Category Archives: What I’m doing

What I'm doing

Unpave Paradise

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280420091359I love demolition sites. Not for the potential new building that will take place there, but for the old view, blocked out for so many years, that gets set free again. Sadly, the view is usually lessened by the big hoardings that keep out people who might get up to no good, and then, sooner or later, some other ugly pile of bricks, glass or concrete will be shoved up and obscure the sight line again. It’s called development and I understand the economic imperative. But.

Someone asked me recently “What would you do if you just had shedloads of money, more money than you knew what to do with?” I really thought about it for once. Or rather I didn’t think, I just let something tumble out of my mouth. And when I heard it, I knew it to be the truth.

“I’d buy up old, ugly, useless buildings in the city and knock them down. Then instead of building something new on the site, I’d make it into a park, a green space, perhaps with a tree or two. And no-one would be allowed to build there again.”

Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that be a better legacy than putting up yet another building (however beautiful or well-designed) in a city that already feels like it has too many?

I think so. I also think it’s too good to wait until I’ve got shedloads of money, more money than I know what to do with. I never say never, but it might be a long time coming. I think a better idea is to crowdfund it. How much would we need to raise to buy something small (but ugly) tear it down and make something beautiful and natural in its place? What sort of organisation would it take? What planning obstacles might there be? Anybody want to take it on as a juicy co-operative social enterprise? Anybody already doing it?

What I'm doing

Friendship

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nolalaughI’m going to ask you to be my friend.

This isn’t about whether the use of “friend” on online social networks is appropriate. Neither is it a heart-warming, tear-brimming story about one of my mates, how fabulous they are (though I have a few stories like that to tell) and how I’d like you to be one of them.

It’s about a specific use of the term “Friend” as used by arts organisations to mean someone who gives regular financial support in return for the value they get from that organisation.

As I become more comfortable with being a Social Artist, I’m offering my own version. So I got thinking about value and of course I asked people to help me out. I set up a survey to ask people what they would get if they had £5, £10, £20 or £50 and they came back with the following answers:

For a Fiver
Flowers for the missus; A trip on the Cardiff Waterbus; A trashy magazine and a packet of starmix; Comics from the bargain bin;
iTunes; Take-away for lunch; Either a beer with a friend or dessert with a friend; a magazine or book; A really really good ice cream: at a 1950s ice cream parlour in Broadstairs overlooking the sea – Morelli’s is the one http://www.classiccafes.co.uk/Seaside.html ; Go to Hawkins Bazaar. Enjoy!

For a Tenner
A “push the boat out” bottle of wine i.e. one that’s more than a Fiver;
An edition, or back edition of Special ten – Ultimate goodness http://www.specialten.com/ ; A couple of good steaks; New comics; Beer, supermarket special offer most likely; Books from Oxfam; Pack of smokes and a beer with a friend; new knickers; Your favourite trash author has published a new book. You pretend to your friends you don’t read this stuff. You can wait, as you usually do, for the cheap paperback edition to appear on Amazon or a second hand copy from Abe Books. Or, you can splurge £9.99 on the hardback, discounted, offer at your local bookshop. You can walk in and buy it. Yes!; Fish and chips for two and cups of tea on the beach at Whitstable in the winter.

For £20
A bottle of single malt (you have to wait for them to come on special); Cheap bottle of Moet rose – usually on offer in Tesco, owner of all land; A bottle of wine and ingredients for dinner for my boyfriend; A mix of comics, old and new; Cinema tickets for two, sweets with the change; Doctor Who DVDs; Dinner with a friend;
241 cocktails with friends in cardiff (wouldn’t get much for £20 in london); Spend it on flowers – from Steve at Chapel Market, near Angel – do a deal you can get lots for £20; Look at Moleskine notebooks. Go on, you know you want to.

For £50
Dinner; Lunch, or dinner in my FAVE cantonese in the UK ever in ever of historian style ever – http://www.riversidecantonese.com/; Taking my boyfriend out for dinner; Big comics (or graphic novels, as they’re known); Meal for two, out at restaurant; Stick it in an ISA! If that’s not available, solar powered electro-gubbins; New sex toy to be used…..with a friend!; a new frock; Take 4 friends to the movies in Leicester Square; or the poshest cinema in your area and buy them popcorn. Ace!; Go to your local railway station. Tell them you’ve got £50. Say “A cheap day day return to somewhere nice please. Where can I go?”

