Broken Whispers

Whisper 1 - She smiled happily at the man who had sold her the amazing shoes and he smiled back, shyly.

Returned - She shocked everyone, for the man had given her piercingly sharp scissors, and she bled on them.

Whisper 2 - Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.

Returned - Celebrate after the river turns to custard, swim if you feel lucky

Whisper 3 - The shouting outside in the street was making them tense

Returned - Brown flying pterodactyls over the turkey was faked for Xmas.



When I was looking for an image to illustrate this post it occurred to me that it would have been great to have a cartoonist commissioned to come up with something to respond to the returned whispers. I'd love to have a cartoon of Gordon Brown piloting a pterodactyl over a giant turkey. Oh well, perhaps if I had, oh I don't know, a budget?

In some ways money, or rather the lack of it, is central to why I love these social media platforms and the opportunities they offer us at very little cost other than my time. And as I think I may have mentioned before, I come pretty cheap. At heart, I think that the way we use these social media tools should be playful. Interesting, engaging, informative to be sure but also playful. I'm very excited by the idea that our followers or fans are no longer just an audience but also a community, visible not only to us but to each other.

The idea of the 'Broken Whispers' game came to me as I was listening to Tina Gonsalves talk about Chameleon, the work she was going to show at Fabrica and the ideas behind it, broadly the idea of contagion, about things being passed on from person to person. The reality of course is that emotions are not passed on as perfect replicas, my happiness doesn't transmit itself to you intact, it's filtered by your emotional state. This reflects the way that the tech in the exhibition worked. It didn't just reflect your mood, the portraits weren't mirrors, the emotions were filtered and affected by the prevailing mood of the whole gallery. (For those that didn't see the show, you can see some information about it here.) So I started to think about the idea of memes and things being passed on imperfectly and then I thought about 'Chinese Whispers', the game that was pretty common when I was a kid. We called it 'Broken Whispers' at school, I think. I obviously went to a pretty PC school.

Then I got interested in how that might work as a game on Twitter. Obviously, the messages would be digital and the human intervention would have to be deliberate rather than a question of mis-hearing but I thought it'd work pretty well. I put out a call for people that might be interested to play a game based on the themes of the show without really saying what it was for. I initially intended to limit numbers to ten but in the end it got nearer to twenty and at that point I called a halt to adding more people, mostly because it was a kind of experiment and I wanted to retain control over it.

The idea of the game was pretty simple. I would send out a message from Fabrica and the next person in the chain would change two words and then send it on. Finally the last person in the chain would return the message to Fabrica.

It took a while to set up because I then had to email everyone to let them know about the game and the rules, confirm they were still interested and then DM them (direct message via Twitter) to tell them who they'd receive the message from and who to pass it on to. I had toyed with the idea of doing the whole game by DM but then it got into a confusion of people having to follow each other and it all started to feel a bit hidden and laboured. I also liked the idea of these slightly random messages being out there that other people might see. When drawing up the chain, I tried as much as possible to make it so that each person didn't know the person on either side of them, so that it became an opportunity to discover new people with whom you shared a common interest.

I should probably declare at this point that I had the idea of doing this before the exhibition started but what with one thing and another, didn't get round to setting it up until the last week of the show. That wasn't ideal considering that one of the stated aims was to get people thinking about the themes of the exhibition as a way of deepening their experience and understanding of it, but in the end I felt it was worth doing anyway as an experiment. In fact this is a good illustration of the problems that many small arts organisations face when engaging with social media, which is one of capacity. I devote quite a lot of time to it, have made development of it a priority this year and still don't have enough time to spend on it, enough time to carry out ideas.

So finally the first whisper (twhisper?) went out and I obsessively watched over its progress like an overly-anxious parent. I tweeted about its progress a lot, I prodded people in the chain to move it along. On top of my anxiety about it working, I am also extremely impatient and I couldn't wait for it to get back. In fact it got to the point that one of our followers who wasn't involved messaged to say that as a follower he was feeling alienated by the game. I apologised and tried to dial it down a bit. We didn't lose any followers so I guess it wasn't too bad but it's a reminder that Twitter is a public space and you do need to think about what you're putting out there and what it means to all your followers.

I put out three whispers over three days and they all came back, thankfully. I'd like to say that I got less anxious and less proddy but that wouldn't be true, though I did try to keep it to myself a bit more.

