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.
Photo copyright Eric Orns 2000
The Brooklyn Museum used online crowdsourcing to a exciting end, in the conception and delivery of their Click! photography exhibition, in a process which invited the museum’s visitors, the online community, and the general public to participate in the exhibition process.
It began with an open call—artists were asked to electronically submit a work of photography that responds to the exhibition’s theme, “Changing Faces of Brooklyn,” along with an artist statement.
After the conclusion of the open call, an online forum opened for audience evaluation of all submissions (all works were posted as anonymous). As part of the evaluation, each visitor answered a series of questions about his/her knowledge of art and perceived expertise.
Click! culminated in an exhibition at the Museum, where the artworks were installed according to their relative ranking from the juried process.
The results are, of course, online, where the public can engage with discussions and analysis of the work, and the entire process.
While the subject matter may not be for everyone, Michael Scott’s forthcoming production of My First Time is using the internet imaginatively to generate content and build audiences, bringing the term User Generated Content to a new level.
The production is similar in format to the Vagina Monologues (another format which Scott very successfully brought over from the US). In the case of this coming production, the public have been invited to submit stories of an intimate nature on the production’s website. These submissions are then used as material for inclusion the production; 4 actors through the course of the performance take turns to read out a selection of these stories.
I imagine the call for stories could have legs virally (if viruses have legs) and that those who submit their stories would be keen to turn up to see if their story features.
In another example of using UGC to produce material, The Royal Opera Company in London produced Twitterdammerung: the Twitter Opera last month. Composed entirely of tweets from the public, the production was designed to make opera more widely accessible. The Telegraph critic wasn’t bowled over, but concluded “as cheap gimmicks go, this was a good ‘un”.
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