Creative Change Blog

pitch progress

Its all gone very quiet here for a while now. I miss the exchange of ideas so hopefully we will get back to it.

I'm trying to put together a proposal for interactive work in the foyer of dpa and hope to build on the idea of bringing the outside inside as an image that will react to movement in the space. Have been exploring max msp/jitter to figure this out but have to mock something up in Director for purposes of the presentation. Does anyone know a script that will affect the speed of quicktime video with a rollover? Ploughing through my books to find as I remember using it years ago but can't find it anywhere.

Hope others working on phase 2 are having fun. Would be interested to hear what you are doing...

Phase two of project

Hi

We have now put into place phase two of the project.  Apologies for my delay in posting.  In order to fulfil the brief to dpa in a timely manner Sarah, Roni, Lyndsay and myself have realised that we can't invite everyone to work on the final piece as we had hoped to.  So, we have decided to invite Rosie to work on the pitch for creating a piece of art to tell the story of dpa.  Rosie has acepted this and has asked to have some input from Jim in helping her create a vibrant, contemporary installation.

The toolbox ideas which we had hoped to work on and refine after Christmas will be addressed at this stage by Tine and Catherine Slade Brooking.  Although Catherine had not been involved in the initial stages with dpa she seems to be a person with good industry skills that we need to show Jean at this stage to keep him impressed with us.

Lyndsay had asked everyone to contribute ideas for workshop briefs.  Tine and Catherine will be given time to work on creating their own ideas and  expanding upon the best ideas overall to ensure we have some viable tools to present to dpa when we pitch to him Thursday 21st December (we're just managing the before Christmas part).

There are currently no plans to have another meeting of the six consultants before Christmas but I will keep everyone up to date through the blog until then.  If we have to stop using this medium then I will go back to email.

I shall try and arrange a meeting in the New Year so that we can all discuss the work that has gone on so far and reflect on the process of fulfilling our first brief.

Well done to everyone for all the excellent work so far.  Those  who aren't involved in phase two enjoy the last couple of weeks of term- I'm sure you've lal got enough to keep you busy until then.

Chelsea Arts Club

Hi All,

sorry this should be on Typepad but!

address - 143 Old church St. SW3 . Nearest tube is South Kennsington then a 10 minute walk.

Time - 7 for 7.30 ish.

Dress code - Smart casual!

Phone code - no mobiles inside the building.

Unfortuantely Anna is ill & Tom is moving so it will just be the 8 of us & four from dpa.

Looking forward to seeing you all their

Best wishes

Sarah

30 days

Did any one else watch 30 days with Morgan Spurlock on Wednesday on More4?

I hadn't watched any of the last series becasue I just found the one about living on the bread line too depressing.

Anyway he went into an American prison and was not permitted to go outside for about three weeks.  When he did go out it was incredible how much he appreciated the trees and sunshine. 

This whole idea of putting yourself into someone else's shoes in order to see the bigger picture seems to be effective.  With the idea for allowing managers to undertake art school workshops in order to be creative and allow creative/ constructive criticism from the tutor and the group we could easily transport these skills into the workplace.  If people are encouraged to think carefully about something physical their colleague has produced and offer criticism of the excellent parts and the parts that may be improved they should be able to critique each others intangible ideas and processes.  People should also learn how to accept this criticism and realise that it is not attack on the person.

Who isn't grateful for the fact that their parents told them to eat with their mouth closed now that they have to dine in front of others?

dpa bods

Hi there,

Not sure yet who from dpa are coming on Monday, Jean definitely and 5 others.

Just to say Rosie we realise you were just presenting us your work on the grid format, but it did look SO good - we had to show it.

Look forward to seeing you all on Monday and catching up properly.

I'm having a crazy week roll on Friday!

Best,

Lyndsay

Random thoughts on big grids

I really like your grids, Rosie, mainly because they change randomly, which throws up odd connections and ideas. And I liked the idea of mixing up what was in the grid - adding imagery from outside, video, still photos...

Funnily enough, the big grid of images has become the favourite way of visually representing the whole participatory media/blogging/YouTube/Web 2.0/me media thing. To accompany their pieces about all of the above, newspapers and magazines often run a large grid of small pics, all of individual people, often head and shoulders shots, all doing some different, but all sort of the same.

It's a visual version of the whole 'next big thing is us' angle that people usually take on  participatory media.  The Observer did it for their Me Media piece - they didn't put the pic online, but New York Magazine used a version of it for their piece about LonelyGirl15 the fake teen You  Tube video diary which became a big thing a couple of months back - that's the pic at the top of this post.

And now it's started to spread into other features.  I was  reading the  New York Times online  yesterday - the film issue of the Sunday Magazine, various pieces on comedy - and several features went with a grid of people's faces...

