We discussed about what we thought of the ‘Couple in Conversation’. We all agreed that it looked peaceful in the middle of the island, even though there is chaos all around it. The couple look like they are excluded from the real world and they are in their own world, ignoring the real problem we have these days. This piece gives me a rhetorical question every time I think about it; could we ever give up everything and just be in peace with someone else and forget the world.

We went back to New Greenham Arts and we all sat down to watch a presentation made by Johannes about the process of him making the ‘Couple in Conversation’ and he says it took him many years to sponsor him to make it and another year to make the actual piece. He commented on the light and dark effects the piece has, as the couple seems to reflect each other but also opposing each other. I thought to myself that this was a clever way of explaining how the couple works and in my mind I remembered the saying ‘Opposites attract.’

We then talked about the precision and time taken to make the piece and I felt admiration for Johannes as he had so much patience and I think it was worth the wait as the ‘Couple in Conversation’ had so many ideas branching out into many different things such as workshops!

We then said thanks to Johannes and went into a room with Jon Spooner. We all sat down and we all introduced ourselves to Jon. I felt slightly intimidated by his powerful presence as I was sitting next to him. Jon was confident and enthusiastic about this workshop, inspiring us to feel part of something which was clever. We all discussed the effects of the piece again and what it made us think about. Tayla said that it was as if the couple were talking to each other, ignoring everyone else and the world was going by, all around them and it kept on changing while the couple just stayed the same. We all felt that it was a striking piece and I might even go as far to say it was thought-provoking in some ways.

We then got a sheet of paper and had to remember a place we had been to once or twice and felt good being there, and write about what we remembered doing there, what happened there etc and draw a bird’s eye view/ map of the place. We all split up all over the room to start drawing this. I felt slightly stupid at the beginning but eventually I remembered a place I went to last year in South France and I drew a map and I wrote up what I knew about the place and made up what I didn’t to add some interesting things to read about. We all then walked around looking at each other’s work when we finished and we then sat down around paper which took up a quarter of the room. Jon said that we had to write one word about the couple around the edge. We did so and then Jon gave us a challenge. We had to draw an island, with boundaries and places, landmarks, ordinary buildings of our own, completely from our imagination and by doing so, without talking to each other. We weren’t allowed to sign too! We did this and took a long time drawing the island and we realised we had to work together to make sure the island made sense by watching what other people was drawing. This was a form of communication. And it was about to play a very big part in our project.

DEVELOPING THE IDEA OF “COMMUNE DE KATE” ISLAND
We all came back to the workshop in Arlington Arts two months later due to terrible scheduling! But we all managed to remember slightly what we did last time and introduce ourselves slowly to Jon again. We were about to work together for the next 4 days and little did we know, we would be going a journey of new found confidence and embarrassing moments!

We started off with some drama exercise including the Power Shower. This was something that everyone liked but felt too stupid to do! We all had to use our hands to pat the person’s body repeatedly over a part of their body like a shower and then mover it around the body, warming up their muscles also. Then we did some moving exercises and we were warmed up. Jon said that there were many forms of communication these days. Letters, texting, signing, cryptic messages even talking. But how do we communicate with someone we don’t know or haven’t seen for a long time. We all said by saying hello. But Jon said we normally say hello by waving our hands or saying it. But could we communicate saying hello with different body parts? We tried to do so with our legs, feet and knees and the result was a lot of wobbling and laughing. But Jon said that if we could communicate by using a secret language or something else by just touching each other in a specific part of the body such as shoulders.

He told us to split into groups and we had two rules. We were allowed to mime only in an abstract way not in the realistic way. And we were not allowed to talk. We found this difficulty and then I paired up with Kirsty and we were talking about her lunch which was an apple and then she came up with a brilliant idea. Could we communicate to each other by giving the other person an object of kindness, in our case, a Golden Delicious apple? Jon said we could so we set about making our short piece of drama. We decided to pretend to be two strangers walking in a crowded place and then bump into accidentally, one of them holding an apple in their hand and then giving to it to the other person in a way of saying hello and apologizing at the same time. Kirsty came up with another brainwave as well. Why not repeat the same process and then rewind it backwards and forwards? We did so and we felt proud of our piece.

