online world, to make it their own. This was the last talk of the event and I chatted with Bill afterwards very briefly and said yes, that’s exactly right, I felt fired up by the idea, I may have even have embarrassed myself slightly. Then I left and got on a train and during the long journey home that excitement didn’t leave me but the question kept coming up in my mind, but how? How do we do that, how do we pitch camp in that world?

I want to quote a little from the HSBC report-

‘How many of us for instance, see social networking sites as a tool for personal rather than professional, gain? Yet for many entrepreneurial groups, social networks are now regarded as one of the best ways to develop and maintain new business contacts, test and market new products, organise and manage new business initiatives.’

Now I’m not in any way anti-business but this depressed me slightly. There’s plenty more in the same vein and it made me more determined than ever to work out how to make sure that arts organisations are part of this new world, that it’s not inhabited solely by businesses who are only looking to make money. Then it occurred to me what we have to do. We have to do what we do. There’s no magic bullet, no blinding idea that’ll make it happen. We just have to make sure that our work, our organisations are there, online, engaging with people and enabling them to engage with us, to share what we do, what we’re about. This is exactly what business is doing right now, and we have to make sure that we don’t lose out, that we build a future in which our online presence is as important as HSBC’s in the same way that our presence in the real world is as important as theirs. And now, right now is the time to be doing that because otherwise we risk getting left behind and that world may become a commercialized one not open to us or one we no longer want to be a part of.

Social media and social conventions

I recently came across this blog entry on a website called Sociability, it’s a summary of a talk given by Andy Gibson at an Arts Council event Do the arts speak digital? Andy Gibson is a consultant specialising in the social uses of technology. It’s definitely worth reading the whole thing but I’d like to pick out a couple of ideas that are particularly relevant to things that I’ve been considering and some ideas that I’m working up.

I’ve been thinking a lot about audience development and what that means. It seems to me, possibly naively, that the focus is mostly on making your audience bigger, developing relationships with hard to reach groups for example or encouraging those that don’t traditionally engage with the arts. Of course all of that is important but I’m also interested in thinking about how you develop your current audience as well, how you deepen your relationship with them, how you can encourage their creative participation, especially through the use of social media and the low barriers to engagement that it offers. A quote from the blog – ‘I believe that social tools make the invisible networks of our culture visible, and therefore possible to engage with’. What Andy Gibson also elaborates is that not only do social tools allow us to engage with our audience more easily than we could before, it also means that they can engage with one another. If you follow Fabrica on Twitter then you can also see who else follows us, the same with Facebook and other social networks.

I’ve been thinking about how to use social media in a playful way to encourage some of those things, creative participation, deepening of relationships, the opportunity for our audience to engage with each other. As previously discussed the photo competition we’re running via Flickr is part of that. I’m working up a couple of other things, no details as yet because I’m still thinking them through, both of which will happen during the Tina Gonsalves show, Chameleon (title tbc), in October/November this year. One, forming part of Brighton’s White Night activities, will be a drawing game, (no actual drawing ability required – I’ll be taking part so you can be assured of that), resulting in an online gallery. The second will be something that plays with the idea of contagion, of passing things on, in the same way that Tina’s show is about emotional contagion. It’ll be a game that will specifically use Twitter and I’m hoping will put people in touch with each other as well as fostering their relationship with us. I think that together, in addition to the photo competition, they will represent a step forward in our use of social media and hopefully the beginnings of a model for future interactions.

Another thought from the blog to end on – ‘So if it’s a time to play with convention, it’s also a time to challenge some of the 19th Century assumptions about how things “should” be done.’ The convention of the silent audience he points out is relatively recent and one that’s beginning to crumble. Time to find new ways of interaction.
Love this image which represents sociability in a virtual society.

It’s a Ning thing

A few months ago I attended a training session organised by the Arts Council on all things digital and the arts. It was a good session and something I’ll probably refer to again in the future because I got a lot out of it. Alongside the training, which happened across the country, there were a series of social networks set up in order to facilitate continued conversation. The South East network can be found here. I’m not sure that the conversation has really continued as yet but I’m hopeful it will. (Actually since I started writing this there’s been a move to create a nationwide network with the regions represented in groups within it. I think that’s a really good thing.) The social network is hosted by Ning, it was the first time that I’d heard about it though it’s been around for a few years. Ning.com allows anyone to sign up and create a network.