Now obviously this represents a wide variety of tastes and geographies as well as some clear preferences based on gender, but it gives you a pretty good idea. So, I’m offering the same rates for regular donations each month – maybe you see me as “comics from the bargain bin, a take-away lunch or a really good ice cream” once a month – in which case you’d go for the £5 option. Or, at the other end, maybe to you I am “solar powered electro-gubbins, a cheap day-return to a mystery destination or… a new frock” – then I’ll put you down for £50pm. See?

But that’s not all. I’m not just asking for cash because you think I’m like an ice cream (?) I’m offering the following benefits in return for four levels of monthly payment.

£5 – a link and a public thank you on the social networking site of your choice, plus the warm glow of knowing that you’re supporting Social Art. Oh, and acknowledgement when I see you next – shoulder squeeze for the gals, manly shoulder punch for the guys.

£10 – as £5 PLUS a postcard from me saying thank you and an invitation to an annual party for other tenner friends

£20 – as £10 PLUS a postcard-sized piece of original art from me twice a year and an invitation to a special summer picnic and a mid-winter feast

£50 – as £20 PLUS a copy of Tuttle Chronicles – a new quarterly publication for such special friends and a quarterly meetup with sparkling conversation.

I’ve made links to recurring payment plans via PayPal.
£5 per month
£10 per month
£20 per month
£50 per month

UK friends – paying by standing order avoids paypal fees – e-mail me and I’ll send you the bank details.

If you’re going for anything higher than £10 I’ll need a postal address for you to send you goodies.

PS thanks very much to Jon; @chkn; Kathryn; Pete; @tookiebunten; edent; WankerGirl; lynsey; and Brian for their ideas

PPS if you’re not my “friend” you can still be my “friend” and you can definitely still be my friend.

What I'm doing

Who’s next for a Social Artist?

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#c4cc buzzingI’ve been Social Artist in Residence at the University of London’s Centre for Creative Collaboration for four months now. I love it. It’s great to have somewhere to focus my practice around – not just so that I have somewhere to park myself to work, but to contribute to a mission while doing my stuff.

I set out here to make new connections between the centre and the various communities that I have a presence in; to create synergy between the work of the centre and other projects I work on; and to encourage others to join in by writing about what I’ve done and speaking about it widely.

It’s been more successful than I’d anticipated (I know, for example, that the majority of people who’ve come through the doors of the centre have done so because of my efforts), which is great, particularly given that this is a startup environment which doesn’t officially launch until later this month. We haven’t talked yet about what happens to my place here after the initial six month agreement, though I’m hoping to stay involved in some capacity.

I’m now looking for another residency to complement it. I’m interested this time in finding something that’s different. I’d like to try what I’m doing in a differently challenging environment, one where there’s an established status quo – somewhere regimented, hierarchical and silo-bound. An organisation that’s struggling to make sense of or come to terms with a shift in their market or operational environment. In short somewhere where I have something to push against.

Any ideas?

What I'm doing

Transmedia storytelling, new journalism & digital curation

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tuttle2texasI’ve become more aware of a few things recently while thinking about getting these “social art” projects off the ground.

Firstly I’ve started to track the term “transmedia” on twitter and seen an awful lot of related and interesting stuff. There’s lots of excitement in the film, TV & videogame worlds about this. Advertising too. Exploring the value in the creation of fictional universes that can be expressed or explored in a variety of media, moving beyond the idea of this stuff as merchandise or spin-off material and seeing it as a part of the creative process. At least that’s my reading of where things are going. So instead of making the “game of the movie of the book” etc. ie taking an existing property and extending into another medium, they are planning stories that are told in a variety of ways for a variety of audiences, including those created by fans, the people formerly known as the audience.