So did it work? Did it do what I wanted it to do? On the scale on which it was set up, I'd have to say yes. I think that our followers will have been aware of something going on, that we were looking for people to participate in something and hopefully that awareness and maybe even discussion about it from participants will have spread out further into networks that I'm not aware of. The more of these activities that you undertake, the more I think that people get the idea that a gallery isn't just a place that they go to see exhibitions, that it becomes something that they can engage with, play with. Something more accessible.

It seems that the people involved were pretty excited about the game, enjoyed it. I received a lot of messages from them saying so, I know that at least one of the other participants was following the progress of the whispers and I was able to see people talking to each other about it. I enjoyed the sense of community that that engendered. I was particularly excited by two participants who, to the best of my knowledge didn't know each other before being placed next to each other on the chain but who are both Brighton - London commuters, tweeting each other to discover if they were on the same train during some fairly typical train problems. Sadly they weren't but it would have been awesome if they'd been able to meet up. I'm hoping that some of the participants will post a comment when they read this and let us know what they thought. Hint. In fact I'd like to get one of them in to record something about their involvement. Another hint.

You could argue and you wouldn't be wrong, that the people that joined in are already engaged. Of course that's true but their engagement was, hopefully, deepened. After all, audience development shouldn't just be about finding new audiences. It should also be about the development of your current audience, providing new ways for them to engage that are interesting and fun and that encourage them to be advocates for you. In fact, in this case, one member of the chain was new to the gallery and was encouraged to join the game by one of our followers who thought he'd find it interesting.

So back to the question of success. I guess my benchmark for success for this type of activity, being as I don't know of any meaningful impact measurement could be defined as follows (at least for today)-

• Assuming that people have the tech, what you're asking them to do needs to be as easy as possible.
• The time commitment you're asking of people should be commensurate with the idea. In this case, for a simple fun game, a couple of minutes was all that was required.
• It should deepen the engagement of your audience and hopefully engage new audiences.
• Give people a different way to engage with an exhibition and its themes.
  
• Develop the idea of your audience as a community.
  
• Demonstrate an openness to engagement.
• Demonstrate a commitment to other people's creativity and encourage their creative participation in the gallery.

So, check, check, check, check and check. Job done.

Seriously though, I am very passionate about the possibilities and working with our audience, to play with them. Our next challenge is to develop something that goes out into the social media world that has the ability to engage people beyond our current fans and followers. There's going to be a lot happening over the next years and dependent on funding we want to research the possibilities of developing an exhibition that is generated through social media in some way. So, you know how it goes, watch this space. In the meantime we'll continue to play around with ideas like 'Broken Whispers' and the remote drawing activity we did for White Night about which I wrote in the previous post. I'm very open to ideas from other people and I'd love to hear them because I'm just one person and much as I hate to admit it, I'm sure there are limitations to my imagination.

Just remember though, there's no budget.

Twitter follow stuff-
@fabricagallery
@laurencehill

Carrots for eyes (thoughts on the remote drawing activity)

The remote drawing activity was conceived to sit alongside Fabrica's other activities for White Night as previously posted. The focus for the evening in the gallery was drawing and I wanted to offer something to sit alongside that using social media, specifically Twitter in this instance. The basic premise was that we would send out tweets with prompts for people to draw something, take a picture and send it back to us. The results would be displayed in the gallery during the evening.

After toying with a number of ways of achieving this I decided to use Posterous to display the work in the gallery. Posterous is a blogging site that can be updated by email and therefore from anywhere, which was handy because I wasn't going to be at the gallery for the whole evening but could still update it from elsewhere. It also had two further advantages for this particular activity. Firstly, the resulting blog is very clean with little to distract from the images. Secondly it can be set up to automatically update your Twitter feed meaning that all your followers can check out what's being displayed. The resulting projection was a bit rough and ready but ultimately that worked really well with the rest of the activity in the gallery.

