iShed

Producing the future by playing the field – how we support new ideas

July 5, 2010

I have just done a talk at the Shift Happens conference in York and @rohan_21awake asked if could share the text of my speech: "it would make an amazing article/manifesto/job ad"

So here it is:

Watershed, based in Bristol and the UK’s first media centre, began life over 25 years ago, concentrating mainly then on the exhibition of independent film. These days, after some long hard thinking about what we are, how we work and where we deliver value, we refer to ourselves as cross-artform producer, sharing, developing and showcasing cultural ideas and talent.

Today I am going to talk a little bit about our motivations and approach to supporting new ideas and outline our latest project Theatre Sandbox.

To give you a better understand of our mode of operation though, I will start with a (very quick) overview of our business. Watershed is a Group of three companies operating within a common Brand:

The Trading company is the revenue generator for the company, but also a neutral space where many of the network we work with are happy to work and play.

The Art Trust curates a public facing programme, primarily in our own venue and online and is the door to Watershed for most people.

iShed is the R&D arm, producing open collaborations which bridge expertise and traditional boundaries to promote emergent practice. We also manage The Pervasive Media Studio, a research lab which brings together artists, academics and companies outside their normal institutional spaces to collaborate, share ideas and create new work.

Each of the Watershed companies have specialist expertise and responsibility, but it is through the synergy of the group that we manage to punch above our apparent weight, manage risk, and deliver high returns on public investment.

Over 10 years ago Watershed started working with both HP Labs and University of Bristol on projects which explored, tested and got emerging technologies into the hands of creatives and audiences early in its design life cycle. From projects like se3d, Clarks Bursary, Mobile Bristol and Diffraction, we started to create a model of community learning, early stage testing and sustained support to develop unlikely collaborations and interesting projects.

Over the past three years we have been working with the Bill Sharpe and Graham Leicester at the International Futures Forum to try and make sense of the many interactions we have with the people we support and the complicated space we play in, and this thinking – brought together in Producing the Future – a book we have just published with IFF – has helped us to understand how much we value:

our role as a producer and supporter of new talent and ideas

the degree in which collaboration has become central to our practice

and that however much we contribute to the wider creative ecology, we receive much more back in return.

In innovation terms, from the history of silicon valley to the development of places like MIT or Apple, much has been written about the benefits and value of interdisciplinary working, and we often come back to the work of John Seely Brown in Creation Nets, that to develop and deliver new ideas, you must collaborate with organisations unlike you – in skills, culture, size or outlook. Indeed this thinking seems particularly relevant at the moment -

“Creation nets accelerate innovation across participants. Not only are participants able to innovate more rapidly than they could outside these networks, the pace of their innovation accelerates the longer they participate in the network.

A natural reaction to accelerating change is to turn inward and tighten control. Creation nets require a different mindset, one that recognises that flows of knowledge across institutional boundaries are the key to generating the new knowledge and new practices required to succeed in a rapidly changing world”

So, to Theatre Sandbox and our new creation net:

In the last few years, after producing a series of projects which fused theatre, gaming and film – with companies like Hide&Seek, Punchdrunk and Bristol Old Vic we became interested in:

how we could support new work which addresses the ways in which digital is influencing and changing the way we live?

how we could support the development of producers by introducing new tools and encouraging new modes of thinking?

the production of new types of personalised, located performance where audience members become collaborators, co-authoring their experiences

And the value of pervasive technologies via a creative perspective - asking how can theatre-makers might unlock new and unexpected capabilities, content and applications early in the technology research lifecycle?

As we were increasingly being approached by people from within the theatre sector for consultancy and partnership, it seemed appropriate to use the format of a scheme called Media Sandbox which we had produced for three years in the south west to leverage greater impact than a series of small, unrelated projects. So we applied to Arts Council and created a scheme which would run innovation labs across the country and then commission six new theatre projects to explore pervasive media.

The commissioned projects - and you can read all about them on the blog - range from a hearing impaired performer who wants to develop captioning which responds dynamically to her delivery, to an audio led fairy tale which explores a parallel magical world glimpsed through keyholes and cracks in the pavement.

Built into the very DNA of Theatre Sandbox is an emphasis on familiarisation, investigation and training for both the partner venues and the commissioned projects to feel confident, informed and able to engage with digital technologies. We have a brilliant advisory group including Lyn Gardner, who is on stage tomorrow, and a wealth of technology and theatre experts for the commissions to tap into.

