OK, I’ve had three projects knocking around in my consciousness for a while now, that I know would be cool to get done and as I accept the Social Artist tag more and more, I see that they’re things that I need to do.

The question is how to get to do them, while still paying the bills – these aren’t just spare-time, pootling in the attic projects, they require getting out and talking to people and then thinking and writing about what they say. It seems that this is not an unusual position for artists to be in, so I’m asking people how they pull money in to support their projects, but I’m also going to try some creative ways too, y’know using the “power of the social web” sort of ways.

And I’m also finding it difficult to work out which project’s more important or useful or popular or whatever, and this reminded me of the thing in Waitrose where you get given a token at the end of your shop, to vote for local charities.

So, I thought, why not let the readers of this blog (and anyone else on the internet who might stumble here) decide by putting their money where their mouths are, so to speak. I’m setting up 3 chip-in funds for these projects – they’re all the same – £3,000 (currently $4,800) to get each of them started and give each of them a month or so of my time – maybe that’ll be enough for one of them, maybe another will grow and I’ll need to look for more support, but that would give me the space and time to get them started.

The progress of each of them will be reported on a separate wordpress.com blog – they don’t need fancy infrastructure, especially at first – the money will go on creating content, getting round the country to collect it, and on my time writing about it and working out what to do next. The people and institutions who contribute to each project will get acknowledgement on each respective site.

I’m not necessarily expecting to raise so much money directly from you, my regular readers and twitter followers but I am hoping that you will be able to say to other people: “There’s this bloke I know and he does some interesting stuff on the web and he needs some financial support for some new projects, so why not bung him a few quid?”

These are the projects:

A New Generation

According to ONS, “in 2002, women who were aged 65 could expect to live to the age of 84, while men could expect to live to the age of 81. Projections suggest that life expectancies at these older ages will increase by a further three years or so by 2020. The expectation of life for people at 70 and 80 has also gone up. At present there are more older people aged 70 and 80 than ever before.”

There is, undeniably, a New Generation of people, a social group that simply did not exist in any significant number in the past. But these men and women are not only living longer. A large proportion are also living out their ‘old age’ very differently to their parents. Some occasional volunteering or fund-raising won’t satisfy them. Those people who started their working lives rebuilding our entire nation after the war are not necessarily ready to settle into retirement at 60, 70 or even 80. Many want to go on contributing fully to the economy and to society.

And when they do relax, gardening, bingo, golf and a couple of pints down the pub are not enough for this generation. They started partying in the fifties and sixties – these people know how to have fun!

This generation has appeared in media a lot talking about the past. What was it like growing up during and immediately after the war? How did you deal with post-war austerity? What do you remember about the beginnings of rock and roll?

This project will start as a videoblog highlighting the voices and stories of this fascinating new segment of society but focusing on what life is like for them now and how they see the future.

Among other things, we’ll be asking people:

• What is your experience of being a member of this “new generation?”
• What grand schemes have you initiated recently?
• What would you do, if you knew you had another thirty years of productive life?
• How did you envisage later life when you left school or got married?
• How’s it different now?
• What’s it like being 70 years old and still having your mother alive?

Chip in to make this one happen


What’s the Web for?

This one’s simpler – a collection of short video responses to three questions:

In your opinion:

• What is the web for? What is its primary purpose
• What do you mostly use the web for?
• What do you think your parents use the web for? / What do you think your children use the web for? (Depending on age of participant)

You may remember this from when I did some initial try-outs with Tuttle people. This project is about asking a broader range of questions and opening it up to a much broader population. My guess/prejudice is that there are at least two main groupings: those who see the web as being about connecting people with information and those who see it as about connecting people with other people. But I’m also interested to see what shades of grey there are between these groups, what perspectives I’m ignoring and whether there’s a difference between generations. There’s also something interesting about what people say they do and what they think other people are doing.

Chip-in to make this one happen


Townhead’s Communities

In 1974 my aunt, uncle and two cousins sold their home and bought into a community housed in two terraces of mostly derelict railwaymen’s cottages at Townhead, on the edge of a South Yorkshire moor. As kids, my sister and I spent a few weeks over a couple of occasions staying with them. My memory of those times are of cold, the wind howling in the chimneys, woodsmoke, tobacco smoke, dope smoke, someone making cheese in their room, no meat, lots of beans, rice, vegetable stews and soups and weetabix (and beans). But this project isn’t about me and my short experience of the place, it’s about the lifetime of those buildings and the communities that have lived in them over the years.

What’s interesting to me is investigating and documenting the life of a community, of the people who have lived there as well as how and why change arose. Through writing and a series of interviews in a variety of media, I intend to tell the stories of the people who have lived at Townhead working back through time, starting with the present day and what they know of the place and the people who were there before. For residents present and past, what drew them to this place, what have they learned there and what if anything they think is special about those two rows of terraced houses.

Chip-in to make this one happen