The Festival Audience as Players

Creative Clusters ‘08

Hannah Rudmanhannah@envirodigital.com

www.del.icio.us/hanrudman

“We-think”

“We-Think: the power of mass creativity is about what the rise of the likes of Wikipedia and Youtube, Linux and Craigslist means for the way we organise ourselves, not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations. My argument is that these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work. People want to be players not just spectators, part of the action, not on the sidelines.”

Charles Leadbeater, thinker and author.www.wethinkthebook.net

Experience Economy / Status Stories

People want to do more than attend

• Personalise• Participate• Co-produce• Create meaning

– Alan Brown’s latest research: WolfBrown

This affects:– Artistic practice– Organisations’ operations– Business models

Implications for organisations

– ARTISTIC• people's online lives and digital devices become part of real

experience – venues and other audience members may have to change their attitudes to their inclusion;

• participating in public spaces or the city, or in virtual spaces changes a person’s relationship to those environments – this is an opportunity to link better with tourism aims and objectives;

• the relationship between the artist and community will become flatter - artists and audiences will begin to develop work collaboratively;

• people will be organised without the organisation, players without the play;

– OPERATIONAL• encouraging more personalisation of and participation with the

festivals experience via digital tools and channels means increasing investment in this area;

• becoming more porous as organisations means opening up to a wide dialogue, including the negative and critical;

– BUSINESS MODELS• creating more digital content means more/different investment and

different contracts with venues, performers and audiences.

Implications for funders• traditional delineations between traditional art forms

are blurring as artists work with more digital media and new forms of digital production and consumption – to what department should artists apply?

• projects may only come together in final form on the day and results may be surprising, even unexpected!

• power laws (1:9:90) in relation to UGC digital content and participation need to be recognized, particularly their potential for audience building

• a fine art critique may not be the only way to get something out of a piece of work designed to be solely digital and/or highly audience participative

• the experience economy is upon us, and we need to emphasize the fact what we do well as a cultural sector is deliver unique, exciting and transformative experiences