We staged the first meeting for participants last week and are at the exciting beginning stage of development where they get to do some free thinking and we get to work hard in the background trying to work out what kind of support they might need.

But the scheme isn’t just about offering an opportunity to these six groups, so here is a 3 minute video showing the ideas generation process of the 5 labs we did across the country:

View film: http://www.theatresandbox.co.uk/2010/05/17/film-theatre-sandbox-workshops/

Marcus asked me to speak personally today and this video illustrates everything that really excites me about working in this space: Bright, open, generous, hungry people, looking to do something new – either in terms of a medium, the audience or their own practice.

But what are the skills and qualities I think are expected of me as a producer, in order that we keep finding and supporting new ideas? How can I continue to be what Seth Honnor describes as a midwife – keeping open channels of exploration whilst maintaining quality and relevance?

I need to engender confidence – to ensure the people I am working with don’t obsess about the technology and are able to concentrate on their idea. Sometimes this confidence is built through introducing them to people who can help them realise their idea, sometimes it is simply permission to spend time thinking, or recognition that their idea is worth pursuing.

I need to be a translator, negotiating across sectors and in a new medium where the language and possibilities is both exciting and daunting.

I need to be promiscuous, to say yes to many meetings even when its not clear why, and then be opportunist about spotting potential and moving quickly. I need to Understand and bridge the research, technology, the commercial digital industry and the cultural sector. Curating conversations and situations where brilliant people can flourish.

I need empathy and care – to work with people over long periods of time… and patience to stick with them when they are wondering what its all about.

I need flexibility and open-ness – I am reminded of David Jubb’s contribution to the Jerwood book The Producers – you rarely make what you set out to make – especially if you look to test, share and iterate ideas during the development process.

I need to be an advocate and spread infectious enthusiasm, to make sure the ideas have a life after the research period.

I need to understand and manage expectation within a collaboration – making sure communication is clear and learning is shared.

I need to shield projects from bureaucracy, cash flow, application forms and pre-defined outputs – taking care of liaison with funders etc.

I need to embrace and share failure – mine and that of the projects that we have worked on – if your success rate is 100% you haven’t taken enough risks. But we can certainly all learn from things that didn’t work.

Watershed is a creative ecosystem, operating in many and different economies. A healthy ecosystem will always be generating new ideas, possibilities and meanings – this is a creative process. Equally creative I think, is the process of negotiating the interaction between the multiple economies at play. Its what excites me and its what I love about my job.

Whilst there is obviously loads of brilliant and extraordinary ideas being made, as a sector I don’t believe we yet know how to properly support or even identify potential interdisciplinary producers. We have been lucky enough to have Katie Day working with us on Theatre Sandbox as part of the Cultural Leadership Programme and we have both learnt a lot during the learning and reflection process.

Digital producers are brilliant value for money in that they leverage connections and opportunity, and their mix of tacit, commercial and cultural production skills will deliver across projects, but leadership development in our sector often doesn’t cater to those working in this way.

I believe there are many more brilliant ideas and people out there ready to fuse artistic practice and digital tools, but don’t think the ideas necessarily come ready to make or that organisations and individuals have the skills or confidence to realise them.

You can throw money at the problem but it won’t result in a flourishing and innovative sector. For this you need to engender open innovation, collaboration, peer to peer learning and time for experimentation.

You need to empower organisations and individuals to think outside of their disciplinary silos

And you need the producers to make possible, recognise and support the development of new ideas and talent.

Theatre Sandbox announcement

June 3, 2010

iShed is delighted to announce the six recipients of this year’s Theatre Sandbox commissions, supported by Arts Council England.

Each of the six successful recipients receives £10,000 to develop their groundbreaking projects at prestigious partner venues across the country ready for public events and testing in September. This will be followed by a final showcase event at Watershed in November.

Theatre Sandbox seeks to grow an active community of experimentation and learning and includes a structured programme of commissioning and knowledge exchange to grow awareness of technology in the theatre sector. IShed aims to encourage innovation and to leave a lasting legacy as part of the scheme.

The commissions were selected following an intensive application period, during which 275 theatre makers attended nationwide introductory workshops and almost 100 applications were received.

