Arts in an Age of Technology

Apparently I Am Going To Be To Blame In The Next Election

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Thanks to a rift in the space-time continuum this weekend, I received this cautionary video dated November 7, 2008 from my future self. Apparently, I will be responsible for great calamity in the next election.

Perhaps it was due to my selfish belief in my own dark horse candidacy. (No embed link so you will have to visit the site. Make sure to watch until the end!)

The first video was put together by MoveOn to encourage people to vote for Obama on election day. The second one just seems to be purely for entertainment value. I don’t know what is involved with the technology but I can see all sorts of potential for the arts. With an ever increasing desire for personal, customized service, I can see this technology becoming more sophisticated and widespread.

You could have personal URLs to a webpage with a video from the point of view of driving up to your venue, picking up a ticket envelop with their name on it and then entering the theatre to see a bubble with an arrow with the words “John and Mary Smith’s seats” hovering over their actual seats.

For a capital building campaign you could have a virtual tour of the proposed facility and have the name of the donor you are courting appear on the plaque on the wall, in the program book, seat plate, brick, etc. And because the technology enables you to fill in the blanks, you can send the same pitch to hundreds of people at a time. You can probably also update wall plaques with the names of those who have already given for those who need the incentive of seeing their names among august company.

I have seen websites where you can upload photos and have faces appear in the video. As you might imagine, it doesn’t always integrate smoothly because of the way the image was cropped, the way faces are turned, etc. I’ll bet within five years someone figures out how to make it work more believably.

Voice overs on the other hand I can see being viable in a shorter time. Make a video of a man and woman who aren’t on your staff. Then record employees reading script prompts “Acme Museum welcomes….”, “…., you will notice the various benefits you can avail yourself of at Acme Museum.”

Then you can go back and have the same people read off names- John (pause) Smith (pause), James (pause) Smythe (pause). Loop the audio in with the video players, insert the names and you have a video where the people are talking personally to your patrons.

The reason I suggest using people who are not your employees is so that people aren’t confused by the actual person’s voice when they meet them in your lobby. Having employees do the prompts and the names preserves the continuity of the voices. As you acquire new patrons you can have your employees go back to the studio and record their names to be inserted. While there is probably significant expense associated with creating something like this the fact that you can record and edit so much of this on a home computer brings the cost down from where it once might have been.

They Took My Beautiful Coke Machine!

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Yes, we lost a good friend today as the guys from Coca Cola removed the vending machine from my building. This summer we had a fire inspection and were told that we couldn’t have the power cable for the machine running under the door into the scene shop. The door wasn’t pinching the cable in any manner and the inspector admitted that it wasn’t necessarily a fire hazard. But apparently safe practice requires we not have the power cord run there even though it isn’t a trip hazard either.

The powers that be decided they would rather get rid of the machine than drill a hole in the wall so it was adios to the Real Thing. Whether this will constitute a safety hazard as people working late at night have to run out to other buildings to get their caffeine fix remains to be seen.

Though I don’t the fire inspectors were really fully aware of it, the history of horrific death tolls in theatres provide ample reason to closely monitor safety operations. One of the most famous theatre fires was Chicago’s Iroquois Theater fire in 1903. This was a disaster of Titanic proportions as the theater billed as “absolutely fireproof” burned down within five weeks of opening due to a series of poor judgments and scrimping and not installing all the fire safety measures they were touting. The fire itself killed 572 people and the death toll from related injuries eventually brought it to 602.

In 1811, 72 people perished in the Richmond Theatre Fire. In 1876 nearly 300 died in the Brooklyn Theatre Fire

All three of these fires occurred in December which may be a sign to stay away from theatres during that month. All of them were caused by light sources. The Iroquois fire by sparks from an electric light that ignited drapes, Richmond by a candelabra that flew out unevenly an lit the drapes and Brooklyn by a kerosene lamp that…lit up the drapes. These are only a few of the many fiery theatre incidents from history.

