Tag Archives: social art

Backstory: The A-levels

August 19, 2010 Lloyd Davis

I know you were completely hooked on the Audit Commission Crhonicles (*yawn*) but today was A-level results day here. There was a flurry of chat about it on twitter and I said what results I’d managed 23 years ago: Two Ds and an E. And when someone asked me privately “How did that happen? You’re such a clever guy.” I gave my stock answer, which is that I discovered the joys of beer and girls in my sixth form.

But because I’m thinking a lot about extending narratives and backstories, it occurred to me that there was more to the story than that – I mean that is the truth, that’s something that happened then, but it’s not the whole reason that I got two Ds and an E. There’s much more to the truth than that. So I started looking at what it was really about – what I don’t normally want to talk about, what I cover up with the stock answer.

Because lets face it, having a laugh about the joys of beer and girls is much more comfortable than looking at the whole truth.

So here’s some more of the truth.

First off, there’s more to the results – I also got an A in General Studies but I miss that out because it doesn’t fit with the story and because it’s too easy to get into an argument about whether General Studies counts or not and it doesn’t seem to matter whether people did it or not, they’re equally divided about it’s value, mainly on the basis of what grade they or someone they know got. So that gets left out. But it tells you something. It tells you that I do have some natural ability, some curiosity for current affairs and good general knowledge across a range of disciplines. I’m a good generalist. That’s more widely valued these days than it was in 1983 but if you started hiding it back then, it seems a little weak to bring it up now…

What else was going on? I was studying German, French and Latin. Yeah. How did that come about? Well specialisation started earlier then, I think. When you chose your O-level options before the fourth form you narrowed a lot, but also in the school I went to the timetable was less flexible – classes in the third form were based around it. There were 10 classes of about 30 kids each in my year. The “top” two were the ones who did Latin and modern languages. The middle ones were more technical and scientific and the lowest ones completely manual – technical drawing, metal and woodwork for the boys, girlie stuff for the girls. We all did a bit of music and art and RE but clearly being able to do languages was important and Latin was a badge of honour with teachers and disgust with other pupils.

I got a lot more positive attention, far more easily for having a talent for languages than I would have done if I’d had a natural talent for art or making things. So that’s what I chose. I didn’t have to work too hard at all and I got through.

That’s the beginning of the mistake, if you like, trying to take the easy way. But it cut me off from an important bit of me, the space to be creative. My only option was extra-curricular drama (no not knife fights in the park. Hamlet, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Real Inspector Hound.) And I hung on to this, knowing that being creative was something that was really important to me.

So when it came to choosing A-levels, I wasn’t going to do Maths, Physics or Chemistry, I’d jettisoned everything else and because I fell out with the head of English, for the reasons that headstrong and arrogant 16-year-olds fall out with tired, middle-aged men teaching in a Midlands comprehensive, two years of English was a no-no. So I ended up doing a triple-whammy of translation and heavy literature.

Essentially decisions I made at the age of 13 together with the demographics of the time and the inflexibility of the timetable led me to an extremely constrained position five years later.

And I completely lost the will to work at any of it. I didn’t see the point in studying literature and I couldn’t be bothered. And it was a means to an end that I wasn’t interested in either (although I couldn’t admit that either). When it came out that I was applying for drama degrees, I had a long discussion with the headmaster who told me that a career in the arts was a ridiculous waste of the education I’d been given and that I should join an amateur dramatics group while doing a Modern Languages degree. He didn’t know that I already felt I was compromising but didn’t know how to get out of the ridiculous bind I was in.

So I did the only thing I could do to save myself from doing something I didn’t have the heart to do nor had the guts to refuse. I simply didn’t do the work. In particular, I didn’t read very much of the German, French or Latin literature that is (was?) a core part of A-level study in those subjects. So Goethe is still a mystery to me though I remembered “Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen bluehen” when I went through the Brenner pass last summer. I couldn’t tell you what La Chute was about except a guess that a guy having some existential breakdown in Amsterdam and while Aeneid VI is one of the more engaging books, Pliny and Ovid left me totally cold. And those are the ones that I can remember the titles of. I was never going to get the two Bs and a C that would condemn me to 3 years in Aberystwyth.

Result!

So I spent the next year still in Bromsgrove. Laying about on the dole. No! That’s another stock answer, that covers up what I was really doing. What I really did in the 12 months before I left home in September 1984 was that I became a political activist, learning rhetorical speaking and camaraderie and ways of organising people around passions – how pointless is that if you want a real job? And I spent the rest of my time working as a volunteer at the Swan Theatre in Worcester, effectively as an unpaid Acting ASM learning a bit of my trade as an actor, which of course although relevant to me spending three years at the Guildford School of Acting couldn’t possibly prepare me for doing something useful once I was over 40. Yeah, I didn’t do anything in my lazing-about year.

So there you go. More truth. Is there any more in there? I don’t know at the moment, perhaps there is. What other “cover stories” and “stock answers” are there?

What I'm doing

Transmedia storytelling, new journalism & digital curation

June 7, 2010 Lloyd Davis 6 Comments

I’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

June 2, 2010 Lloyd Davis 4 Comments

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)

events, london, What I'm doing

Applying Social Art

May 10, 2010 Lloyd Davis 4 Comments

My 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 think, What I've Been Doing

The Social Artist I

January 7, 2010 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

This came out of a conversation with Mike Radcliffe at the BFI this morning – part of my Human Scale Conversations. There were a few points and it was going to be one mega post, but I think I’ll break it up a bit.

We got talking about being artists (go back and click on that link to Mike’s site if you don’t know his work – go back and preferably buy something from his gallery!) and being blocked and what we need to do to keep relatively sane and solvent and working and happy and stuff and it seemed worth exploring them a bit – especially how they relate to my experience as a nascent Social Artist.

First of all we talked about the need for artists to be with other artists.

Artists need to spend time with other artists.

The rider to this is that we need to spend time with people who are in their flow, who are looking after themselves and doing their work. If we are blocked, it’s these people who will feed us and help us through – it’s far too easy to find other blocked artists to hang out with, who reinforce and rationalise our own blocks – then we just all get depressed together!

And even if we’re not blocked, it’s great to spend time with people who understand the creative process, who get what it’s like so we can all remember that this is normal and it’s the people who don’t do it who are weird…

Signs that you’re with the right people are: they’re encouraging you; you and they are smiling and laughing together, preferably at yourselves rather than others; you’re both talking more about the work that you’re doing now, rather than the work you used to do once or the work you’d really really like to do one day if only someone else would give you a chance.

Signs that you need to find some new friends are: the person talking to you is only talking about reasons why it’s hard; you’re feeling low and so are they; you hear yourself whining; you find yourself thinking about that project, you know the one, and how it’s never, just never going to get done.

So get out, and find some shiny friends instead!

That’s why I keep going back to Tuttle. It’s a place that attracts all sorts of creative people in large numbers. Creativity and different ways of thinking thrive among these people. It’s where I get my fix every week. I know you all think I’m doing it for you, and that’s true, but I’m doing it for me too.

What I'm doing

Projects for Funding

June 3, 2009 Lloyd Davis 2 Comments

Originally uploaded by _Gid

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