The recent conference at the Open University, The Future of Cultural Work inspired much debate and discussion amongst delegates and touched on many pertinent issues for my PhD research into cultural entrepreneurship and education policy. With many strands including capitalism and work, precarious labour, working in television and inclusion & exclusion, it offered a variety of perspectives and provocations in relation to cultural work and cultural labour. Not only were the themes appropriate to my research, but many key academics on the subject presented and attended the conference – I must admit to being a little start-struck! McGuigan talked of the relationship between capitalism and cultural work, the subject of a forthcoming paper in the International Journal for Cultural Policy and of his book Cool Capitalism discussed in previous blog posts. Hesmondhalgh and Gregg kicked us off with two provocations on the future(s) of cultural work highlighting the pitfalls and issues associated with working in the cultural, media and creative industries. Hesmondhalgh presented the idea that on the one hand cultural studies has been very critical of recent cultural policy and of the implications for culture and those working in the sector, while on the other hand there is an over optimistic (near evangelical) promotion of creativity and the benefits of working in the sector. He suggested that instead of treating cultural workers as a ‘special’  case, that they in fact have more in common with all workers in terms of needing to explore their rights and conditions of work. He talked of  unions as a potential solution, recognising the problems with unionising freelancers and the current strength of personal networks which in many ways act as a support system but without the official power of an organised group such as a formal union.

In her provocation, Gregg highlighted the relationship between love and work, in terms of the language used to describe the ideal job and a very middle class aspiration and aestheticization of the experience of work. A simple  Blackberry advert demonstrated this perfectly; All you need is love. To further illustrate her point, Gregg referred to Steve Jobs and the language of love he expresses. This, along with our own implicit contribution to competitivess at work, and to the use of tools to make our own work and life balance increasingly blurred was contrasted with the recent suicides at the chinese factory, Foxconn which manufactures iPhones.

Of the many other interesting papers, I would like to highlight an ongoing research project by Daniel Ashton at Bath University, with media students who are making use of an incubation space rather than an ordinary class room. Ashton discussed how students described the space as more professional and how they were engaged in ‘performing’ the process of becoming a cultural worker. This process is aimed at getting students ‘industry ready’, clearly a concept which caused much concern amongst the delegates, but which for me, working within a vocational university, is a key objective whether I like it or not. The question for me is not to be critical of students, parents and others who want students to be better prepared for work (self employment or as an employee), but how to balance that while still encouraging students to be critical and independent thinkers. Despite the entrepreneurial nature of the students he researched, Ashton suggested that they demonstrated ethical concerns in wanting to set up social enterprises relating to their cultural work. A common aspiration for my students and something which did not seem to be a contradiction in my experience.

Finally, some of the other points raised:

• Do we need to rethink the notion of self-exploitation in cultural workers?
• How does networking actually work in all the different contexts & subsectors?
• What are the implications for education?
• Should we be more explicit about the idea of failure (which might not be failures) in the cultural industries as opposed to encouraging the celebrity status of a few workers?
• Do we ignore class and the importance of social capital?
• Is the celebration of autonomy and independence associated with cultural workers a paradox?
• Would it be helpful in research to take a sociological and more general view of cultural work?
• Is there a lack of interest and awareness of issues of diversity in research of the cultural sector and workforce?
• Rather than ‘Living on Thin Air’ are we Living on a Contradiction?

Introduction to Jez’s premiere from Andrew Dubber on Vimeo.

In the video above, Jez Collins of interactive cultures explains the purpose and the genesis of the film, and how it connects with the Birmingham Music Archive.

The event, Chaired by Tim Challans (former co-ordinator for the West Midlands Culture & Sport Improvement Network), will highlight the latest research and intelligence relating to culture, sport and tourism and review the implications for the West Midlands: a region striving to assert itself as a national and international visitor destination and a leader in the digital agenda. The intention is for the event to dynamic and interactive, providing plenty of opportunity for delegates to dictate discussions.

Full details of the conference programme, speaker biographies and venue information are on the West Midlands Cultural Observatory website

The conference is being organised by the West Midlands Cultural Observatory, in association with Birmingham City University, the West Midlands Cultural Research & Intelligence Group and West Midlands Regional Observatory.

Digital Innovation Lab (job opportunity)

We don’t know what the future of digital marketing looks like, nobody does, really. You might say it’s all about touch or augmented reality but that’s already happening. What happens next? One of our latest projects will aim to find out by shaping the next big thing.

Over the next two years we will be working with leading marketing agency Clusta, to develop a digital innovation lab within their business. Breaking media firsts is a key part of what Clusta do; this project gives us and the agency a chance to build on these foundations and explore how we can make innovation processes the heart of a creative business.