We all showed our drama pieces to each other and then Jon chose mine and Kirsty’s and Hassan’s and Mel’s. We all taught it to everyone in the group and then we continued developing the drama pieces. We then got together and split up into two groups; one bigger and the other one smaller. Jon gave us a card which said ‘More exciting than Italy ‘and then we had to make a drama piece out of that. We all found it difficult and then decided to do something based on a theme park as it was exciting. We all then agreed on imitating a rollercoaster, by suing abstract miming with one of our arms pretending to be the safety belt and then our other arm to hold on to the rail in front of us. We all screamed as if we were in a real rollercoaster ride and we moved our bodies side to side at the same time it shows the audience where we were going on the rollercoaster such as sharp turns or loops etc. But Jon gave us a surprise twist. He asked us what our favourite foods were and I said mine was chocolate. He said we had to sing in an operatic voice saying our favourite foods’ names and do it on the rollercoaster at the same time!
We practised and after several ‘rides’, we were killing ourselves with laughter. We started to bond as a group ands started to understand what we were capable of and challenging ourselves to push each other into new, brave territory.

THE COMMUNE DE KATE ISLAND!
The day before the final performance where the other 2 schools took part in this workshop would be coming together to join us for a final showdown, we started to focus on the island. Jon asked us to remember the island we drew on paper the first time we came together 2 months before. We did, and Jon said by using the ‘Couple in Conversation’ we were going to make our own island and base our pieces on it and draw the island at the same time. Sounds daunting? But Jon decided to push us to our very limits. We had to write about a memory, our thoughts of this imaginary island or write a postcard to someone else from the island about the island. We spent half an hour doing do and then Jon gave us a piece of chalk and we drew the island. We had to write a story the places we decided to draw and it had to be made up using our imagination. But Jon gave us some hints and places he made up and we had to draw them and continue some of the stories he had made up too. At the end, we all stood away from the island and discussed on where we would do our drama pieces on it and making the island the right size. Jon said that he was becoming proud of our determination but to be honest, at that very point, I was knackered.

The day of the performance! Other schools came, very official council people came and many more people. Families and other project leaders came together on this day and we all felt nervous. We rehearsed our piece and looked at the other groups’ work. They did some paper maché work on forms of movement. We then realised a lot of things we did for this performance. We had based the whole workshop on Johannes’ piece ‘Couple in Conversation’ because we had so much different ways of working together, sharing special bonds with each other silently and communicating through the power of actions and movements. The other school did a dance involving very abstract movement and they also used the theme of relying on each other when they needed each other. When it all came together, I was amazed by the fact that one day, we just looked at a bronze piece on a roundabout and it brought up so many controversial topics and human beliefs such as helping each other, when you know you need them and through the power of communication, we could do so many things in this world today and we took them for granted.

I am also a bit of a geek, an early adopter. I’m an associate of the Quantum Information Science Group at the University of Leeds. I like shiny gadgets and computers. When I was ten years old my dad bought us a Dragon 32 computer which me and my brother used to program with ‘games’ written in C Basic ( I think) that we copied out of the back of magazines. Twenty five years later, I own a mobile phone that contains more computing power than was used to put the first manned mission on the moon.

I am not an ‘expert’ on new technology, social media or Web 2.0 (whatever that term means) – but I use all those things all the time.

I’m here to offer a perspective. Some opinions from my experience as an artist who has worked in a world in which the internet has always existed and has, over the thirteen years that I’ve been working professionally, radically changed the way that we all interact with each other as human beings.

As students at the University of Leeds in the mid 90’s we’d all had email and internet accounts that we and no-one else that we knew ever used. When we formalised our company in 1997 we received an offer to participate in a scheme that I think was an Arts Council initiative to bring Yorkshire companies and artists online. But I was pretty much the only one of us who ever used it – email back in 1997 was for us still kind of a miracle. I vividly remember one of Unlimited’s founding members Paul coming in one morning and asking “Has the email postman been yet?” because he thought that like regular post, email was delivered just once a day.

Faxes were still totally ubiquitous – Chris came up with an idea that he was convinced would be his “killer app” and send him into the Sunday Times rich list – the wipe clean fax header.

Now, we regularly post videos online that allow our audiences and our collaborators, any of whom might live on a different continent, to share and contribute to our creative processes. And it works for us. And we’re only a very small organisation – but we have regular conversations by email, on Twitter, on YouTube with people from all over the world.

Our most viewed video online is called Superposition. It was filmed in my garden shed and was essentially a first draft of our attempt to explain how it is possible for a single object to be in a minimum of two different places at the same moment in time.