In the lead up to the current show at Fabrica I had a conversation with Natasha Ba-Abdullah who jobshares the Front of House Manager role and has responsibility for volunteer development, about her need for something, a blog she thought, that could be a focus for the volunteers, a place for them to go for information. Like most small arts organisations, Fabrica is heavily reliant on volunteers, at any one time we have 60-odd signed up. One of the big challenges of Tasha’s role is email management, there are a huge number of emails going backwards and forwards with the volunteers, which is both time-consuming and frustrating for everybody and she wanted a solution for that. Then as often happens in small organisations like this we both got very busy doing other things. (Insert montage here to show time passing). Because it had been knocking around in the back of my mind, I sent out a request to our followers on Twitter for examples of Nings they used, good or bad experiences in setting them up etc because I thought it might be a good solution for Tasha. People were, as always, generous with their thoughts and experiences and that, along with my own research, started to give me a good picture of what a Ning could do and what it could be. Last week I sat down with Tasha and asked her what she needed from this volunteer ‘hub’. Her answers were-

• A place for Fabrica to post information that the volunteers need
• A place for Fabrica to post opportunities the volunteers may be interested in
  
• A social space for the volunteers to meet
• A place to promote themselves and what they’re doing
• A space in which they can offer and ask for help
• A way of reducing the number of emails sent to and from volunteers
  

A Ning seemed to answer all those needs and so we set up ‘Fabrica Volunteers’, unimaginative I know but keeping it simple and descriptive seemed right. Tasha and I are currently the only members and we are populating the site with some content so the small group of volunteers we invite to test it out won’t be faced with emptiness. I’ll blog again about the Ning I’m sure because ultimately we hope the volunteers will drive its development and make it a useful tool for themselves. I have some thoughts on my perception of its value for Fabrica which I’ll blog about soon, maybe with some feedback from the early test volunteers.

History part 2 – Let there be Twitter

I’ve just scrolled back, because I can, to the first Tweet I made on Twitter on behalf of Fabrica. It was 4 April this year and I was in the gallery for a venue hire. In fact the first part of this post could probably read exactly the same as the post about Facebook with the two words switched over. To summarize and thereby save myself a couple of hundred words:-

-Thought Fabrica should have a Twitter feed
-Thought vaguely along the lines that it’d be for marketing
-Set up a personal Twitter account to get familiar with it*
-Realized push marketing angle was not that interesting
-Fell in love with Twitter

*Actually it turns out I already had a Twitter account, which I’d opened a year or so before and then promptly forgotten. It was only when I discovered that someone else had taken my name on Twitter and I was trying to think of an alternative that some dim and dusty memory was stirred and I remembered that I already had an account and the person that had taken my name was me. Since then I’ve come to love Twitter and use it a lot but when I first opened the account I didn’t know what it was for and what it might mean to me. I suspect this is the case with a lot of people, you have to find your own way to it and your own value in it. This is on a personal level of course, for arts organisations I don’t think there’s any question of its value and I’m getting pretty evangelical about it.

Looking back over the early tweets it’s clear from the outset that I was doing what I now believe is one of the key opportunities with all social media and that is giving some insight into the process, the ‘behind the scenes’ that people don’t get to see. I’d like to say I was really clued up from the get go but the reality is, having started the feed, I didn’t want it to just wither away and I was tweeting the only things I could think of given the lack of any events to ‘market’ at that time.

What I have always been focused on was the opportunity for dialogue with your audience, for feedback, and one of the early ideas I had, in fact looking back it was in the first few days, was a tweet review competition. It was a simple thing, see the show, tweet a review and the best would get posted on the website. I thought it was a great idea, still do, as did everyone I talked to about it. Throughout the Kapoor show I kept pushing it and at the end of it we had three entries. Discounting the one from a Fabrica director and the one from my partner, we had one entry. To be honest I don’t really understand why. Perhaps, I thought, it was because the Kapoor show was a bit tricky, a bit difficult to engage with, but re-launching the idea with our current much more immediately accessible show has elicited no response at all, even with prizes on offer. I’m flummoxed but I’m not giving up so watch this space on that one.

That’s all for now on Twitter, there’s a lot more to come but I am vaguely trying to keep this in bite-sized chunks for all you busy busy people.

You can follow Fabrica on Twitter and/or me

What the f**k is social media?

I came across this today, it’s a slide show that answers the question above. It was written by Marta Kagan, self-described social media evengelist and is an update of a presentation she made a year ago. It’s nicely done and though aimed directly at business contains a lot of useful information about the exponential growth of social media. I particularly like the fact that if Facebook were a country it’d be the 8th most populous in the world and the idea that social media is like word of mouth on steroids. I will definitely be stealing that one. It’s also good in that it reiterates the fact that I’ve mentioned elsewhere that using social media is about so much more than just one-way push marketing.

