Brave new world

While change is nothing new, the rate of change is staggering, resulting in fresh challenges and opportunities. This relentless evolution is the result of the widespread adoption of affordable and pervasive connected technologies. These technologies are revolutionising creative processes, offering artists new ways of reaching, engaging and collaborating with each other and with audiences. The once distinct line between consumer and producer is blurring. Content is now digitised and uploaded to the web. It is copied, shared, and remixed by myriad connected creative communities. Established notions of ownership and intellectual property are no longer fit for purpose. On a more positive note, for small creatives at least, direct access to audiences becomes easier and the gatekeepers that used to control access become less important. One-way broadcast is replaced by two-way conversation and collaboration. Gone are the days of passive and captive audiences. They have been replaced with vocal, opinionated, sophisticated audiences who will not be duped by second-class content and who expect to be listened to.
Bridging the gap
Established media organisations struggle to keep up with this new fragmented yet connected world order. While they flounder finding out where they fit into it, the small fleet-of-foot innovators do what they do best: make a lot out of a little. Small creative companies have always had to act entrepreneurially. With a little help, these entrepreneurs could fuel the innovation engine and pull us out of this current economic slump. This plethora of independent and small creatives, given the right opportunities and structures to create, collaborate and share, could hold the key to a successful, sustainable economy. The UK has a healthy stream of edgy creativity running through its core: an ecosystem of innovators motivated not by money, but by a need to create, innovate, make new connections. The players at the edges of the mainstream, previously only seen by a minority, can reach and influence large audiences and gain real traction in this new landscape.
Creatives at hierarchical, sales-driven organisations only think outside the box within established boundaries. The ‘indie’ creative, however, can bring originality, irreverence, and an entirely different skill set into mainstream culture, but there is a gaping chasm between commercial and creative.
b.TWEEN, an interactive digital media forum, aims to bridge this gap, by providing a creative platform that catalyses and develops cross-sector and cross-disciplinary relationships between creativity, commerce and technology. We first started exploring this powerful hinterland in 2001, with ‘Shooting Live Artists’, a commissioning stream designed with forward-thinking officers from Arts Council England and a BBC department willing to take risks. The scheme invited live artists to use connected technologies to reach new audiences in new ways, and commissioned works from artists including Blast Theory, Forced Entertainment, Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth. The first six works were celebrated at an event at the Saatchi and Saatchi headquarters: a commercial agency inspired by the innovation and experimentation that happens at the fringes. Those commissioned artists were asked to open up their development processes and learn through peer exchange sessions with cross-sector audiences.

Need for change
The open ethos of these early events is now applied to our open source commissioning processes. Our schemes take decisions from behind closed doors into an open space where our growing online community is invited to vote, comment and help select the final commissions. We believe in transparency and harvesting the collective knowledge and experience of our diverse communities.
Arts funders have supported many commissioning schemes that have enriched b.TWEEN’s, leading to the creation of significant intellectual property. The arts funding sector is not set up to support cross-sector, cross-disciplinary activity. Each year we hope for regularly funded commissioning schemes to catalyse and support cross-sector activity, and each year we are disappointed. We feel strongly that as public funds continue to shrink, new, cost-effective funding mechanisms should be explored that link artists to the commercial world, supporting cross-sector innovation and helping them move away from grant dependency. Pioneering projects that explore this find it tough to struggle against tides of risk-averse bureaucracy and fear of failure. Organisations that catalyse activity between ‘creatives’ and ‘suits’ will become increasingly important.
Funding organisations too often take the path of least resistance, resources are too often used to pay yet another consultant to write yet another report, or to subsidise established institutions whether or not they are relevant or sustainable in the evolving digital ecosystem. Funding agencies should support producers and catalysts that are close to the coal face and that have a history of delivering. New infrastructures should support creative talent through mentoring, training and an investment framework that encourages rather than frowns on experimentation, risk and failure.
Copyright should be remodelled to incentivise, not stifle, creativity. Successful innovative businesses of the future will come from collaboration between creativity and commerce. Successful twenty-first century models will be those where connected collaborative creativity is the driving-force, supported by shared knowledge and experience. If this economic meltdown forces us to try working in different ways, experiment with new models, learn to get more from less, maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all.