Dominic Smith - Transcript
Dominic Smith: Transcript
Bill Thompson, chair:
Next up we have Dominic Smith who is digital project manager at Tyneside
Cinema. We’re going to talk about Tyneside’s engagement with digital assets and
digital material over the years and his current role, and give us some insight into
how a resolutely venue-based institution – a darkened room with a good sound
system – can engage with the potential that digital has to offer.
Dominic Smith:
Apologies if I seem a bit nervous, I looked at the delegate list before I stood up,
so... Suddenly you get that sense of impending doom that you’re actually
preaching to the choir. I’m having that right now so you’re going to have to indulge
me as I go on. So, the title of this piece is Pixel Palace, which is entirely Bill’s fault.
Bill thought of this name... When I first started working here in September I saw Bill
and said “Thank you, I think you’re responsible for my job, thank you.” And now I’m
looking at him and thinking “It’s all your fault!” [laughs].
The Pixel Palace is a really interesting digital arts program here at the cinema. I’ve
been working here since September and when I came for my job interview here I
kind of left thinking “Oh my god, I’ve done a terrible thing” because I sat down and
had to give an example project – “what do you think would be a good project to do
here?” – And I said “Radio station”. And I went home and held my head in my
hands, thinking I went to an interview at a cinema and said “Should we run a radio
station?” [laughs]. But actually the team here were really on board with that, so I’m
going to talk a little about the reasons why I thought that would be a good idea.
So, to kind of touch on something that Bill talked about actually I’m going to talk a
little bit about boot-strapping – has anybody come across the term ‘boot-strapping’
before? I think it originates with Baron von Munchausen pulling himself out of the
swamp by his own boot straps... so it’s a kind of metaphor for a self-sustaining
process that requires very little to start it. Just to lay it out for a minute, when you
switch your computer on it goes through the boot-strapping procedure, so a tiny
little program will start a bigger program, and then a bigger program... and it
increases until eventually you have the graphic interface that you use. So the
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Dominic Smith - Transcript
process here, and I’m going to talk about this case study, is how we’re bootstrapping broadcast capacity.
Now something that happened while I started kind of thinking about making notes
for this talk – while I was making the notes this thing called Turntable FM appeared
in the world – has anyone come across Turntable FM? Before I had finished
writing, it was already locked into North America because of copyright issues, so
we can’t go on it anymore. We could only go on it for a couple of weeks, but it
looked like a lot of fun at the time [laughs]. Turntable FM was just basically a chat
room where people could share content. So by sharing content, DJing for each
other... and that desire to share your own material really drove it. And I think this
was the first of many of these kinds of experiences that are going to be made
available.
So how are we doing this? One of the things we’ve been doing and kind of the ‘on
button’ for the boot-strap process here has been to take advantage of the cinema
program. We have directors coming and talking here quite a bit about their work so
I was able to stream those talks for starters, just to get an idea of how the
infrastructure would work in this building. The actual technology itself is believe it
or not surprisingly easy, and has been around for a long time. There are a variety
of servers you can use, from Showcast to iCast to Flash QuickTime – they all
basically do the same thing, which is to serve up media to your computer. That
works by sending a single signal to the server, and the server multicasts it out to
as many listeners as you want.
One of the game-changers recently has been the fact that people can listen to this
stuff on their mobile devices, so it’s taken this experience from a ‘lean in’
experience, where you’re ‘leaning heavily into the computer’, hand on mouse, eyes
glued to the screen, really getting a bad back - to a ‘take anywhere’ kind of
experience, where I’ve been doing experiments on the small Metro route in the
North of England to see where we get dips in signal, so to see how long people
can listen to streams on their way to the cinema - so there’d be potential to have
shows and events happening in the build up to people arriving here, to kind of
extend that experience. And I’m pleased to say the only dip is in Jesmond. Of all
places [laughter].
In terms of practicalities, I’m going to talk money here, and how small
organisations could start this process. For a streaming server you’re looking at
about £200 a year – not for a massive amount of listeners, but enough to get
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Dominic Smith - Transcript
started and to build that capacity and to build that experience. Again, podcasting is
a great way of archiving live events – you’re going to need a few basic bits of
equipment, which I’ve put in there. However, you’ve probably already got them.
And then you’re going to need licensing, and if you’re looking at licensing then you
start to look at different types of capacity. So the first stage in this boot-strap
process would be to get the small microcaster licenses, which as you can see
aren’t terribly expensive.
I’m actually from an arts and curatorial background, so I’d like to talk a little bit
about what that means to this program and what this means to broadcasting. So it
turns out that arts are really good at finding new uses for technology really, aren’t
they? I heard a talk a while ago by a chap called Miller Pukette, who is the
developer of a program called Pure Data, which you can use to make your own
multimedia software etc. He was probably quoting someone else, but he said “If
you give an engineer a hammer they’ll read the instructions. If you give an artist a
hammer he’ll just start hitting things with it.” Which is one of the first reasons that
I’m really interested in working with the arts to find new and unexpected uses for
this technology.
