Duke Special: waiting for your call
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Thanks to Business to Arts for their recent tweet on the Pledge Music site. Readers of artsaudiences.ie may recall that last year we posted an article on Artistshare, a US based web organisation which enables those interested in the arts to directly provide project-specific funding to artists of their choice.
As with Artistshare, Pledge Music enables the individual to contribute at a variety of levels – in the example of Duke Special, £11 will buy you a signed EP, £55 would get a phonecall with the artist, and for £300 you could have dinner with the man himself.
Where the UK based Pledge Music surpasses Artistshare, is in the sense of community it builds around this new media patronage. The site has a high degree of social media functionality, and it incorporates donations to charities at the core of its activity.
Of course a site such as this can only succeed with a heavy inward traffic, and so the websites of featured artists must have links from their site into Pledge Music. Duke Special’s homepage has a prominent link to the Pledge Music site, as well as details of his upcoming Pledge concerts. It all seems to be working for him, he has received pledges 30% in excess of his initial requirement.
Kevin Costner – he built it, and they actually did come
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Whoever said ‘if we build it, they will come‘, wasn’t a web designer.
He was, in fact, the ghost of a baseball player, speaking to a farmer from Iowa. However, ghostly apparitions aside, as anyone who has built a website (started a facebook page/ Twitter account/ Ning community, etc etc) will know, putting something up online is only half the battle, it takes work to get the word out, and to get traffic in.
So while the arts in Ireland is seeing an increasing amount of high quality work occurring online, these endeavours aren’t always getting the attention they deserve. We’re looking to provide a platform to showcase new work in this area, and with any luck to help bring this work to a wider arts public, nationally and internationally.
So, if you’re using the internet to present work in a new way, if you’re launching a dynamic new website, if you’ve a new and imaginative ways of engaging with new audiences online, drop an email to james.kelly(at)artsaudiences.ie. Looking forward to hearing from you!
A recent survey of 18,000 adults in the US by the National Endowment for the Arts points to the fact that while audiences for traditional live performance is slipping in some quarters, an estimated 47 million Americans choose to watch or listen to music, theater or dance performances online at least once a week (ref Washington Post). This is perhaps a sad reflection of the fact that we spend an ever-increasing amount of time in front of our computers! However, arising out of this trend it is heartening to see artists using new media to engage and inspire audiences in imaginative ways.
Eliot Feld, New York based modern ballet choreographer, has for some months been posting a series of imaginative dance pieces to his facebook page. These poetic posts, all of which begin with the words “One dances” can transport the reader momentarily, reminding us all that dance, should we wish to engage with it, is never too far away.
Here we see some of his posts from August & September;
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(thanks to my office neighbour, Laurie Uprichard, Artistic Director of Dublin Dance Festival, for passing this on. If any visitors to the site have anything they think may be of interest, please let me know, I would be delighted to hear).
In their own words, Dilletante is an online classical music hub that connects organisations and musicians with audiences, listeners with recorded and live music, and members of the worldwide classical community with each other.
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David T.Little – Virtual Composer in Residence
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Earlier this month, after an open competition worldwide, they announced that U.S. composer David T.Little would be their Digital Composer-In-Residence for the 2009/10.
Little wins a modest cash prize of £1000, but more interestingly, a year-long residency on the website. This allows him to engage with web-site members through a Composer’s Corner blog, a podcast series, online forums, and masterclasses. His residency culminates in 2010 a live event with a performance of a new work.
Here is a video of the winning piece.
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