                                                 

I wonder if the grid idea has become the 21st Century version of the dotcom era image - a sort of digital mosaic, where a portrait of Bill Gates would be created from hundreds of tiny images of dollar bills. Those kinds of things used to be everywhere in magazines in the late nineties.  Now it's grids of lots of individuals, doing their own thing, but all sort of doing the same thing.

By the way, there's a good piece in this weeks NYT Sunday Magazine called Online Auteurs, about new talent/young film-makers and performers using YouTube (rather than Sundance, or spec scripts or whatever) as a way to get their ideas out/get noticed etc.

Memory Mapping London

More on the whole memory map idea - the Museum of London have just launched MapMyLondon - the idea is for ordinary people to tag an interactive online map of the capital with the memories they associate with different places.

Not sure if I'm explaining this that well, but it's like a London-wide collaborative version of the Flickr/Google memory maps I mentioned before.  Had a quick look at the site and I can't get it to work that well on my browser at home. But it's an interesting idea.

thanks for feedback

Well done for posting Lyndsay. Good to have some feedback and bit of a shame Thursday meeting is cancelled so we can't discuss more fully before dinner next Monday. Seems like there is quite a lot more to think about. Do we know who is going from dpa? Will Jean be there?

I am glad Jean wants something other than the grid. I want to emphasise that this was just my way of presenting research to you guys and, although flattered that you thought it had some potential in the finished work, I was unsure that it was the right solution to Jean's brief. I tried to put it together in an interesting way for us because I knew there wouldn't be time to watch two hours of video. I wanted each member of our group to go away with a DVD to view at their leisure before we move on to the more creative stage. Unfortunately I wasn't able to jump through all the technical hoops to achieve the desired result - so I'm just wondering if there is a way we can still do this? Or is it still relevant even? I guess I am thinking that if each of us listens carefully to what is said by the dpaers - then something wonderful may click into place... Any ideas on this? Andre Whitbourn has archived all the full screen DV.

Jean Meeting Update

Hi there consultants,

Hope all is good with you. Really enjoyed Friday and feeling like we are a real team now. We were all blown away by how much work you'd all done and excited by the ideas and thoughts generated.

Thought I'd just give you a quick update on the meeting we had with Jean on Monday, which was really an opportunity to just replay some of what we discussed and looked at on Friday.

He is really keen for us to develop our tool box further. To help he gave us a brief for a project he is working on, which is to train up the future leaders for companies (age range 29-39). The tools he's looking for are on:

*Managing conflict

*Right brain thinking exercises

etc...

The tools can be 15 min exercises  /  2hours / full days etc

As planned we are going to pull together creative briefs that we are already using. We'll come back to you with more of a plan for tackling this once we've collated them.

He was very interested in emotional mapping and our ideas around wasted energy - so posible areas of development here.

While he liked the photos, the grid idea and the video testimonies - we got the feeling he wants something more unusual - so need to think more about how to do this.

As I said it was an informal meeting just to touch base - so the next stage is to make a pitch to him of what we actually want to do.

We are going to refelect on Friday and our meeting with Jean a bit further to work out the best way of utilising our time, the budget etc to the best effect of dealing with all these areas and will let you know our thoughts as soon as we can. We have a business plan deadline for next Monday to present to UCCA Enterprises (so we can get some business start up funding) so our efforts will be on that this week.

We're really excited about all the possibilities our ideas have generated and really thank you for all the hard work so far...but there's still more to do. We'll contact you all soon with the plan for stage 2!

Until then...

Best wishes,

Lyndsay 

thoughts on grid

I've been thinking over the weekend about the proposal we are putting to dpa and wondering whether it all sounds a bit overcomplicated? I expect the meeting at dpa will have already taken place by the time you read this so hope it's still OK to add ideas.

I have thought of several ways we could combine the stills and video grid - rather than there being two autonomous grids - and add levels of interactivity so the user could have a bit of fun with it.

I really liked the idea of bringing the outside inside and wondered whether some full frame HD video camera landscape shots - formatted and composed like stills - would break up busyness of the grid. They could look quite painterly and bring a calmer mood the piece.

Enjoyed Friday.

