We had a great meeting with some very nice people at MADE last Friday. To continue this blog's general obsession with the weather, it was a very unpleasant day... rain, wind, cold, a full house of fetidness. I had wet feet by the afternoon as we were trying to film outside for part of the morning. Could have picked a better day. We may have to relocate to LA for the next shoot... But I digress...
MADE are a regional version os CABE - into sustainable cities, quality design, community involvement and the such. We've come across lots of their previous work, using artists of various types to uncover hidden aspects of cities and towns. Anyway, they have a really nice office in an old canal masters house in the middle of Eastside, and we had a meeting with Julia and Stef to talk about how they might be able to help us with the project. Stef made me a nice cup of spiced apple tea.
They were really clued up on the creative / artistic / community engagement side of things, while also being embedded in networks with planners and regeneration bods. Both of these things were of great interest to us.
The main things to come out of the discussion were that they could help make our end of project event much more than just a one-off thing. They have two large function rooms on the ground floor, and offered them to us to for the event, which is wicked as we hadn't found anywhere suitable. The rooms are just the right size - about 15'*20'.
Julia suggested that we don't call it an end of project event, but an 'Eastside Laboratory', where we get lots of different groups of people to come in and engage with the project's outputs. She suggested getting the local community in, but also hosting a day for planners and local regen bods to try and get some of the work to feed into policy and masterplannig for the area. We liked that idea. This also made me think about the possibility of getting some follow up funding based around the idea of knowledge transfer... MADE were really into making it policy relevant in some way, so this seemed like a good idea all round.
She also suggested that the lab could run for two weeks to a month, and we could get school kids in too. This would also help them fulfill their educational remit. They also mentioned maybe 'branding' the event for us... god knows... we need some help with our brand...
Funding was also discussed, with reference to the event itslef, and how to facilitate turning some of our outputs into forms of art. Julia suggested that an Arts Council bid between us and them, with three of four named artists including briefs of what work they would do might be a goer. It would also be useful to orient this towards making art relevant to the community and policy makers. She said she might be able to make a few calls and see whether the Arts council people would be receptive to such a suggestion.... Beyond that, it appeared that both the project and MADE might have enough odds and sods floating around in various budgets to make the event happen anyway.
The timing would be critical - in order to prepare as fully as possible, but still fall within the project timeframe, we settled on middle of sept 2008. so we need to put boot to ass in order to get these funding apps in by Easter. Must speak to Dan about it, he wrote us something that would be appropriate for the arts council bid a few months ago - need to find out whether he has done anything with it yet.
The details of what exactly to do in the lab were discussed, although no firm decisions were made. Consensus was that it needs to involve ICT, and be interactive, although this would mean that tehcnical support would have to be available. It would also need to 'be done right' in order to have a positive impact.
Stef mentioned something called mediascapes:
http://www.mscapers.com/home
Their description of a mediscape reads as follows:
"A mediascape is a collection of media fragments associated with
positions in space. You experience the media fragments as you walk
around the space." http://www.mscapers.com/home
the software can be used on a GPS handheld device as far as we can ascertain, and we were all excited about the possibilities of using some of our outputs in this way... further investigation needed though.
Anyway, it was only an hour and a half, but we covered a lot of ground. We were singing from the same hymnsheet (as it were) and it really felt like we had something to offer them and vice versa. if only all meetings were as pleasant and productive. Stef even offered to introduce Jane to some of the hidden parts of digbeth. cool.
then it was back out into the rain...