The commissions:

Proto-type Theater
Hosted by Bristol Old Vic
Fortnight is a two-week long performance experience located in the spaces, technologies and occurrences of our daily lives: an unfolding adventure into the limitless 'local'.
Proto-type Theater is a company of multi-disciplinary artists interested in live and digital performance. Proto-type has created demanding, intricately crafted original works, differing in scale, subject and medium for a diverse audience of intelligent, modern humans. FFI www.proto-type.org

Mind the Gap
Hosted by Contact, Manchester
Mind the Gap will make a sonic maze where the audience are moved through a space, attracted and repulsed by sirens. Mind the Gap makes professional theatre with learning disabled people. FFI www.mind-the-gap.org.uk

Analogue
Hosted by The Junction, Cambridge
Analogue will use 21st century connectedness to explore disconnections between ourselves in the present, and the semi-remembered events of our childhood. The audience will navigate through events in May 1985, beginning with a phone call that has long since vanished from history.
Analogue aims to produce challenging, highly inventive via theatrical traditions from the past.FFI www.analogueproductions.co.uk

Ed Collier & Melanie Wilson
Hosted by Lyric Hammersmith
The Observatory is an audio led adventurous fairy tale for children aged between 7 and 10 and their adults. Staged both on a high street and in a theatrical playspace it is about a parallel magical world that exists alongside the city. It can be heard only by those who want to hear it and glimpsed through keyholes and cracks in the pavement by a lucky few. The Observatory will be made Ed Collier of China Plate and award winning theatre and sound artist Melanie Wilson.
FFI www.chinaplatetheatre.com / www.melaniewilson.org.uk

Tin Bath
Hosted by mac, Birmingham
Sophie Woolley and Gemma Fairlie of Tin Bath are developing a new comedy called You’re So Happy I Want to Die. The project experiments with dynamic, evocative captioning that responds to the live nature of theatre. Tin Bath produces exciting interactive theatre that is accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people. FFI www.tinbaththeatre.com

Duncan Speakman & Uninvited Guests
Hosted by Soho Theatre, London
Duncan Speakman is an artist who creates experiences in public spaces, often using mobile audio technology. He is collaborating with Uninvited Guests, a Bristol based company whose recent work blurs the line between theatre and social festivities. Together they are exploring how audiences can collectively imagine utopian futures in real locations using performance and networked maps
FFI www.duncanspeakman.net / www.uninvited-guests.net

Theatre Sandbox is originated and produced by iShed, part of Watershed. It is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, and delivered in partnership with Bristol Old Vic, Soho Theatre Lyric, Hammersmith, mac, Contact and The Junction.

Theatre Sandbox Commissions - workshops announced

March 24, 2010

Posted by Clare in: Events | Watershed | Innovation | Technology | 1 comment so far

Theatre Sandbox is a new opportunity for theatre artists, companies and collectives. We are offering six £10,000 commissions to support the research and development of experimental pieces of performance which engage with Pervasive Media Technologies.

The process of application involves participation at one of five half-day workshops and a written application. Workshops will take place
in Bristol, London, Birmingham, Manchester and Cambridge. Find out more and book here.

Theatre Sandbox is produced by iShed and supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. iShed is part of Watershed, a cross art form venue in Bristol

Pervasive or Invasive?

March 6, 2010

Hands up who likes using Facebook? Me, I do, I like being connected to a network of friends, sending messages and spying on their lives. But do you ever think about how the data you’re idly tapping in, is actually being used? I didn’t, well not until this week when UWE’s Digital Cultures Research Centre presented a talk by Rob van Kranenburg on The Internet of Things; followed by ‘Pervasive or Invasive?’- a seminar at the Pervasive Media Studio where the issues (good and bad) surrounding the ethics of pervasive media, we’re laid out on the table. And it seems a lot of people do think about it.

Not to paint Facebook as ‘the baddie’, logs are recorded by almost all the internet services we used regularly - Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Twitter the list goes on - and this can generate a surprisingly clear picture of our lives. Nello Cristianini, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Bristol University showed us a list of web searches from a random IP address - and the results were scary. The list revealed the computer belonged to a couple; him bi-polar with a cocaine addiction; and her concerned with becoming pregnant and the effect his drug use could have on their ability to conceive. A private situation, and here we were reading it within a public context. It felt wrong, but it was supposed to. And in that moment I assessed what my own searches would say about me; who I am; where I live; what I do; who my friends are; and what a company such as Google or a Government could do with that data? Right now, Google would most likely make (more than a few) bucks through targeted marketing - allowing companies to try and entice me to buy things (they think) I’ll like. And what about the Government? They can’t persuade us to carry ID cards, but we all happily carry mobile phones that track our every movement. But where’s the harm? Most of us probably aren’t too concerned; the value of the transaction is worth it - so what if I get a few adverts on my Facebook page? I can just ignore them as I flick through my friend’s latest photo uploads. And what if I’m abducted? Great, the Police can use my phone’s location data to find me.