Secondly, I’ve seen that Dave Winer is getting into his stride at NYU and “organising” a hypercamp this week on “Sources Go Direct” sadly it’s not on at a good time for me to watch & participate live, but it’s being ustreamed and presumably that will be archived along with everything else. The bit of Dave’s thinking that I’m most drawn to here is what he’s been saying for a while about opening up journalists’ processes and notebooks – “open sourcing” their stories and articles so that others might see what stories they might make out of the same material.

Then over the weekend, JP has written two important posts about digital curation. The second of which in particular deals with curation in the age of unbundling. What I’m talking about is unbundling in the sense that a book, film, photo exhibition, whatever is a bundle (with all sorts of preconceptions about how they are produced and distributed) and we’re not predefining which bundle we might choose to create when setting out to explore an idea.

My interest is more in the “real” world than in fictional universes. They’re amazing and fascinating and are giving us endearing and engagingly fresh cultural artefacts that help us understand ourselves better and yet, I’m left thinking “why not explore our own universe?” I’m also drawn more to the more reflective forms that we used to call features, factual and documentaries rather than the current affairs end of journalism.

That, I think is what #tuttle2texas was a prototype for – a series of explorations of spaces or ideas, a series of true (whatever that means) stories that help us understand ourselves better, expressed in a variety of media, open-sourced and unbundled for curation, remix, re-use whatever you want.

What I'm doing

Designing a better field trip

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So the Social Art Field Trip idea has been very well received. Everybody I’ve spoken to thinks it’s a great idea: “love the concept”, “sounds really cool” etc. Thank you!

However, despite the outpouring of encouragement and support, nobody’s actually booked a place yet. So the first one, planned for tomorrow, isn’t going ahead. I’d like to work out what I need to do differently to get the “cool concept” really working – the positive side of this is that I get to ask and find out what works rather than it just “working” and me not learning anything about why 🙂

So here are the variables I can think of that we can tweak to make it more appealing or practical:

Timing: They are 10-4 on Thursdays. Is there a better time of day? Is there a better day? This is always the obvious thing with events “Oh I’d have loved to have come but Xday is my day for doing Y, sorry” “If you did it on Zday I could come” but it can send you round in circles trying to please everyone. I still have people telling me that Tuttle would be “much more successful” if we didn’t do it on Friday mornings when they can’t come. So think about this as “If I were to be doing it every day, which day would you like to come” and “Should it start earlier or later?”

Length: is 6 hours too long? or not long enough?

Content: Do I need to specify more clearly what we’re going to do or was it too vague? I’m assuming from the positive feedback that the content is OK but thought I’d check. Is there anything I can do to make it more appealing?

Sales & Marketing: I blogged about it 3 weeks before the first one, tweeted several times (I have about 3k followers) and sent out invitations by e-mail and twitter DM to around 200 people (mostly asking that they pass it on or suggest it to other people). I also posted it on chinwag.com, done my usual thing of talking about it wherever I go and announcing it at Tuttle. Is this just way too little? Do I need to allow myself to be more spammy?

I made the assumption that most people in my immediate network, those who already understand something of my work would not be the market for this. Is that right? My approach then was to ask those people to put it in front of people that they thought would be interested or find it useful. Is there an obvious flaw in this? How could I have done it more effectively?

Price: is £75+VAT for a day too much… or too little?

Something else: Umm… I dunno, is there something in my blind spot? Something obvious to everyone else but not visible to me because of where I’m sitting?

All thoughts very welcome (preferably publicly here in the comments so we can all learn, but by e-mail if you want to be private)

What I think, What I'm doing

What do we need managers to do better?

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IMG_9266I spoke at Social Media for Business ’10 the other week and in the panel session afterwards we were asked what we thought social media in the enterprise meant for leadership and management. Big question. I flannelled off some stuff about leadership through service, that the leader needs to encourage and facilitate what’s already going on rather than decide what needs to happen and then make others do it.

(Oh man, I wish I could take my own advice sometimes…)

It ties in with some of the work that’s been stuck up on the wall at #c4cc for a while – a bunch of statements of value that Frankie noted down when I was speaking about Tuttle2Texas at TEDxTuttle. They summarise the value an organisation might get from interacting with “us” whoever we are – tuttle, tuttle consulting, me & Brian & Heather, just me? That’s all for another post.