Can you help shape the future of digital marketing?

The project is being realised through the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships scheme. We are currently recruiting an associate to work with Interactive Cultures and Clusta in developing the lab. The associate will be a recent graduate (or will be about to graduate) who will work day to day within Clusta establishing the lab, and eventually leading a small team of digital innovators, matching new uses of technology to client briefs. The associate will be supported by staff in the Interactive Cultures unit and User Lab at Birmingham Institute of Art & Design.

We are developing a number of KTP projects. If you would like to talk to us about how we could work with your business, through KTP or other approaches, please contact Annette Copper on 0121 331 7280 or email annette.copper@bcu.ac.uk.

Image CC: Solyoung

I attended an event in Copenhagen back in March this year. It was organised by Jazz Danmark, a government funded body whose role it is to promote and foster Danish jazz. My keynote was about how musicians could use the opportunities of the internet, and it seemed to go down reasonably well.

Through that connection, I was invited to be a guest of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which finished today (I’ve just returned home).

Naturally, I was delighted to attend. Of course, there would be a lot of great music and events – but it also gave me an opportunity to research and consider the ways in which a festival like that could communicate online.

I thought of it as a natural extension of the Aftershock Project for me. How do you take those ideas and begin to apply them elsewhere?

But although it’s still very much about live music, it’s configured very differently. So the frame through which I saw the event was one of digital narrative, and how you could BE a jazz festival online – without simply making a brochure or an online programme. In that sense, the approach, at least, remained.

And this was timely, because this week, we’re off to talk to the organisers of the Scarborough Jazz Festival to discuss just that issue.

While I was there, I captured some video, and talked to a few people – but it’s the way that this could all be assembled that interests me. And I came up with a concept that is helping me think through the ways in which events could be considered.

The digital narrative matrix
Essentially, the digital narrative matrix is an interwoven series of frameworks through which an event can be viewed – the overlapping threads of story that can be signposted and brought to the attention of the site visitor. For instance, with the Aftershock Project, those key narrative threads are character, chronology and song development. But there are all sorts of different ways in which you could build a matrix (not The Matrix – that’s a film. Just a matrix).

When building a matrix, I think the key questions that need to be considered should include the following:

- What are the possible stories?
- Who are those stories for?
- What is interesting to them?
- How can they be involved in that storytelling?
- What is important to communicate?
- What can be done in the digital realm that could not be done in any other way?
- What else, other than the obvious, could be interesting?
- What else is going on? (eg: off-stage, behind the scenes, amongst the audience)?
- What does it all sound / look / feel like?
- What do you have to be respectful of that would lead you to a different way of working?

The things to avoid are mere reproduction of an audience experience (ie: filming a concert and putting it online), reportage, and fixed delineation by subgenre or music type. Instead, a successful matrix would tease out opportunities for surprise, delight, conversation, and human interaction.

Of course, I have pages of notes about how that could be translated as an online digital narrative matrix in the particular instance of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which differs markedly from any other event – and I will type up and send a report to the festival organisers in thanks for my invitation, in the hopes that will be helpful to them.

But as a result of these conversations, and many more I had with other festival guests, I’m looking at working with a few other festivals and organisations on this sort of thing. Which is great on two important levels: first, that this sort of research can have direct and helpful benefits to cultural industries; and second, going to jazz festivals is cool.

Pic: Lord Carter outside the Ikon and Fazeley Studios, CC Dave Harte

On Tuesday 16th June the Government published the Digital Britain report. The report outlines the direction of policy in several areas of digital media from infrastructure to digital literacy. On the following day Birmingham held the first in a series of regional debates on the report. The event was organised by Digital Birmingham, part of Birmingham City Council, and featured a keynote address by Lord Stephen Carter who oversaw the writing of the report. Parallel to this “official” event, a 2nd Digital Britain Unconference was held at Fazeley Studios. Lord Carter also attended this event where he spent some time taking questions from the floor.