The theatre going experience is much safer now that technology has moved away from flame based lighting technology and have adopted safer methods and standards for electrical lighting. In the past, as with today, theaters and fire marshals come into conflict over the circumstances surrounding performances.

Of course, many a proactive theatre stays ahead of the fire marshal’s objections by instituting and disseminating safety procedures. Some theatres even have a process for reviewing stage sets at the design stage.

The loss of my soda machine notwithstanding, the fire marshals were pretty fair in their evaluation of our facility. The changes they required were appropriate to the amount of traffic an area got and the training and familiarity with the facility possessed by the main users of those areas. The interaction was certainly not as antagonistic as some of the experiences I have had and stories I have heard.

Getting The Dead To Blog For You

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Thanks to an interview with librarian on my local public radio station, I became aware of a fascinating blog written from beyond the grave. The grandson of William Henry Bonser Lamin is publishing his grandfather’s letters home from the trenches of WW I exactly 90 years after they were written. The first letter, written on February 7, 1917 was published on February 7, 2007. His grandson had to make some allowances in his publishing schedule since 2008 was a leap year and 1918 wasn’t. But he remains true to all gaps in letters whether due to loss or his grandfather being home on leave. Only the Lamin family knows whether the senior Lamin returned home or perished in the trenches. All misspellings, grammatical errors are preserved.

While the same element of a suspense over an unknown fate may not exist for some of the more famous artists in history but the basic idea might be one arts organizations could use either over the course of a season or in the weeks or months leading up to an event. If the letters are accessible, the organization could post them in some manner appropriate to their plan. What was Tennessee Williams writing in his correspondence while he was writing A Streetcar Named Desire? Or Van Gogh when he painted Starry Night? He had committed himself to a mental hospital at the time so it is sure to pique some interest based on that fact alone even if there is nothing untoward in his letters.

A release plan that was paced slow enough not to overwhelm people or make them feel it was a burden to follow but frequent enough to give people an excuse to return to the website regularly could be welcomed by patrons of all experience levels. This could be a good alternative to attempting to have performers and creative teams contribute to a blog during rehearsal and performance periods. A reproduced letter with notations that the untimely death of a sister referenced by a composer were the primary motivation for a symphony will probably motivate a respectable readership.

The biggest negative I could see if this became a common practice is that those organizations with money and prestige will be able to do more research and gain exclusive access to estate letters. But the less affluent arts organization can still flourish by employing more publicly available materials in a manner that resonates with their community.

Little Bird, Will You Sing For Me?

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Short entry today because I am feeling under the weather. I wanted to briefly reflect on my experience appearing on my local public radio’s fund drive.

First of all, we made the goal for the hour which was $500 more than the goal was last year. Even though I am not a public radio employee, I was feeling a little anxious as the end of the hour was approaching and we were still a little ways from our goal. It would be a blow to my pride if they didn’t succeed while I was there. Not only did I want what I was saying on air to be an inducement to pledge, but I was worried that the tickets I was letting them give away as a gesture of appreciation wasn’t being valued by the listening audience. In the end, all the tickets to one of our performances were snatched up.

One of the most interesting things that happened during my time there was that we were getting pledges from people in California and Louisiana. I thought maybe they were from some homesick people listening online. It turned out that the phone volunteers for that hour were self-professed computer geeks and were appealing to people on their extensive Twitter network to pledge. So we had people making $50 donations who never listened to the station based on their relationship with the phone volunteers.

Last month on my Inside the Arts’ neighbor blog, Scanning the Dial, Mike Janssen wrote an entry, “How Classical Stations Could Use Twitter.” I guess this is another use to add to the list. Of course, the use is hardly specific to radio stations. If you and your patrons and donors have an established network, be it on Twitter or some other social network, you might employ this tactic yourself. Renewals may have to be through the same friend rather than your development office because the person won’t have as strong a personal connection to your organization. But this fact will go that much further in convincing your local supporters that their efforts on your behalf matter and are appreciated.