But when I’d finished writing them out it seemed to me that there was something else to it. These things are only valuable if you have a particular mindset about the people you work with. So I wrote the following things on the end, intended to summarise our assumptions about the sorts of organisations we can deliver value to. If someone is going to buy from “us” they probably will share these assumptions – that managers or leaders need to:

  • be more comfortable with their own creativity;
  • let go of the myth of control;
  • work more effectively in groups;
  • report on what they’re doing in an engaging way;
  • be more responsive to changes in a market or organisational environment;
  • lead people in audacious acts of innovation;
  • better understand the cultural implications of what they do.

so, each of those probably needs a blog post of their own but I think that if you’re looking for ways to get the people around you to do some of the things on this list and you’re struggling then you should come and have a chat about how we can help.

What I'm doing

Art art

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Art in #c4ccIf you’ve been into the Centre recently, you’ll have seen some of my drawings that I’ve been putting up on the walls. This has turned out to be an extremely effective marketing strategy (people see them, say “oh those are lovely” we get into conversation and then they say “can I buy one” – funny, it’s almost as if markets were conversations…) and so I’ve been working today and yesterday on my first commissioned pieces.

w00t!

It strikes me there are two bits of progress here: 1. I’ve been willing to put my work up on the wall; and 2. I’ve been willing to talk to people about them and own up to them being mine.

Actually there’s also a 3. which I’m not so inclined to admit, which is that when they ask if they can buy one, I’ve said “yes” rather than flannel and bluster and look at my shoes.

So if you like them too, let me know if you’d like to commission one. They start at postcard size, but the largest one I’ve done is about 2′ x 4′

You can see some earlier studies for these on my flickr

What I'm doing

More Social Art Projects

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tuttle2texasI’m thinking a lot about the kinds of projects that I talked about a while ago, of which tuttle2texas turned out to be a prototype.

Here’s one thing. They don’t have a specific output in view when we start them. So they might end up producing a book, or a film or a vook or just some interesting thoughts or a performance or a photo book or something. But we don’t know what they will become when we begin.

I think this marks them out from other projects. I might well have done research for a book about the differences between US & UK cultures by travelling across the country by train and meeting people as I went, but that’s not what tuttle2texas was. Importantly, there is no standard way of marketing or funding these projects in the same way as there is, for example, with a book or a film. If I wanted to write a book, there is a whole well-defined market mechanism involving specialist agents, publishers and marketers. This is different, it doesn’t mean that they can’t get funded up front, that no-one will give us an advance, but that it needs to be done differently.

Then there’s the issue of making sense and finding meaning in the content produced. Who does this? Traditionally it’s all part of the creation of the cultural artefact. The artist, the writer, the composer has something to say and they say it through their creation. I’m interested in how we can open up a more collaborative form of sense-making. I don’t think I should be the only one who gets to say what tuttle2texas was about.

I’m wondering whether a metaphor from software development might be useful here. What if we were to talk about them more as open-source projects about social web culture?

So in general, there will be an idea that we wish to explore, it might involve a physical journey like tuttle2texas, but it maybe more of an intellectual one and on the whole they will be studies of how the web affects us as cultural and social creatures. And we will carry this investigation out by writing, taking photographs, making video and audio and publishing on the web as we go.

So then the output of the project, rather than being any single artefact, becomes akin to creating the equivalent of an open-source codebase that others can come and use, build on, exploit for pleasure or profit, or not.

Um… I think.

So the next bit is about how we get them funded, who takes part in them, how we know they’ve succeeded, what opportunities are there for opening them up to be recognisably cross-disciplinary (and therefore have a home at, say, a Centre for Creative Collaboration…)

Bonus Link: These sorts of project ideas might be what Grant McCracken talks about as Culturematics.

events, london, What I'm doing

Applying Social Art

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Art in #c4ccMy time as Social Artist in Residence at the Centre for Creative Collaboration is helping consolidate stuff that I’ve been learning throughout my career. I want to share some of this by running some workshops around the question:

“How do I use social art, social media and social tools to improve my organisation’s engagement with its customers or other stakeholders?” (btw that’s whether your organisation is just you or hundreds of other people too)

I’m going to run some 1-day workshops to help you explore where you might start; how you can make use of things that you already have; how you know who else to get involved; and how you keep going once you’ve got started.