Now propel yourself 10 years into the future. As the majority of us now use email and mobile phones, telephone boxes and Royal Mail are extinct. The last 5% of us who held out have now been forced into this new digital world. Anonymity will be almost impossible. What will this mean? And what will happen when the dataset collected by Google is matched with the dataset collected by Amazon? What will this say about us? And what are the implications of Government and security in this? As we head into this new digital world (where the choice to opt out no longer exists), will the value of the transaction still be worth it? What will be the real price of free?

So that’s the scary scenario - it’s clear the digital world is upon us, expanding at an alarming rate (just think about all the changes we’ve seen in the last 20 years), so what can we do to make a positive future?

Rob van Kranenburg talks of a future (which has begun) where everything is digitally connected from yogurt pots to bus tickets via radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. This is a rapidly growing near invisible network, which Rob believes must be exposed and debated as it is implicated. A loose network of interested people formed to do this very job; they became The Council of the Internet of Things. You can check them out (and join them) here: http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/

But surely the Internet of Things and pervasive media services are corporate, expanding and out of our control? How can we as individuals, make positive change within this landscape? Well, there are many things we could do; we could join The Council; we could strengthen our physical communities by using data to enable sharing between neighbours; we could, as a majority, charge Facebook for use of our data; or we could follow Usman Haque’s lead and design companies like Pachube.

These are changing times, so it’s important that talks and seminars such as this take place - enabling free and open, ethical debate. I am however left wondering how conscientious our designers of the future need to be. As they create tools, services and experiences that utilise our data, will they lead the way in this new world?

Speakers at the symposium included Rob van Kranenburg, Innovation and Media Theorist; Nello Cristianini, Professor of Artificial Intelligence, University of Bristol; Patrick Crogan, Senior Lecturer, Film/Media/Cultural Studies, UWE; Lizbeth Goodman, Director of Research, Futurelab Education; and Andy Miah, Professor of Ethics & Emerging Technologies, University of the West of Scotland.

Rob van Kranenburg’s talk is now available to watch on dShed.net - and we’re inviting you to join the debate: On 26th March, Professor Jon Dovey from the Digital Culture’s Research Centre will chair a conversation on Twitter, so get involved and tell us your views. #DCRCUK

PM Studio is looking for an adventurous, collaborative, creative technologist

February 23, 2010

Creative Technology Research Associate (one year fixed term)

Grade: 2 £27,000

"Everyone at Watershed has a passion for doing a job properly. Often doing a job properly involves creativity, innovation and a lot of thought: being encouraged to do those things, and working with others who do too, every day, is what makes Watershed both a great place and a great place to work." Oliver Humpage, Watershed ICT Coordinator

The Role:

This one year research post will play a key role in developing collaborative, publicly-facing projects and ideas in The Pervasive Media Studio.

The role will provide residents and collaborators with technical inspiration, collaboration and support. It has a broad remit: sometimes you will be exploring cutting-edge research, sometimes you will be coding an artist's project, sometimes (but less so) you will be re-setting the router.

About you:

You will have the ability to understand and inspire, listen and communicate and then make brilliant ideas happen. You need to know your stuff and have a flexible, adventurous and collaborative approach to work.

About us:

The Studio is part of Watershed. We have a formal partnership with UWE's Digital Cultures Research Centre. We are a multi-disciplinary lab exploring and producing pervasive media content, applications and services. We work within a brilliant community of artists, creative companies, technologists and academics. Our projects include gaming, projections, location-based media, digital displays and new forms of performance. Some are commercial, some are cultural. We test our projects as early as possible and iterate. We have a great workspace, an open ethos and a can-do attitude.

This research associate post is supported by funding from the South West Regional Development Agency.

How to apply:

To visit the Studio Website to download the job description and application form click: here.

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