I was very excited about the remote drawing idea because for me it delivered in a number of areas that I think are crucial for the arts using social media. The low barrier to engagement as ever is really important, in this instance it meant that people could take part in Fabrica's White Night drawing activities without having to come to the gallery or even be in Brighton. In addition to driving participation in the arts in terms of attendance, it's also about creative participation, you could very easily make a piece of work that would end up as part of an exhibition. (We tried to stress that we weren't expecting people to be fantastic at drawing or have expensive materials to work with, that they could use what was to hand - that's one of the reasons that I chose the image above to illustrate this post. Also because it made me laugh out loud when it arrived, so thanks to @blogbookblog for that). What I also want to put across with everything that we do with social media is a sense of fun, a sense of play. I think it's hugely important for contemporary visual arts which often need to overcome people's self-imposed barriers, the idea that cva may not be for them, that they won't get it or that it's too serious, too intellectual. Failing to have that sense of play I think is failing in an opportunity to engage. It also helps to open up the organisation and I hope make it feel more accessible. You could argue that we are only followed by those that are already engaged or willing to be engaged and that's certainly true but it misses the wider issue and the power of social media networks. We are engaged not only in a dialogue with our followers but potentially with their followers and beyond and everything that we do or say has the potential to engage, to intrigue, to start to chip away at those barriers.

And what, I hear you impatiently asking, was the result. (Well ok probably not, but a boy can dream, right?). The initial announcement went out via Twitter to a flurry of excitement and some opportune retweeting, a general air of excitement and feeling that it was a cool idea. On the night we asked people to draw faces, which seemed appropriate for the exhibition and indeed mirrored the activity in the gallery, which was also centred on drawing faces. In the end we had some 15 responses which are posted in a gallery on Flickr, there's a link at the bottom of this post. We sent out the prompt three times through the evening and had vocal support from one of the participants who was urging other people to take part. There's a tiny competitive part of me that was a little disappointed, that wanted to receive hundreds of drawings but also a much larger more pragmatic part of me that knew that wasn't going to happen and was actually quite pleased with the number that we did receive.

This leads me on neatly to some thoughts about engagement through social media and in some ways continues on from what I've discussed earlier about measuring achievement/impact of that. Ultimately, I'm not disappointed by the response to the remote drawing activity for a number of reasons. By doing this kind of activity, by putting it out there we demonstrate a commitment to the dialogue with our audience, a commitment to engaging with them, to welcoming their creative input and there is huge value in that. Unmeasurable right now to be sure but I'm convinced huge nonetheless. Secondly, whether we had received one or one hundred drawings it demonstrates neatly the power of online, the power of the long tail. The Long Tail is a theory/book developed by Chris Anderson, which for those of you that aren't familiar with it, I will try to summarise very briefly. It's really an online business model and Amazon is a prime example. Because it's an online business Amazon can afford to 'stock' very obscure books. These books may sell only one or two copies a year but what the customer gets is 100% satisfaction in finding something very easily that they would never find even in their local mega-bookshop. Obviously Amazon don't make money from selling those books, they make it on Dan Brown etc but they provide satisfaction to that person who will likely go on or carry on buying books from Amazon. Physical bookstores are never going to be able to provide that service. So, slightly round the houses, I come to my point. It's very easy for us to set up these online activities, it's free in financial terms, costs some time for sure, a bit of brain power but it's largely free and if we can engage one, or in this case fifteen people in a deeper way with the gallery, if we can encourage them to participate creatively then they will undoubtedly be more likely to come to the gallery, to recommend it to their friends, to talk about it on social networks and that word of mouth cannot be bought. To me it's more powerful than advertising or press coverage or any of the traditional (and dying) routes through which we market ourselves because it's about engagement and dialogue and not about push marketing.

I'd like to say thanks to all those who took part in the remote drawing activity. Please take a look at the drawings which are posted in a gallery here. I'd love to hear any thoughts from any of the participants or others in the comments.

A reminder that you can follow us on Twitter @fabricagallery or me @laurencehill - the two are sometimes interchangeable.

A late disclaimer - I'm aware that I probably repeat myself slightly in these posts but in my defence this is all new and I don't have it all worked out yet. Probably never will, but it's fun and fascinating trying to get there.

Remote drawing

On October 24 2009 Fabrica will be taking part in Brighton and Hove Council's White Night event. White Night is based on the French Les Nuits Blanches and involves cultural organisations in the city staying open until 2am when the clocks go back, giving you another whole hour to play. There's lots of good stuff happening in galleries, other venues and on the streets too. Check the website for full details.