We will get there the same way that the Tuttle consulting group has been working things through with our consulting client, Counterpoint. We’ll use the tried and trusted Tuttle approach of playing around with ideas, talking lots, trying out tools and ideas and generally making it up as we go along.

Many people don’t go near social tools because they’re afraid of getting things wrong or looking stupid. So I’m placing this workshop in a context that values getting things wrong, where everyone will probably look a little bit stupid, where we will value each other’s silly childish scribbles and say “This is great! Carry on! You have to start somewhere. Well done! Well done for having a go.”

Who should attend?

People who:

  • have been exposed to the theories about social media but want to get their hands dirty; or
  • have a strategic role but need some practical experience of social tools; or
  • are artists in any medium, looking for ways to expand and extend their creative practice; or
  • know that using social tools is important, but don’t know where to start; or
  • want to be better at having conversations with others inside or outside their organisation; or
  • just feel stuck and are eager to try something new.

What actually happens?

The day will take the form of a field trip in which we go out together, explore a space and use social tools to capture and reflect on the experience. The group will decide for itself exactly which space will be visited, but the idea is to have a day out and about so the menu includes museums, galleries, woods, ponds, rivers as well as more urban landscapes.

You will learn:

  • the importance of maintaining flow and creative action in your work;
  • how to collaboratively create an online cultural artefact;
  • how to think about your business from a social perspective;
  • how to make simple engaging media with others;

You will have the chance to reflect on:

  • your own ability to work in a group;
  • your own creativity;
  • how these tools might help you deal with a change in your market or organisational environment;
  • how decisions can be made collectively;
  • ways that you might use social tools in your everyday work.

Cost

I’m pricing the days at a specially discounted £75+VAT per person for these first ones. You will need to bring your own packed lunch, at least one portable device capable of connecting to the internet, a fully-charged oyster card and a kagoul in case of inclement weather.

Booking here.

What I'm doing

My take on Cloud Culture

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IMG_9481Next Monday I’ll be taking part in an event hosted by Counterpoint at the ICA to discuss Charlie Leadbeater’s pamphlet on Cloud Culture which is being published on that day, but has already been trailed here and here. In that pre-publication writing Charlie has focused on ownership and control of the cloud as the big issues. While I agree that these are important questions, I’m more interested in the effects of cloud computing on the things we make and do and how we use them to understand each other and our world.

Something came clearer for me before Christmas when I was watching archive film from the British Council as part of our work with Counterpoint.

It was that in tandem with the abstraction of work away from the personal creation of physical objects, through mass production to stuff that’s all about thinking and using our brains, there has been a parallel abstraction of our cultural artefacts away from intimate cultural exchanges, through analogue representations and now digital representations.

The film archive work we did (and, I hope, we’ll continue to do) centres, for me, on how to deal with these analogue artefacts in a digital age. Yes, we can translate some of the experience – we can digitise the film and make it available on the web. The British Council has tried sharing stuff like that. Many other institutions are making their collections available online too. But it’s not the same as sitting in a little screening room at the BFI, handling the film, watching the soundtrack oscillate, seeing the richness of the monochrome. And watching these things on a computer screen on your own can’t compare to sitting in a cinema, watching them projected at the scale they were designed to be watched and with friends with whom you can chat about them immediately afterwards.

Are these experiences really important or are they just romantic nostalgia pieces for those born in the middle of the 20th Century? Can the web and a cloud-powered internet replicate these experiences? Should we be asking it to?

Counterpoint will publish Charles Leadbeater’s report Cloud Culture on 8th February with a debate and conversations at the ICA featuring Catherine Fieschi, Charles Leadbeater, Ekow Eshun, Paul Hilder and me. If you haven’t received an invitation but you think you should be there, please let me know.