Az is looking for a ‘technology provider’ as a partner in the development of our mappa mundi project. We believe we can attract funding from organisations that promote innovation. The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts are such an organisation and they have a Digital Research and Development for the Arts and Culture Fund that they are running in partnership with the Arts Council of England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Could our mappa mundi project be technologically innovatory? Since the project is an investigation of change, it’s worth asking whether there are ways in which it delivers change. I am using the word ‘deliver’ deliberately because any individual and organisation that will support mappa mundi will have to be satisfied about delivery. What links technological change with social change and how does a project that is focused on ‘cultural action’ relate to these kinds of change?
Just as social change is intensified by the current recessionary economic crisis so also is the pressure on technological innovation. In orthodox economic terms the crisis is like a vicious circle where a failure of stability causes a failure of confidence. In this situation investment slows down and the prospect of increases in productivity (not just the amount of goods produced but the relative amount of labour that it takes to produce each amount of goods) decline. Profit, the source of investment, must be directly related to unit costs and demand. If costs can be reduced through technological innovation then investment, all things being equal, will flow towards that enterprise. Of course technological innovation can be more easily and commonly seen to be related to the development of a new product rather than the improved efficiency of the production of an already existing one. However all products are related as commodities to the satisfaction of human need (illusory or real!) and they are linked in terms of the disposable income of buyers by relations of substitution (buying A instead of B) or complementarity (Buying A because you are buying or already own B).
In a period of recession people will look more intensively for innovation in order to create competitive products and enterprises. However, of course, investment in innovation after the Research and Development stage (characteristically and generally financed through the state) may be slow to arrive. Mariana Mazzucato makes a brilliant and acerbic attack on the private sector ideology of the current government in The Entrepreneurial State. She points out that almost all the major technological innovations have happened through state finance and development, a prime example is the internet. She also explodes the illusion that, for example, the health care programme in the US does not depend on state funding. She points out that every single major pharmaceutical development has been state financed.
Nesta’s main work on innovation and the arts is ‘The Culture of Innovation: an economic analysis of innovation in arts and cultural organisations’ by Hasan Bakhshi and David Throsby, a research report for NESTA. They struggle to find a basis on which to talk about how innovation can impact on the arts. They restrict themselves to institutions (their report is based on the Tate and the National Theatre) and therefore cannot really interrogate how innovation may arise from the arts practice itself. They leave in tact a model of the relationship between artists, funders and the audience that makes it difficult to see how innovation may be able to break down those elementary categories. For example, in participatory arts the audience/artist relationship is reconstructed. Augusto Boal expresses this dynamic relationship in the context of theatre by the neologism, ‘spectactors’. However the use of an institutional model is understandable given that innovation has to be defined more widely than that which is directly attributable to technology. In this Bakhshi and Thorsby follow Miles and Green’s 2008 report for NESTA on the creative industries in specifying that innovation can take place at the level of the governance and managerial structures of the firm, in the production or preproduction stages (how research and development is organised in relation to and within production), in the actual product, in the user experience and in communication (with suppliers, for example, or users). This enables them to use a broad definition of innovation and gives them a basis for looking at four categories of innovatory impact.
One is concerned with the ‘reach’ or ‘depth’ of the audiences relationship to the experience of art. This is to do with interactivity and in their description they verge on the realisation that the audience may in some respects be the makers and that digital technology may have a specific impact on participation. This is highly relevant to mappa mundi and because these basic categories form the criteria for the judgement of applications to NESTA’s fund this is an important indication of the direction of the conversation we can have with NESTA.
The second is concerned with art form development, the third with how value creation is measured and the fourth with management and governance. All of these aspects of the impact of innovation on arts and cultural organisations are relevant to our project.
mappa mundi aims to bring together the vibrancy and creative fertility of the drama space, (the rehearsal room or studio ‘floor’, the performance or location space) with the quickness, interconnectivity, interactivity and inclusiveness of online space. The inspiration is social networking. We are interested in rephrasing the relationship between online space and live events. For mappa mundi live events are the meetings of participants making mappa mundi and also meetings of participants and audience viewing and experiencing the exhibition/performance stage. These spaces are as linked, for example, as the virtual space of social networking with the live space of Tahrir Square during the revolution in Egypt in 2011.
So the technological design is crucial. The site will not simply be a means of collection and distribution but a source of inspiration, always precipitating live events. This means that the sensitivity of the systems is crucially important.
Also, digital technology will enable innovation in the art form. The hybridity of the mappa mundi, (the videos that will be uploaded) could be rich; maybe soap opera, thriller, horror, documentary, flashmob, pop promo, dance video forms will intermingle and new idioms and forms of expression will be found by participants.
The visibility of product and how an uploaded video will impact on the total design of the interactive space will depend on technological ingenuity. The ways in which participants and potential participants can respond/assess/comment on mappa mundi will have to connect fluently with other evaluative processes. The co-curation and moderation systems will be based on ‘radical trust’ and this will be a keynote for the management and governance style and procedures of the project.
The capability for the online space to be both a collection and delivery point and a source of inspiration is specifically to do with the dynamic interactivity between the functional design of the space and the ‘toolkit’ or ‘toolbox’ that people will download as a guide to the making and uploading process. These elements have to be able to sing to each other. The technology and design have to be as close as dancing partners.
I don’t think mappa mundi will be creating technological innovation. For example we have to ensure that the site and its full functionality is accessible from moderately advanced computers. We have looked at ‘second life’ technology but will not be using programmes requiring a high throughput or digital broadband consumption. The innovation in our project will be to do with the creative use of digital technology and using already existing technology and combining it with offline activities in imaginative ways.