Dpa Blog

Hi Guys

I've removed the dpa blog, so we can just work on the c3 one. Good meeting last week.

link

http://on-my-desk.blogspot.com/
This is a really interesting one! 100n artists desks

Some Links Again

Visual Pain
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6129016.stm

Blogging News
http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000443.html

Robots In the Picture
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/06/technology_robot_menagerie/html/1.stm

Silent Aircraft
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6120132.stm

I need a Wii
http://uk.wii.com/

Photo for Stuff

Here some photos from the installation
Tine

Stuff

Hi
I just read through our blog - so much good stuff here. I am back from Denmark, exhibition set up, open and all went well. Good news coverage as well.
Casper and I meet today - we spent most of our time talking about life and what it is we think we are saying...some stuff on mapping and 'what we offer' Wish I could go to dpa again to see the building and people to get a feel for them but I will wait and see Anna and Rosies stuff - look forward to our meeting.
To bad Jean is not coming or good maybe?
Tine

brief response from dpa

The box did indeed contain some amusing surprises. There are several DVDs which include a punch up in a bar where I recognise several dpa employees, 3 dpa consults jumping around in funny wigs and a Tabasco animation with a very bad audio track. There is also an mp3 file of a song I vaguely recognise that has been mixed up a bit, some photos of a show stand with shelves of handbags, and a scroll tied up with a lobster motif... plus the brochures and a few other bits and pieces. Trust you will all help with interpretation on Friday! Not sure what this reveals about dpa - although I can see that some of them have a great sense of fun.

Memory Maps

More on the mapping theme - people are finding interesting ways to use Google Maps - one thing that's catching on is adding tags and notes to  satellite images, to personalise them and share memories of a particular place. 

There's a  Flickr group devoted to memory mapping and a more general site, Tagzania. A good example is Mark Griffith's memory map of  Krug Park Place in Missouri - he lived there for four years  - aged 7-11. Click on the marked areas of the photo to read the notes. There's an interesting discussion about the idea at Grand Text Auto.

Convergence People

I've been catching up on some research - I want to read 'Convergence Culture', the new book by Henry Jenkins, an American prof who's the big authority on fan media/fan cultures.  The new book argues that convergence isn't primarily a technological process - it's more of a cultural thing, driven by users as they consume/create media across a variety of platforms... blah blah blah.

It sounds pretty interesting, but it's taking a while for the book to arrive.  So I checked out Jenkins' blog, which is v. interesting and v.busy (how does he get the time to write so much?) and made me wonder whether I needed to read the book - I could just make do with the blog.

I also tracked down an interesting interview with Jenkins by Big Shiny Thing - here's an interesting quote that jumped out at me... not sure why.

The Renaissance Man was someone who sought to contain within their own individual intellect as much as possible of what anyone on the planet at that time knew.

Today, with the explosion of information we are all experiencing, it is simply not humanly possible to know everything. Most of us alive today know more about a broader range of topics than most of the people living in the Renaissance but we know a much smaller portion of what could be known that the idealized vision of the Renaissance Man suggests.

This is where Pierre Levy’s notion of Collective Intelligence enters the picture. Today, we see knowledge as dispersed across social networks. Everybody knows something, nobody knows everything, and what is known by any member is accessible to the group on demand. The Convergence Person thus knows how to tap that network to get the knowledge they need and knows how to make meaningful contributions back to the group in return. The Renaissance Man was a creature of hierarchy and expertise; the Convergence Person is a creature of adhocracy and pooled information.

Hell and back

Been away too long - sorry.  Have been meaning to respond to Eleanor's post about corporate bonding and unhappy employees being more productive...

It would be interesting to find out which kind of firms were polled for the survey - were they 'creative' or service sector ops or what?

That said, it made me think again about this 'Hell's Kitchen' in Germany thing that dpa staged and what the point of it was... I made the comparison to outward bound/firewalking thingg, reworked for the Reality TV generation. But after the meeting I was wondering if that wasn't a bit glib.

What happens in 'Hell's Kitchen' - yes, you learn to work as a team to make sure you get the food on the tables. But it's also about individual success - someone wins a popularity contest at the end of it all.

More importantly, who's the real star of 'Hell's Kitchen'? It's Gordon Ramsay, or some other foul mouthed, autocratic, dictatorial taskmaster, who, by swearing at, humiliating, overworking and generally abusing his staff, gets results - food on tables and, paradoxically, respect and loyalty from his team of pinnie-wearing slaves.

(By the way, 'Hell's Kitchen' is just one example of a whole series of reality shows that are about a return to traditional authority (tough love etc) - like 'Brat Camp' and all the other shows that send stroppy teens back to old disciplinary regimes, or 'Supernanny'...

So what lessons about being a boss are all those German execs from Sony learning from doing their own version of  Hell's Kitchen? And what do dpa want them to learn? Is it just about team bonding?

I guess I'm drifting back to my central concern - which I talked about in the last meeting. I'm still not sure what dpa  do and why - what products  come from  their consultations and what are they supposed to do?

Box Of Tricks

Well I've got it! Met Lyndsay out at dpa this morning, have returned home and about to rumage through the contents. On first glance it's a bit light and doesn't look as though they have made a particulary creative response to the brief - for example there are quite a lot of dpa brochures. There are also quite a few CD/DVDs to look at, so maybe there are some surprises. I'll get back to you when I've more to report.