The content of the report has been discussed in depth across all media (Rhubarb Radio are running an excellent aggregator of blog mentions). Rather than add to this well established body of work, I thought I’d reflect specifically on what our Digital Britain response says about Birmingham, what opportunities it provides for the city, and what challenges it might present for Interactive Cultures and Birmingham City University:

1. Birmingham is ready for Digital Britain. It wants to be part of the debate, and it wants to be part of the future that the report maps out. Our creative industries, our universities, our third sector and our regional and city agencies all came out in force at both events to make sense of Digital Britain.
2. Responding to Digital Britain is about more than just continuing to develop a vibrant creative industries sector: Dave Harte has identified one or two areas of the report that provide specific opportunities for Birmingham to take a key lead (mentioned on Twitter, and I expect a blog post will follow).
3. While a complete switch over to DAB for existing commercial and BBC radio seems problematic, it presents fantastic opportunities for community radio on FM frequencies that will no doubt be a key discussion topic at the Community Radio Forum that is being convened by Interactive Cultures in the coming weeks.
4. The areas of the report related to education and skills will impact our work within Birmingham City University as media educators. This is an area that we’re already reflecting on: our Birmingham School of Media colleague Caroline Officer has convened cross faculty discussions in association with Skillset to ensure that we are developing degree programs and short courses to meet the objectives of the report. For Interactive Cultures own Paul Long’s take on this, you can listen to his speech from the 1st unconference in a recent podcast episode.

Image CC Kasperbs

I am an intern in Interactive Cultures department, currently studying MA Event and Exhibition management. I was asked to help organise the Digital Britain Unconference and am going to share some thoughts on how to go about organising one.

When I was asked by Jon to help organise an unconference about Digital Britain there were instantly two things that came to mind about the event. 1. I had no idea what an unconference was and 2. I hadn’t read the document on Digital Britain. This obviously was a challenge not to be taken lightly as the event needed to be organised within a week.

Firstly a structure must be decided upon. Whether or not to structure the unconference or/and how to structure an unconference is particularly difficult. The nature of an unconference is to be unstructured and to a point un-organised so how to you make everyone happy and ensure that key points and panels are discussed?

By having no structure whatsoever there is no guarantee that all of the key points will be raised during panels and having a published list of panels would turn an unconference into a conference. After deliberating no structure, semi structure vs. a structure, a middle ground was decided upon and posted on wordpress in a call for panels.

Promoting the event

From that point onwards there are several key ingredients that need to be in the mix in order to make the event itself happen:

• A wordpress blog
• Twitter
• A suitable venue
• EventBrite – for managing bookings
• Contacts

Finding a suitable venue wasn’t particularly an issue, Birmingham and Birmingham City University have some great venues and it was a case of formulating a list and contacting them for availability and price. In theory an unconference could be held at any kind of venue as long as a wireless internet connection (for live blogging and tweeting), is available along with plenty of plug sockets.

Once all the above have been set up, utilising social media networks for advertising the event and gaining panels and participants is at the forefront of the organisation. The event was advertised through blogging, email and Twitter. Further marketing on Facebook could have been utilised but this relies in some way on already existing networks and for this instance was unnecessary. Other groups that have a longer lead in for this type of event may want to use this networking tool to aid them.

The event itself ran reasonably seamlessly once those who needed an internet connection could get online. Discussions were centred around the digital Britain five objectives and panel discussions ran to time although discussions could have gone on longer.

Why Unconference?

The format of an unconference is an interesting one as there should not be a technical format at all. This kind of unorganisation could be well suited to different events as it allows discussion to flow freely between and can throw up interesting discussions and can lead to further debate. For any organisation wishing to hold a conference to stimulate debate and ideas this kind of event would be perfect.

From an events organisation perspective and unconvention is relatively easy to set up as long as you can attract like minded people to attend and talk at an event. For organisations that do not have an option to a free or low cost venue, I can only imagine that using a wifi pub/bar or having access to a meeting room in a library would be the only way in which the event could have a space for the meeting.

Unconferences & the events industry

In my opinion an unconvention cannot be a money making exercise and would not work as a commercial venture. Sponsorship, providing it was with a relevant and unbiased party would be a good way to bring in money, but in this economic climate sponsorship can be hard to find. Within Birmingham there are arts organisations that do hold Artists talks and discussions that attendees are charged a nominal fee to enter. This no doubt brings needed funds into the organisation but may only help facilitate payment for a key speaker rather than make profit.

Unconvention currently is a trendy word to use and whatever the connotations of this are, holding an unconvention is an excellent way to gather informed opinions and spark debate.

Image CC Katielips

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about policy and support for creative and cultural industries. In Birmingham a lot of support for the sector, as well as for businesses generally and SMEs in particular, has come in the form of funded business interventions. A few weeks ago Nick Webber and I had a lively debate about these assists, which led us to wonder about the value that the sector and the region has had from all of these interventions in Birmingham.

Many of the assists offered to businesses in Birmingham and across the West Midlands across this decade came in the form of funding towards certain activities. The assists were typically given in small amounts of around £2,500 to £5,000. These were normally delivered by a consultant, sub-contracted to Business Link. Businesses within the CCI could often benefit from these assists in two ways: as recipients of the funded assists, and as suppliers of consultancy to Business Link.