At Fabrica we will be offering a number of drawing activities through the evening for those that can make it to the gallery but we also wanted to use social media as a tool so those that can't can still participate. To that end we are setting up a remote drawing activity that will be driven by Twitter. At certain points in the evening we will send out a word via Twitter as a prompt. We are then asking people to make a drawing based on that word, photograph it and send it back to us via Twitpic, we will then project the images in the gallery during the evening. The images will also be available to view via Twitter so if you take part you'll be able to see what other people are doing. We want people to use anything they have to hand to make the drawing and don't expect you to have any particular talent for it. If you're in the pub draw it on a beermat or the condensation on your glass, do it with pebbles on the beach, in the dirt on a van if you're out and about or with your kids' crayons etc etc. The possibilities are endless. We'll keep it simple in what we ask you to draw but your response can be as elaborate or as casual as you want. Long term we'll put the images on our website so they'll become part of Fabrica's archive of the event. It'd be great to have an idea of anyone that'd like to join in so if you are interested send us a DM.



We've also set up a collaborative playlist on Spotify with the theme of 'emotional contagion' which reflects one of the ideas behind the exhibition. Have a listen and feel free to add something. Chameleon

And the winner is.........

Mark Barkaway

Big congratulations to Mark, this is a great picture. We were looking for something that delivered a different perspective on The Elephant Bed and this certainly does that. All the shortlisted pictures are great but this one came out a clear winner when the votes from the panel were collated. Mark's £50 Amazon voucher will be winging its way to him shortly and I'm hoping to record a boo with him in the next couple of days so keep a look out for that. It may even prompt me to write about Audioboo, which I've been meaning to for a while now.

I just wanted to take some time to reflect on the competition. Firstly, I should say that I set the whole thing up really badly. I do have a habit of thinking of an idea and rushing in. We asked people to post photographs on Flickr and to tag them fabricacomp so that we could find them, which was fine but did cause a couple of problems. We asked people to submit a maximum of three images but a few people entered more and during the competition I tried to contact them to reduce the number of images, but the only way to do that was through Flickr comments and that isn't very efficient. The upshot was that when it came to shortlisting, a couple of people had to be disqualified. The second issue was that after we had shortlisted, I needed to be able to put together a document containing all the images to email out to the panel for their votes. Once again we were obliged to contact everyone via Flickr to get a low res version of their image that we could send out. This all took time and has made the process much slower than I had hoped. The next time I think that I'll ask people to email the images they want to enter and we'll post them on Flickr. I think that'll iron out the wrinkles and speed up the process. If anyone has a better idea or wants to point out that I could have used Flickr better I'd be very happy to hear from them I'm clearly no Flickr expert.

I'm discovering that it's difficult to quantify success with social media, so although I blithely said in an earlier post that I'd report back on whether the competition had delivered what I had hoped it would, I'm not sure how to do that. I can talk about the number of entries (135), quality of entries, (v high), people in the gallery talking about it (a lot) and more, but I'm not sure that they are a measure of success when what I'm really interested in is deepening engagement, in driving creative participation. This is a tricky question and something that will undoubtedly need to be addressed in depth at some point but at the moment I'm sort of enjoying the fact that it is difficult to quantify, that no one really knows and that there's no one standing over my shoulder demanding meaningless stats. I'd be interested in talking to Mark about his response to the competition and his relationship to the gallery and I'm sure it'll be part of our boo. One unexpected result is that John Grade has asked permission for some of the images to be used on his website, which is fantastic. There will definitely be more competitions and games coming up so watch this space.

In the meantime congratulations to Mark again.

Shortlisted Photos in competition

Thought it would be nice to post the shortlisted images from the Elephant Bed photo competition, which I blogged about earlier. Will post some more thoughts on how it worked soon. Along with the winner of course.

Sara Ingman

Jo Stevenson

Adrian Powter

Adrian Powter

Perry French

Maura Hamer

Emma Gray

Perry French

Joe Wilkins

Mark Barkaway

Inhabiting the tangled hedgerow

It's been a while since I posted on here. Sometimes I feel like I have so much to say that I don't know where to begin without it becoming an incoherent mess and I get slightly paralyzed and end up saying nothing. But today I read something that really clarified for me the answer to an issue that I've been thinking about a lot.

