The Arts v art and in praise of the telephone

Nicely expressed in Rachel Coldicutt’s write-up of her Edgelands talk:

The Arts is a system that needs all the help it can get. It’s an infrastructure that needs trustworthy services to make businesses run and deliver services to patrons. Rather than making innovative ticketing systems, brand new video-streaming platforms or bespoke social networks, The Arts should make the most of its limited resources and stand on the shoulders of giants – use the best technology and services from the wider world, and deploy them in the best way possible.

But art is another matter. Art is about disrupting and subverting – changing and challenging the norms. “Art teaches us to see into things.” And this is the area we’ve been tentative in.

Personally, I’d caveat that first paragraph by saying there’s nothing wrong with The Arts making/improving/adapting/customising tech if it serves a purpose. cf also Matthew Somerville’s point about making educated decisions having weighed up the risks and rewards of relying on 3rd party services.

But then caveats should have no place in a provocation (which is what this is excerpted from).

Yay phones

Also from Rachel’s post came this (paraphrased) comment from the discussion that followed her talk:

The first assertion was that “there was no good Internet art” – that after the invention of the Gutenberg Press it took the first novel, Don Quixote, 150 years to appear, so perhaps we should be a little bit easy on ourselves. There isn’t a canon of telephone art from the 1950s, so perhaps the Internet isn’t all that as a medium for producing new art?

Which was interesting. Saying ‘phones are great’ would make me sound like a simpleton but, while they may not be a great medium for art in and of themselves, they’ve done a great job of helping to make art happen. People are keen to bang on about how ace the internet is at connecting people, I wonder if phones sit there seething with resentment at being overlooked constantly.*

To answer the rhetorical question posed in the quote – surely it’s too early to make judgments on whether the internet’s a good medium for producing art. That said, it’s already doing a decent job of facilitating many parts of the artistic process. I reckon it’s becoming a pretty good place to present certain types of art too.

Various related links:

• This is what Edgelands was all about
• Audio of provocations by Rachel Coldicutt, Matthew Somerville and Matt Adams
• Matthew Somerville’s post about his talk
• Tom Armitage’s contribution to the Edgelands newspaper, an essay called Technology as a Material

* Of course they don’t. They’re phones.

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Twitpanto – the Twitter pantomime

This afternoon I was Trig – one of the ugly sisters in Twitpanto, a production of Cinderella played out over Twitter. My co-stars were mainly Birmingham-based twitterers, along with a few of minor Twitter slebs.

Jon Bounds, a social media consultant, was responsible for the idea, script, direction… pretty much everything in fact, and a fine job he did too.

My fave things about Twitpanto:

• It was absolutely chaotic but it absolutely worked
• The audience participation – it’s an important part of a panto and seeing over 50 tweets of ‘oh no it’s not’ and ‘oh yes it is’ come rolling in was fantastic
• It was popular – not a penny was spent on promotion but it spread because people liked the idea. #twitpanto was the top trending topic on twitter and so far my tag search is showing over 1,300 uses of the tag (and they’re still coming)

A ‘performers’ eye view

Managing the number of #twitpanto tweets coming through was a bit of a mission. I started off watching the #twitpanto tag on Tweetdeck. However, with 15 minutes to go there seemed to be too much audience ‘noise’ coming through so I created a new group for cast members only. However, tweets came through too slowly, so halfway through I was glad to be able to shift to watching the Roomatic chatroom (screenshot below) and tweeting via Tweetdeck.

Matthew Somerville deserves hearty thanks for, first of all, knocking up the Roomatic chatroom and then tweaking it so the cast’s tweets were distinct from the audience’s.

What Twitpanto ‘was‘

There’s loads that could be said about something like this – why it appealed, what platforms were used and why, how the idea spread through networks, how it could be monetised/improved/replicated, etc and so on…

However, keeping up with the audience banter and trying to follow along with the loosely-prepared script was surprisingly exhausting, so for now it’s enough to say that it was a lot of fun and I can’t wait for the next one.

I’ll leave you with a few Twitpanto-related links:

• The website (incl cast list)
• The script
• The transcript
• The transcript passed through Wordle (above)
  
• The Upcoming event for PantWeb08
• Cinders’ wish to go to the unconference

And some other Twitpanto posts:

• Nick Booth
• Actors Online
• Tom Roper – “It was rowdy, bawdy and sometimes hard to follow, just like the real thing”
• Emma Jones (Dandini) – “ludicrous though it sounds, I felt like I’d really been part of something big”

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