Thoughts on padlocks

This is just a quick one. It’s something that really bugs me and I’ve just figured out why. When someone starts following either me or Fabrica on Twitter and it’s someone I’m not already following I always go to check them out. And I get really wound up when I see that little padlock symbol denoting the fact that they have protected their tweets and that if you want to follow them you’ll need to make a request. You may have a very good reason for doing it, I don’t know and honestly, I don’t really care. My immediate reaction has always been that I’m not interested in following you on a personal or organisational level. I’ve just worked out why that is. It seems totally against the spirit of Twitter which for me has always been about connecting with people that you know, people you don’t know but who are interested in similar things, people that make you laugh, people that are interesting for whatever reason. You can follow them and they can choose to follow you back or not, they can even block you if they want and vice versa. It’s all about that openness that opportunity to build a network. Facebook serves the primary function of being a network for just your friends which is fine. Maybe I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face and missing out on the opportunity to follow some interesting people but until that little padlock disappears I’m not going to do it.

History part 1 – In the beginning there was Facebook

This is how it started. Back in February ’09, I was at work for a weekend during a hire of the gallery for a fashion market. I’d been vaguely thinking that I should set up a Facebook group for Fabrica with an equally vague idea of why, just that it might be a good idea for marketing. Somehow. At this point I ran up against the fact that I knew nothing about Facebook, I wasn’t on it personally and had only the vaguest idea of how it worked. I’d been generally resistant to it on a personal level and had declined numerous invitations from friends to join. I spend enough time on a computer at work, I don’t need it in my social life too, was pretty much my reasoning. Looking back and giving in already to the hindsight that I promised to avoid, that wall had already begun to crumble because at the end of last year I got an iPhone and actually the division between my online and offline life suddenly disappeared, in fact they began to overlap. With my phone never more than a few metres away I became permanently online, in a sense I began to live my life online. This is a digression but it’s an interesting theme that I’m sure I’ll return to, because I think it’s probably central to what’s interesting about this work.

So I set up a personal account on Facebook because, I reasoned, I needed to understand the ins and outs before I set up a group for Fabrica. Fast forward to exactly a month later and I’m back in the office again for a weekend of gallery sitting and I’m beginning to understand the attraction of Facebook. I have cousins scattered across the globe that I rarely see and we’re all equally bad at keeping in touch but through Facebook I started to know what they were up to and where they were going and sometimes what they had for breakfast and I loved that, it made me feel that I was somehow more a part of their lives and them a part of mine. Please excuse this detour into my personal life but it is relevant because it was at that point that I began to have the first inkling of an idea that maybe Facebook could mean more for an organisation like Fabrica than just a way of marketing ourselves and events, that maybe it was about making yourself more of a presence in the lives of the people that chose to join your group, your audience.

So I set up Fabrica group and invited some people to join and during the course of the first part of the Anish Kapoor show Blood Relations the group grew to around 180 members and I posted events on the group and pictures from the installation of the show and sent out invitations and invited comment and…… nothing really happened and I started to feel a bit frustrated with Facebook. Then they launched pages for organisations or maybe I just caught up with the opportunity and on investigation something became much clearer. By joining a group, any group on Facebook, people demonstrate an interest in something that goes as far as a willingness to click on a button that says ‘join this group’. But crucially that’s it, and what you’ve signed up for is to be on a mailing list essentially and unless you choose to go and visit the group you get nothing more from it. Now I’ve joined plenty of groups but rarely visit them and I’m guessing most people are the same. The crucial difference with a page is that once set up anything you post on that page automatically appears in the news feed of all your fans. It’s a much more direct intervention into their lives. Of course you run the risk of people then deciding to undo their relationship with you because you post too much or post things that don’t interest them but so be it. You don’t want people that are not genuinely interested anyway. Of course if you’re regularly losing followers then you probably need to be rethinking your posting policy.

So next I set up a Fabrica page and invited, over the course of a couple of weeks, all of the group members to switch, warning that the group would be closed down on a specific date. About 130 of the group made the jump and the rest fell off. At the time I thought it was a shame that you couldn’t just switch all members of your group over to the new page but actually, sorry hindsight again, I think that a natural cull is not necessarily a bad thing. As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s better to have ten great followers than a thousand who don’t really care.

So that’s where we are now with Facebook. We get a lot more comments than we did with the group though we’re always searching for more. We now have over two hundred fans and it grows steadily. As I’m, again, way over my word limit, I’ll leave this one there but will of course return to Facebook at some point. There’s plenty more to talk about.

Click here if you’d like to become a fan.