Subscriber Meeting 28-08-2007

From NodelWiki

In holland, the watery, holiday-ridden month of August is often referred to as 'the cucumber season'

The second new NODE.London "Subscriber's meeting" was on:

• Tues 28th August 6.30pm - 9.30pm, venue BFI, Southbank.

As this was the 'cucumber season' meeting we changed the format a bit:

[edit] Format

11 people gathered at a great venue at the BFI, there were plenty of wonderful snacks. Thanks to Tim for braving a reportedly horrible Sainsbury's local ordeal to bring us those.

The structure we developed in the absence of presentations was good:

• Everyone introduced themselves and their backgrounds and work, with a bit more time and space to do so than usual. There was quite an even mix of backgrounds in art, technology, business and various mixtures of those. I found this bit particularly interesting and surprising in terms of the diversity of people's experience. I think it might be a good idea for people to do that on this list too.
• Then we talked in depth about Audience for an hour, taking Hannah Redler's talk about audience from the last session as a starting point: http://wiki.nodel.org/index.php/Subscriber_Meeting_30-07-2007#Hannah_Redler

I think there was a lot of material in the presentations from the previous meeting, and it would make sense to take time to discuss each one, and take practical suggestions from them as to how to move forwards with NODE.London. I feel like that was achieved this time, and we talked about taking the same approach to the next meeting, talking about business and economic structures and for NODE.London.

So - with apologies for my poor recall and unattributed ideas:

[edit] 'Audience' Discussion

Please contribute what you remember to the list, or discuss these points then we can wiki the results here

• Audience is particularly important to NODE.London because it doesn't have an established art market, and it was clear that for the March 2006 Season of Media Arts, a specific audience was not 'targetted', and that it was very difficult to gather meaningful audience participation figures (our limited capacity to gather data, projects that contributed to deeper data gathering may or may not have skewed results in the evaluation report). This is strange given that with the technologies often used in media arts, it might well be possible to collect very good information.

• Saul pointed out there was an audience development strategy of sorts for the March 06 Season, which was to encourage venues/orgs, through their involvement, to activate their audiences and proactively link them to audiences at other venues.

• The Arts Council's audience evaluation procedures are considered extremely inaccurate and leave plenty of room for improvement. Two ways of thinking about audience emerged:
  • more quantitative: demographics and attendance figures gathered to prove the value of an investment for funders and sponsors.
  • more qualitative: how a work is received by an an active audience, feeding back into the creative process.
• Manjit pointed out that the business world can often be just as bad as, if not worse than, the arts world in terms of reflecting on how well it's done things.

• 'What does the audience need to know to appreciate the artwork meaningfully?' was a very interesting question. From this came the idea that in future NODE.Londons, it would be a good idea to ask each participating artist, venue and group to explain that clearly in their proposal. This would provide very useful information to help place particular works and events in appropriate spaces and time slots. It would also enable far more useful audience participation and evaluation information to be gathered in a qualitatively specific way. The development of an intelligent system of matching content to venues sounded good.

'everyone agreed that the PR sub-group should have been a PR super group'

• Ghislaine mentioned that highly experimental artworks are actually well suited to mass audiences, and can be placed in that context successfully. Similarly, small and highly specific audiences are a vital part of developing practices, and need to be encouraged as much as 'public facing' artworks. Both could be encouraged by future structures of NODE.London - making it clear which is which.

• Towards the end of the discussion we tipped into marketing/PR and communicating with audiences in a wider sense. We acknowledged that in its previous incarnation NODE.London hadn't been much good at this. We referenced the catalogue from the March 2006 Season and, regardless of the quality of its content, the inappropriateness of the placing of a dense, small-font essay by Charlotte Frost on the inside cover of the catalogue. General agreement that the big push would be served by colour, dynamic design etc - and that the 'sub group' for marketing and PR back then should have been a 'super group' ;)

[edit] Next Subscriber Meeting

....is pencilled for Monday 24 October '07, location to be confirmed.