Part of my role as Digital Champion has been (and continues to be) supporting the Fun Palaces around the country to fold the digital (and digital culture) into their activities and practices. Not digital as marketing (tweet what’s happening), or distribution (live stream what happens) – but as a practice, as art, as science, as a material that you work with. This involves a lot of reassuring people that digital is not ineffable/scary, and that a good deal of digital culture and practices are totally accessible at a community/DIY level. The 2 pieces of advice I find myself repeating the most is “sometimes the best way to be a digital artist is to know when not to use digital – do what suits you and your context, not what you think you should do”, and “digital doesn’t mean the internet, it doesn’t even have to involve unusual technology, and it definitely doesn’t have to involve learning to code”. Digital culture suffuses contemporary culture – it’s (for example) in the language of ‘interactivity’ (which in reality is often misused and misinterpreted, read this old blog post of mine if you’d like to read more on the difference between immersion and interaction and how we understand the grain of the material interaction we work with).

The best of digital culture (there are bad and difficult bits to it, like any) is in the playful, the interactive, the collaborative, the sharing, the giving of a platform to those who might not have had a platform before (I won’t insult all of our intelligence by using the phrase ‘democratising’ however), the constellation and re-constellation of micro communities around interests, stories, funny things. Yes. Cat Pictures. There’s also burgeoning aesthetics, video games have been going long enough that people are no longer necessarily looking to make things like look SUPER UNCANNY REAL, but that use a digital aesthetic – look at some different forms of this in Kentucky Route Zero, Super Time Force, or The Yawhg for example. These are still decisions tied to budget and time constraints, but they are also self-conscious styles.

Anyway, you can read more about this approach in the Good Ideas toolkit I sent out to all makers, and which is available to download over here.

Mostly what I wanted to do in this blog post is demonstrate the kind of process I go through when I support a Fun Palace with thinking about how to fold digital/digital culture into their activities.

So here are 3 conversations I’ve had, from context, to ideas, to possible outcomes:

1. Context: A school with a new building that will be welcoming a new wider intake of pupils in September – some limited number of iPads and interactive whiteboards, main resource is staff. The school has invited local community groups to run activities, most of which are craft based.

Suggestions (three):  – Minecraft is HUGE with primary school age kids at the moment, suggest a mine craft exhibition for adults to show what their kids are making

– kid experts – part of the ethos of Fun Palaces/Joan is ‘everyone an expert’ – often children are always being taught but aren’t valued for what they know/can offer, why not ask kids what they’re experts in that they could teach adults – possibly with a computing emphasis

– pixel art as knitting patterns. One of the groups doing craft on the day were a team of machine knitters, I suggested it might be nice to get kids to play around with pixel art which would really satisfactorily translate to a knitting pattern.

Outcomes: the one that chimed the best with the school was the pixel art project – I explained that they didn’t need computers to make pixel art, graph paper and felt tips will do, and they suggested it might be a nice way to pull together the new community of their school – to populate a scene with hundreds of pixel art children (paper or a digital scene). We then began to work on how to present and develop the task.

2. Context: A London borough dance centre who will be co-running a Fun Palace across the borough – particularly working with lots of local businesses. They have a large old building with a rich social history. They are opening the clock tower of the building especially on the day. They have someone collecting old memories of the building when it was used as a dance hall, or a wedding venue, etc.

Suggestions: It sounded like the biggest asset for the centre was also it’s biggest barrier – they have a great resource in the grand old building but it also isn’t a place some people in the borough would ever think to go. I made 2 main suggestions:

– a playful activity that crossed between local businesses and the venue, and out into the surrounding public space – a treasure-hunt style game that would have points of discovery in all the co-operating local businesses (which would be a good match for them too – getting people into their shops/pubs), and that you could discover the trail of in the surround area. That crossed from venue to community and back again.

– using the rare opportunity for members of the public to go up into the clock tower (which only fits one or two people) where you can see all over the Borough to exhibit the stories collected from old and current users of the building. A gentle sound collage played on loop, with 5 minutes slots set aside for people to go and listen.

Outcomes: Both ideas appealed, so they’re talking to the team about it before developing them further. I also put a call out for local digital artists to respond to their general call for ideas, and suggested they connect with a nearby art college and their digital art output.

3. Context: A largely text-based theatre collective are co-hosting a Fun Palace with a large arts centre. They are an all-female collective and they have commissioned 16 short plays by and to be produced by female characters around the idea of ‘what feminist theatre can be’. They weren’t sure where to start with digital but possibly wanted to hold some kind of debate over Twitter/online.

Suggestions: The thing about twitter is that it’s good for incidental chat but for genuine and nuanced debate it can get quite annoying quite quickly; likewise it’s hard to engage people online, there’s lots of distractions, besides, why would someone want to be online just to have a debate? ‘Interaction’ can be a really interesting material to work with when it’s well understood, but the question “why would someone want to interact with this/care about this” isn’t asked often enough. People are much more likely to engaged in a balanced, careful, and invested manner if they’re all gathered together for a specific amount of time, in my opinion that’s the best way to have a debate – although social media can still be a powerful way of disseminating what people say and of letting people know it’s happening – maybe by sharing your provocations or relevant thoughts or quotes on a hashtag on the run up to the day.

– The main suggestion was in response to the text-based activities – I suggested they create a 17th Twine commission as a way of creating a reactive narrative in response to the same provocation. Twine is a ‘choose your own adventure’-style text game engine that’s very simple to use. There is a little more meeting between audience and author in that context, and they could even have each 16 writers write a different route for it (it would have to be curated and edited so the paths interconnected satisfactorily) – a Twine game could be projected onto a surface from a laptop so that any number of laptops running it could be viewed by others as the game is played.

Outcomes: The Twine idea appealed, so the organiser was going to talk to the rest of the collective and then work out next steps/any guides or explanations that need doing, and think about presentational context with me. I also connected her with a female game designer very local to the organisation by asking on Twitter, and they planned to meet.

So, as you can see, there are DIY/community-based ways of responding to the digital for a really wide variety of Fun Palace contexts! If you want to ask me any questions or run anything past me, just get in touch, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. HN@funpalaces.co.uk