NORTHERN PLANNER

I went to TEDx Bradford on Friday, which was mostly pretty good but it’s not what I’m going to talk about today.

Because I went to a breakfast thingy with some artists before; that was the REALLY good bit. It was at the National Media Museum, where they’re launching Life Online, an exhibition about the internet. That’s right, the internet is actually old enough to start appearing in Museums.

Makes me feel old. My nephews are 18 and 20, for them the internet is like air, it's fundamental to their lives and has always been their. Anyway.

They’ve commisioned an exhibition on open source culture and the threat to net neutrality. Your views on this are your own (they think curbing freedom and ‘free stuff’ online is mostly bad) but what I took from the work wasn’t much to do with the subject, it was more to do with the brilliance of ‘post digital’ stuff and interactive design to  free up new forms of creativity and inspire people to do all sorts of things together- in the real world.

Not using all their spare time as Clay Shirky would claim, which is frankly bollocks, and always will be until people stop having to work for a living, but around the edges, little spikes of entertainment and interest within the fabric of the everyday.

Ross Philips has created Read Aloud, an installation that that invites the public to perform lines from a chosen book in a collective effort to read the entire work.

 

While it enables us to experience literature, poems ore whatever in a different way, I think it captures the idea that any piece of content is always unfinished until people actually experience it, none more so than books where we asign mental images of the places and people portrayed, we hear their voices in our own heads and respond to them in different ways (like the way some see Shylock in Merchant of Venice as a sympathetic character pushed to the limit by discrimination, while others see him as a villian). That’s always worth remembering when you create content – leave room for people in there.

This idea of the way the internet lets people collaborate together to make real things, in the real world is also expressed in his ‘videogrid’ concept that has been used at the Liberty Store in London, The V&A  and by Nokia, where people touch a screen in a window to have a 1o second video made of themselves, automatically uploaded to a gallery existing as a real life and virtual video wall.

This is the V&A version:

  

People really will do stuff for you if it’s fun, not too  much effort and if there’s an end result they’ve influenced in some way. Instant feedback and instant results help too. Worth thinking about when you’re considering ideas people will play a part in – think about why it’s fun and interesting for them, rather than just pushing your agenda. Think about instant, or quick, real time results. Digital is about now, if you’re going to make it about ‘later’ make the result worth waiting for.

Content that lots of people have had a hand in tends to work really well for brands, because it tends to cut through more. The above stuff isn’t that different to Nike’s Chalkbot

  

This got lots of headlines and social media traction because of the people element – we’re social animals and like doing stuff together. It gets picked up by the press and people just like sharing it more. The value of the people that interact is negligable, it’s not nearly enough to alter sales figures or brand scores, but the noise and headlines they make IS.

Rather than presenting a finished ‘thing’ present a simple system for people to work in.

I also liked Thomson and Craighead’s  Portrait of Tim Berners Lee, an Early warning system.

 

I love this idea of a portrait made of webcams, it just shows how much amazing source material is there for us to re-purpose if we use our imagination. Naturally, a lot of good digital creativity is about newness, but equally, it can be about what you can ‘hack’.

Then there is their ‘Flat Earth’ a desktop documentary which takes the viewer on a seven minute trip around the world to encounter fragments of real people’s blogs, knitted together to form a single narrative, over a visual effect created from satellite imagery, that looks for all the world like Google Earth. You can view it on their website.

All this stuff demonstrates that thinking about the people experiencing the internet just on screens, be that a laptop, phone or TV isn’t the half of it. The internet will increasingly be about linking objects and imbuing them with all sorts of stuff. It will be about the real life context of where people are and what they are doing.

It will be about the real life we are living, not the virtual one.

By the way, while I was there I also loved Forms, in their Blink of an Eye exhibition.Sport isn't often thought of as beautiful, but there is a grace and artistry to the way athletes move and this work really captures that. Just shows what happens when you apply a bit of (digital) creativity to something to make people appreciate the familiar in a completely new way.

 

In the so called 'traditional' creative departments, TV, print etc was also inspired by art, it seems to me that digital creativity (is this really a credible distinction these days), if anything should be about this even more, some sort of magical fusion of code and story.

Anyway