Audiences, but not as we know them

Audiences eh. What to call them?

‘Audience’ just doesn’t cut it when the projects are designed to interact and encourage engagement.  Participant is too easily confused with the people helping to make the project/up on the stage/running the workshop/delete as applicable.

I’ve just spent a very clunky and irritating 3 hours writing a funding application calling them ‘audience/participants’.  Helps my words per minute stats, but surely I can do better than this.

Hmmm.  Audicipant?

Anyone?

Owned.

I don’t know why I spent so long thinking about terminology and sector-specific phrasing yesterday ahead of last night’s event.  There was a woman there who sets mathematical models to music.

Co-creation in the Arts World

This afternoon I’m going to an event put on by Creative Works to introduce their voucher scheme and to talk about the consumer (audience) as co-creator.  Looking at the attendee list, lots of forward-thinking people from the arts sector who want to discuss how to better involve their audiences in the development of their programmes- which will then of course lead to increased audiences for their programmes.  It felt that only a year ago the arts world were only thinking about using tech to create innovative marketing campaigns, now it seems like people are really engaging with the possibilities around creating content with audiences.

I’m very excited.  Lately I’ve been so frustrated that there’s this hugely exciting explosion of people making crossplatform stories, yet theatre makers don’t seem to be in that first wave- they seem to be entirely left out of the dialogue.  Despite there being quite a few brilliant interactive theatre shows that explore the audience as co-creator, and often use technology to take those audiences on journeys as participants, I don’t see the creators of those shows at transmedia networking events, where everyone tends to have a background in the audiovisual industries. I’ve never met anyone else from the theatre sector there, and it’s been a lonely experience! 

So I want to think carefully about what language I’m using when I talk to people this afternoon- I’m concerned that the word ‘transmedia’ is a huge turnoff in the arts world (it has the word ‘media’ in it for starters)!  I talk with ‘transmedia’ people about making immersive stories that are ‘platform agnostic’ (i.e story comes first, decide on platform afterwards) and how audiences can interact and direct the story- both of which are increasingly concepts the theatre world can get on board with.

So I guess all I need to do this afternoon is talk about how I ‘make immersive stories that engage the audiences as co-creators’, and I’m essentially spanning sectors.  And more importantly, hopefully engaging people in the idea that the mistakes and successes currently being made in transmedia has a lot to teach the arts world.

Wish me luck.

Cross Platform Pitch Up!

An attempt to take an old and popular format- Pitch Up! (complete with peppy, unsquashable exclamation mark) and make it work  for the crossplatform storytelling world.  Imaginatively titled ‘Cross Platform Pitch Up!’

I ran this event at BAFTA last week.  The format needs some tweaks but there’s potential to take it further.

What I’m really interested in doing is providing a pitching competition for people who are at an earlier stage in their careers than those who pitch to Power To The Pixel.  I am also really interested in making sure that people from the immersive theatre and arts/tech worlds get involved.  Such inclusiveness will all come down to the marketing.

Audience-led Theatre

For fans of Coney, and particularly for fans of A Small Town Anywhere (and I know there’s quite a few of you out there) here’s an opportunity to see how a new Coney show gets built.

Coney is currently making Early Days Of A Better Nation (it’s a new development on from the successful A Small Town Anywhere)

Being an audience led- show, it can’t be developed without the audience.  So we’re creating events to do that, and we’d like you to come along, play, and give us some feedback!

First, come to an informal ‘playtest‘ this Thursday 26th at Stoke Newington International Airport.  It’s free and we’ll be testing some of the game -like structures that push you through the narrative.

Then, pay what you can (and a pound would do it) to come to the first public scratch, i.e work in development, at Battersea Arts Centre in south London.

mapping digital influence

A bit of an attempt to map how digital tools have influenced the theatre ecology, bringing in the film, broadcast and games industries. Click through to read….

With the explosion of digital into arts and entertainment, affecting content creation, marketing and distribution in all industries in myriad ways, my visual brain needs a mindmap to encompass the whole- and this barely scratches the surface.

It’s been an interesting exercise, not least because I can quite quickly see that all the company names that spring to mind are in the pervasive games/immersive theatre corner (top right), not least because this is the work I have been involving myself in for the past few years. As I extend my knowledge and skills horizontally towards the left of the map into transmedia, I’ll be populating that side soon enough.