Nick and I discussed the nature of these assists. As someone who had received and delivered assists, I explained to Nick that they were broadly split between three types:

1. Training and development in key business skills e.g. cash flow, financial management, business planning, or sometimes sector specific skills such as software training.
2. Consultancy and business advice e.g. a business and marketing plan.
3. Tactical marketing material, most often a website (as the grants were not allowed to be spent on printing).

For me as both a former recipient and a deliverer of these assists, I have concerns about this process. I wonder how much value the end client got from “another website” and what the objective was behind “another business plan” beyond encouraging businesses to seek more funding for more growth. How is the agenda for growing all of our creative SMEs playing out now in a different set of economic circumstances?

This point led us to consider the value of these assists to SMEs: did these businesses get any real benefit from their funding? How has this made them more viable? What would businesses (in particular those in CCI) really value if they had any say in how this money could be spent? I put a simple question to my network on Twitter: “If I gave you £5k to spend on ANY business expense, what would you spend it on and why?“.

JohnColby: Macs to the creative people. Benefit – make their work SO much easier.

deplorableworld: sxsw, heating, drobo, books + training on things we all knew nothing about, value new ideas and smarter working

podnosh: Shared thinking space. Possible somewhere warm and very cheerful. Value – clarity.

bounder: 500 blogs for brum postcodes

djeglin: probably a new 15″ MBP (because my little MacBook is struggling, bless it), maybe a good collection of stock photography, too…

IanDice: Camera, sound and lighting equipment with some editing software with the change please

craigfots: £5k would cover an album release on my label. Manufacture, Press. Distro costs. Or 3 x album releases with Manuf. only.

leerobert: I‘d press our first vinyl record and take it from there.

This very unscientific survey suggests that the things that matter most to our existing CCI businesses are either much more tangible (and therefore not fundable under most schemes) or much less tangible but none the less valuable things. The responses also suggested that very few people wanted a marketing plan or a website. This raises some important questions:

• Is there a better way for us to help these businesses?
  
• Can we find a way to fund the things that matter to these businesses?
  
• Is the funding approach broadly correct?
  
• Is the problem instead with the businesses perceptions of what is needed?
  
• Should they accept that the funders know best and are giving them the correct assists in the most timely manner?
  

Interesting to note here that while Nick and I were having this debate AWM launched (and then promptly withdrew) an “emergency fund” for West Midlands Businesses to provide them with new business plans in the recession. The call for applications was publicised through Created in Birmingham and Media Talent Bank, but then withdrawn and the blog posts deleted. I’ll end on this point with a Twitter comment from Robert Sharl:

Sharl: There may be almost nothing of value for £5k, long term.

One of yesterday’s speakers at the kick off event for Creative Metropoles was the Chief Town Planner for Oslo, Ellen S. de Vibe. In her presentation she had a lot to say about how town planning can create an environment to encourage creative industries, and help the city to learn value its creative industries. I was fortunate enough to be sat next to her at the dinner in the evening, and she explained a little more to me about here idea that cities needs to surprise their citizens and visitors, to ecnourage exploration of the space.

What is interesting about this is if we relate to some of the current thinking about Birmingham and how it should organise itself and its creative industries. For example Stef Lewandowski‘s ambient creativity audit suggested that we need to sign post where creativity happens in the city, so that people can find it. There’s criticism here not of the annexation of creativity to East Side but of the fact that it doesn’t link invitingly to the main districts of the city. This chain of thought might lead us to think in terms of regenerating and re-landscaping the city end of Digbeth so that city visitors are drawn towards the creative hub.

Looking at this from Ellen’s perspective, maybe what we have already is correct? Maybe it should be a “surprise” to find the Custard Factory, The Bond, and Fazeley Studios? Because afterall, as Stef points out:

(it seems) Digbeth must only be for the locals, so I turned back. I mean – I should have taken the hint what with all the stop signs, and even sets of signposts that just point back into the city centre. This isn’t a place you’re supposed to go, right?

Perhaps then the Custard Factory should be the reward, the surprise, for venturing beyond the Bull Ring?

Another way of looking at this was suggested today at Kreative Oslo during a panel discussion on “Creative City Districts”. Here the delegate from Berlin suggested that their success in creating creative districts has come from “unplanned planning”: essentially giving some space for creativity, and letting the creatives organise themselves in a way that suits them.

A final point here, and coming back to the presentation by Ellen S. de Vibe is that if creative districts want the rest of the city to join them in their spaces, then it’s not enough to just be there: you need to give them something so they will find you. Events such as Supersonic seem to lead the way here in bringing attention to creativity in Birmingham, by bringing not just the normal Custard Factory crowd but local, national and international tourism to Digbeth.