We posted at the time simply to allow the quantum physicist we were working with (who lived several hundred miles away) to hear and see what we were doing so he could tell us whether it was accurate or not. It has since been viewed 50000 times and has hundred of comments qualifying it as “popular” and therefore has been offered the opportunity to earn (a very small amount) of money through Google advertising.

One of our other most popular videos online was filmed on my mobile phone during rehearsals when we were trying to work out how to make the scene changes in a new show more dynamic. It’s of my good very friend and colleague Chris, who is one of the smartest most gifted people that I have ever met. And he’s stuck inside a stool.

When we’ve ever made and posted a more… ‘standard’, quote quoting, shiny piece of marketing…… no-one watches it.

People like and are interested in (I think) personal, funny, sincerely made information that gives them access to the personalities, the attitudes, the value systems of the people they’re going to invest their time and their money in. Audiences are increasingly, incredibly smart at ignoring disconnected “marketing”. Unless you’ve got a container ship full of money and can completely saturate your market with familiar faces and images, of course. But I would suggest that that’s no way to build loyalty which is, I think (?), what most of us value above all else.

We are a relatively small organisation. We do our best with the resources we have and they’re not many. We didn’t foresee the changes that were coming – we weren’t blazing a path. I mean for fucks sake, we invented the wipe clean fax header! But we’ve always been interested and want to stayed up to speed with what the trailblazers in this field were doing and we’ve always been curious – we like and we invite conversations. And we’ll always have a go. Our work has always been and continues to be sincerely interested in what it’s relationship is, and can be, with it’s audience.

Part of my job as the leader of our organisation is to continue to remind us that

there is always the possibility for transformation…

In our roles as producers with our responsibility to nurture and promote creativity, we should celebrate the creativity of our audiences – even the most mediocre and as one of the earlier keynote speakers Andrew Keen would term “amateur” attempts.

As a parent I don’t tell my four year old child that his drawing of a house is shit.

I ask him who’s inside the house, what they’re doing. I use his initial impulse, interest and desire to create, to develop a conversation with him – to find out what his interests and his concerns are. To develop a deeper understanding of who he is, to get to know him better so we can have a better shared understanding of the world.

I’m not going to commission him to paint his depiction of creation, the Downfall of Man and the Promise of Salvation through the prophets and Genealogy of Christ on my living room ceiling – but I might stick it up on the fridge, even just for a few days.

Our job is to create and commission the most excellent works of art that we can, in whichever mediums they are best suited to. That work can and should continue to happen in traditional forms and places and crucially with artists at the lead. But it would be naïve of us to think that we can continue to promote them to our audiences without heavily investing in an exploration of the new technologies and platforms available.

We can still curate, have an opinion on what is “excellent”, expect and demand a level of technical and creative expertise and brilliance from professional artists AND mix it up with other, less ‘accomplished’ but no less creative engagements from some of the people who have a particularly keen interest in our work. At the very least we can have a sincere, meaningful conversation with them about it. Because they can be our fiercest, most committed and most vocal supporters of our work.

And then we’ve done our research and earned the choice as to whether or not it might be interesting, or potentially brilliant for our audiences to have a more active part in their creation.

I would like to suggest that there has to be a massive, widespread, sincerely adopted development in our approach to engagement with audiences and artists that is as radical as the developments in the technologies that are now widely available – mostly for free.

Last week Chris and I were in Singapore doing my one man show about quantum physics and we met a scientist who is working on a technology that will allow us to produce a single photon of light at the literal press of a button. Within five years he reckons – they’re just waiting for the final developments in the technology to arrive.

And we’re still debating whether or not we should have a blog on our website and who should be writing it.

We cannot ignore these new technologies and opportunites, pass them off as a “fashion” or hope that by paying lip service to them, by asking someone in our marketing department to sign up to twitter, that we will be doing our bit.

A games console and a social networking platform that coupled with widespread and previously unimaginably fast broadband connection speeds have so radically altered his relationship with his long term partner that they felt they could no longer be together.

Now obviously this is an extreme example and of course there will be other factors at work here – but it’s undeniably a very real experience that would never have factored ten, five years ago.

The title for this symposium is “On Not Being Born Digital” with a chief concern in:

“providing an opportunity for cultural leaders to apply their own reality check to the virtual revolution that is being so much talked about these days… and how digital strategies and channels could be geared towards enriching the relationship between the artist, the arts organisation and the audience – or not.”

In a 2005 BBC survey 100% of 6-10 year olds, 97% of 11-15 year olds and 82% of 16-24 year olds describe themselves as regular video gamers. There is no not. We’ve gone native.