I read an executive summary of a report commissioned by HSBC, The future of business: The changing face of business in 21st Century Britain. It's not the sort of thing I normally read, though maybe I should, but I read it because the report names Brighton as one of the five supercities of the future and hey, I live and work in Brighton so it's relevant to me, and once I got past the hilarious and frankly slightly desperate jargon, I learned something.

The issue I've been thinking about is this- How do arts organisations inhabit this new world? This crossover world, the overlapping space between an organisation and the online world, the tangled hedgerow to steal my own analogy. I was at an event called Shift Happens a while back and one of the speakers was Bill Thompson, he's a commentator on The Digital Planet a BBC world service programme about digital stuff and describes himself on Twitter as a hack and a pundit. One of the things that Bill talked about was what he believes is the challenge for arts organisations in the future, which was to pitch camp in that online world, to make it their own. This was the last talk of the event and I chatted with Bill afterwards very briefly and said yes, that's exactly right, I felt fired up by the idea, I may have even have embarrassed myself slightly. Then I left and got on a train and during the long journey home that excitement didn't leave me but the question kept coming up in my mind, but how? How do we do that, how do we pitch camp in that world?

I want to quote a little from the HSBC report-

'How many of us for instance, see social networking sites as a tool for personal rather than professional, gain? Yet for many entrepreneurial groups, social networks are now regarded as one of the best ways to develop and maintain new business contacts, test and market new products, organise and manage new business initiatives.'

Now I'm not in any way anti-business but this depressed me slightly. There's plenty more in the same vein and it made me more determined than ever to work out how to make sure that arts organisations are part of this new world, that it's not inhabited solely by businesses who are only looking to make money. Then it occurred to me what we have to do. We have to do what we do. There's no magic bullet, no blinding idea that'll make it happen. We just have to make sure that our work, our organisations are there, online, engaging with people and enabling them to engage with us, to share what we do, what we're about. This is exactly what business is doing right now, and we have to make sure that we don't lose out, that we build a future in which our online presence is as important as HSBC's in the same way that our presence in the real world is as important as theirs. And now, right now is the time to be doing that because otherwise we risk getting left behind and that world may become a commercialized one not open to us or one we no longer want to be a part of.

Social media and social conventions

I recently came across this blog entry on a website called Sociability, it's a summary of a talk given by Andy Gibson at an Arts Council event Do the arts speak digital? Andy Gibson is a consultant specialising in the social uses of technology. It's definitely worth reading the whole thing but I'd like to pick out a couple of ideas that are particularly relevant to things that I've been considering and some ideas that I'm working up.

I've been thinking a lot about audience development and what that means. It seems to me, possibly naively, that the focus is mostly on making your audience bigger, developing relationships with hard to reach groups for example or encouraging those that don't traditionally engage with the arts. Of course all of that is important but I'm also interested in thinking about how you develop your current audience as well, how you deepen your relationship with them, how you can encourage their creative participation, especially through the use of social media and the low barriers to engagement that it offers. A quote from the blog - 'I believe that social tools make the invisible networks of our culture visible, and therefore possible to engage with'. What Andy Gibson also elaborates is that not only do social tools allow us to engage with our audience more easily than we could before, it also means that they can engage with one another. If you follow Fabrica on Twitter then you can also see who else follows us, the same with Facebook and other social networks.

I've been thinking about how to use social media in a playful way to encourage some of those things, creative participation, deepening of relationships, the opportunity for our audience to engage with each other. As previously discussed the photo competition we're running via Flickr is part of that. I'm working up a couple of other things, no details as yet because I'm still thinking them through, both of which will happen during the Tina Gonsalves show, Chameleon (title tbc), in October/November this year. One, forming part of Brighton's White Night activities, will be a drawing game, (no actual drawing ability required - I'll be taking part so you can be assured of that), resulting in an online gallery. The second will be something that plays with the idea of contagion, of passing things on, in the same way that Tina's show is about emotional contagion. It'll be a game that will specifically use Twitter and I'm hoping will put people in touch with each other as well as fostering their relationship with us. I think that together, in addition to the photo competition, they will represent a step forward in our use of social media and hopefully the beginnings of a model for future interactions.

Another thought from the blog to end on - 'So if it’s a time to play with convention, it’s also a time to challenge some of the 19th Century assumptions about how things “should” be done.' The convention of the silent audience he points out is relatively recent and one that's beginning to crumble. Time to find new ways of interaction.
Love this image which represents sociability in a virtual society.