I’d argue that art has been at the forefront of uses of new technology from the very
onset, from the early Dial-A-Poem experiments by John Giorno, through to a chap
called – I’ll struggle with this guy’s name – G.H Hovagimyan, who is a New York
based artist I was looking after at an interview a couple of years ago. He had been
involved in a bulletin board system in the ‘80s called “The Thing”. A bulletin board
is kind of a pre-Internet, really early system for exchanging messages. And he had
produced this piece called Barbie and Ken: Politically Correct- which you can
imagine. He released a picture a week, which was like one of those Jackie annuals
with speech bubbles etc. with Barbie and Ken in compromising positions.
But the point that I’m going to make here is that he had gone around various
galleries in New York, cap in hand, looking for an exhibition. He went to a gallery
called YK Arts in Manhattan, and he was kind of begging for exhibition. And the
door went, and the guy said “Oh just two minutes, I’ll go and answer the door” and
then he looked at the computer to find that his work was the screensaver on the
curator’s computer. So he had kind of bypassed the whole gallery system where
you have to work your way through – he was already in the gallery without
knowing it. So this is also the sort of thing that I’m quite interested in as broadcast
as an artist’s space – not just a means of marketing artwork, but actually a space
for artwork to exist in its own right.
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Dominic Smith - Transcript
And to get to that point really we have to look at the curated model. Now, I would
argue that a curator’s job is to do with interpretation of the work as well, and there
is so much going on out there that we’re really getting to the point now where we
need to look at how we present our information to other people, and how we
manage that content. And one of the important factors is gate-keeping. Now I’m
from a sort of hacking, open-source background, and the idea of gate-keeping
might seem quite foreign to that. But in actual fact, the open source models have
very strong levels of gate-keeping to stop someone taking a piece of graphic
software and turning it into a music sequencer, as people tend to have these crazy
ideas on the internet. So it’s really important that we look at how we gate-keep that
process.
So revenue – I think probably a few people are interested in revenue, and I’m not
sure that I have great news about it being a major source of revenue. What I can
tell you is that not only will it bring you audiences but it also engages with the
existing audiences, and finding out what they want, and building a sense of
community around your work. One of the things we’re developing, and that I’ll talk
about later, is we’re having the artists who are involved in the broadcast
communicating at the same time as the broadcast is going out with the audience,
at the same time, to build that sense of community and to have that conversation
as the work is going out. And then doing that, I suspect that we will also get more
people coming into the building at that point, as an organisation. I’ve put
micropayments in there, because well, everyone puts micropayments in under the
revenue heading, don’t they. But there is the possibility of desired content being
funded by micropayments. Not in a kind of ‘pay-to-view’ way, but in a kind of ‘kickstarter’ way, where people would fund future content that they’re interested in
being developed.
So the future for Pixel Palace really, where we’re taking this at the minute, is that
we’re going to be doing... well we’ve just successfully received a GFA application
from the Arts Council, so one of the things we’re going to be doing with that is that
we’re going to be releasing a series of monthly broadcasts and developing a series
of monthly broadcasts, as we increase capacity. We’re in the process of
redeveloping the websites, as you can see there- there’s just a tiny bit of it. But the
important factor is the ‘Launch Radio’ button that we’re developing. So that will be
one of the first things that happens when you go on the website, rather than
“What’s on”, “Isn’t this cool?”, “Look at these pictures” – you’re going to be straight
into that shared space. And this monthly broadcast is building up to a collaboration
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Dominic Smith - Transcript
with the AV festival, to produce a month-long 24hr a day broadcast in collaboration
with Vicky Bennet, who goes under the name ‘People Like Us’, and we’re talking to
Goldsmiths as well at the moment. So that’s where we’re heading in terms of
capacity, and we’re building capacity – we’ve still got a way to go. One of the
things that this enthusiasm led to was a larger project that is currently going under
the title Popule! But a Latin title isn’t necessarily the most accessible title for large
groups of people, so it’s now the Culture Network, and it’s working across the
NGCV network in the Northeast of England – ‘NGCV’ is ‘Newcastle, Gateshead
Cultural Venues’ – that’d be a real faux-pas to get that wrong at the moment! –
And in doing that what we’re developing is a collaborative structure to do larger
broadcasts and to prepare the way for internet protocol television. Which has
taken on a life of its own at the moment. So there is that small grassroots, ‘getting
things done’ level, and then there’s this much larger system that’s coming out of
that enthusiasm.
I’m not sure if I’ve gone over or under time... I’m fine... So, in 2012 after the monthlong broadcast we’ll be working more towards video as well. We have done a
series of video streams from the cinema, and what we found was that the early
stream process – it was really quite disheartening, just to let you know, if you do
start doing this – you put a lot of effort into something and get like five listeners,
which was devastating news at the time. But one of the important factors is to keep
doing it, to keep going, and to keep going regularly, because people expect it to be
a place to go to at a certain time to find certain things. And if you don’t provide
those things they don’t come back. So you just have to keep going and going and
going. We started off getting five; the last time we did it we streamed Mike Hodges
in the cinema and we went over capacity – we couldn’t keep... the server wouldn’t
let anyone else in to listen and to watch. Especially when Alan Armstrong came
on, telling jokes about bees for some reason, we maxed out. And the chatroom
aspect of it was really useful as well to keep that conversation going and to make
people who weren’t physically in the venue feel like they were still part of the
conversation, still part of the event. I think that’s all from me!
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