Arts and media partnerships – Partnership potential

The potential for collaboration between arts and media organisations is growing phenomenally. Andi Stamp explains how arts organisations interested in fusing arts and media can take advantage of a new atmosphere of innovation.

Change is afoot. A growth in digital technology and markets is impacting massively on broadcast and media industries just as the audiences and revenues of television companies are threatened by the proliferation of terrestrial, cable and satellite channels. The convergence of television, the net, mobile media and interactive television (cross-platform media) has caused a rapid expansion of audiences and markets. Potent, unknown spaces are opening up. The broadcast and media industries are hungry for cross-platform programming that captures audiences? appetites for new content and experience. Yet the capacity of these industries to invest in research and development is severely limited by the demands and restrictions of their changing situation.

New audiences

This has provided exciting opportunities for artists to work with the media to develop new content that connects contemporary arts practice with broad popular distribution. The subsidised arts sector offers considerable creative research and development capacity for ?knowledge transfer? with the media industry and commercial sectors. Effective media and arts partnerships offer exposure to new and expanding audiences with an enhanced impact on culture, which works to the mutual benefit of both parties.

This potential is being recognised by entrepreneurial arts and media organisations. BBC Radio regularly works in partnership with music festivals to broadcast live programming. Newspapers and magazines sponsor art exhibitions and events. The BBC and Channel 4 have produced, and continue to produce, media arts programming. The Year of the Artist pioneered artists? residencies in media organisations. Increasingly, arts commissioning agencies produce television and media programming. This reconfiguration between the arts and media sectors is being played out against a fundamental shift in the national psyche. The traditional British hierarchical divide between high art and popular culture is beginning to fragment. To take advantage of the situation we need to develop translation and negotiation skills that synthesise new forms of art and media cultures.

A recent project I initiated, ?Shooting Live Artists?, offered several organisations exposure to some of these skills. Produced with the BBC and made with leading and emerging live and media artists including Blast Theory, Forced Entertainment, Third Angel, George Chakravarthi and Lisa Wesley, the project formed two series of combined Internet, mobile media and live art programming. Relative to its scale (a budget of £170,000), the project performed remarkably. It had a national impact, attracting significant audiences and national and international press attention, and generated significant economic development. ?Shooting Live Artists? became the BBC?s highest audience-rating media arts website and the work has subsequently toured nationally and internationally.

Making it happen

Realising a successful arts and media partnership requires the application of skills that arts producers use daily: research, fundraising, negotiation, programme delivery, marketing and promotion.

– Research enables the arts practitioner to see where connections, needs and opportunities are. A working knowledge of broadcast and media production practice is invaluable, but the advice or partnership of a media producer will help.

– Many producers in the subsidised sector have developed the skills to attract and utilise funding. The application of Arts Council, Film Council, European Regional Development Funding and other investment sources can provide the capacity to successfully secure production and distribution commissions.

– Negotiation and brokerage of media arts commissions is seldom effective without an existing relationship; the recruitment of a media producer can help here. The success of a partnership depends on how effectively the different perspectives of artists, media producers and broadcasters are managed and combined. Keep talking!

– In addition to solid nuts and bolts organisation, scheduling and budgeting skills, programme delivery depends on being able to anticipate problems.

– By working with a major media organisation you will also have access to their marketing and promotion capacity. Contemporary arts practice is able to touch the raw nerves of contemporary culture. If the programming realises contentious ideas accurately, the press and media will take notice.

Publicity

In working with the media, the subsidised sector could learn a lot from commercial arts sectors such as music, clubs, advertising and the art market. It wasn?t too difficult for Brit Art to attract national headlines. However, there still lurks a residual belief among many arts organisations that promotion and marketing are suspect, dark arts, coupled with a thinly veiled resentment in the arts community that the press and media do not cover the arts with the critical and theoretical literacy they merit. This is a critically uninformed position. Get to know your friends. Publicity can take many forms. There is a considerable amount of ?critical? writing out there, be it in the broadsheets, art magazines, the academic press or art websites. If that sort of coverage is what you want, that?s where to go and get it.

Arts Council England and The Film Council are developing new media art initiatives and getting in touch with them, regionally and/or nationally, is a good place to start when planning a project. Or you may wish to be even bolder and get in direct touch with broadcast and media organisations. You?d be surprised how open they can be to an informed, creative and constructive approach. The media production trade association, the Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television (PACT), has an extensive list of media commissioning editors, which is an excellent place to start making contacts. The Film Council and Regional Screen Agencies have information on media production companies.

Andi Stamp was Director/Producer of Shooting Live Artists and is now working on Fuse, a project utilising, Internet, interactive television and mobile media arts. e: [email protected]. See also http://www.bbc.co.uk/shootinglive, http://www.skinstrip.net/index_archive.htm and http://www.newaudiences.org.uk/downloads/sla_summary.pdf