Bradford University and the Centre for Creative & Cultural Knowledge Exchange (C3KE) invite you to Dwell-Time, a one day professional development workshop bringing together Performers, Cultural Programmers, Visual Artists, Technologists and Urban Designers to create new forms of programming and curatorial practice for the display of artistic content in urban space. Showcasing creative work and recent innovations developed for the BBC’s big screen network, the workshop will present research findings on the use of urban screens, specifically in the creative and community context. The workshop is open to anyone with an interest in public art, the use of large scale urban screens for the display of creative content, new media and public space.

Presenters include:
Mike Gibbons – Head of ‘Live Sites UK’
Ava Schiek, Bartlett’s School of Architecture (UCL)
John Foxx (urban artist/musician)
Members of the BBC’s Big Screens Network

For further information and booking details contact Patrick Allen, Bradford Media School, p.t.allen@bradford.ac.uk
01274 236139

A one-day event at the National Media Museum, Bradford, UK

Friday June 26th

Here we are creating professional development opportunities for the creative use of display media, performance and artistic expression in urban spaces and city centres. We’ll be working in close collaboration with Live Performers and Visual Artists in the creation of the programme.

The event associated with this will take place at the National Media Museum – date to be confirmed – but much of the content and interaction will take place online prior to the day and with an event in Centenary Square, Bradford.

Here we begin to use our Web 2.0 tools in parallel with urban screens both experimentally and creatively as part of the build up to a pubic exhibition and event.

Proposition: A new form of public performance and event is available when we consider the combination of media-rich content created in an asynchronous, remote virtual manner – now a natural part of, so called Web 2.0 technologies (skype, facebook, youtube etc) – with the display of media content on large urban screens that are fixed in a specific location in public space and used in combination for the purposes of a specific event in public space.

To think this concept out more fully the following scenarios may be useful prompts.

Three Scenarios

Scenario 1: Senior’s Day

It’s Sunday afternoon during the Urban Screens Conference in Melbourne and it’s Senior’s Day. As part of the public celebrations in Fed Square a live event is set up called “Town Square Meeting”. Four simultaneous “skype-enabled” video feeds of people inhabiting distant locations across Australia are projected onto the big screen. In the Square is a person who is both moderating the conversation between the individuals on the screen and is mediating between the audience in the square and those on-screen.

Scenario 2: Facebook (local)

Liverpool A-Z (a “tenantspin” commissioned project), by Kelly Mark,  is an excellent example of how a combination of Web 2.0 technologies, such as facebook can be used for generating personal narratives about place and location and used in combination with the Big Screen in Liverpool to project video footage, that’s also used as a way of presenting personal narratives of locality and stories about the places people live in. The interesting thing about this is that there are two very different forms of public space – facebook is a form of ‘virtual’ public space and the screens are fixed in major city locations – are here being used as a way of fixing stories into the locality.

Scenario 3: Live Events meets Web 2.0

Take both of the above and begin to see the potential of, on the one hand, virtual/asynchronous/remote collaboration using the kind of co-production networking that can facilitated by Web 2.0 technologies, and on the other hand, the fixing of these virtual interactions and collaboration into fixed locations in real public space via a large urban screen. The screen here is a mediator between the virtual and asynchronous afforded by Web 2.0 working practices; and, the real and live event-based aspects of the urban screens used as a display medium in real-time.

Add to this scenario a human moderator who, for the sake of argument, is positioned on a stage in front of the big screen. They moderate the performance coming in to the screen, whilst simultaneously moderating/conducting the performers/public in real public space.

Initially, it’s worth conceptualizing this as a musical performance, with the moderator acting much like the conductor in a real musical performance who is managing the composition. But they are also acting as a go-between – between the networked performance and the live performance in real public space. However, this is not exclusive to music. There are other forms of performance that are equally as viable in this context. Dance is another artform that springs to mind and adds a further opportunity with the possibility of using data captured from the movement of individuals in real space that’s fed back to the screen. Further possibilities – ones that might simplify the technical constraints of this kind of performance is with storytelling and narrative that largely focuses on text or audio output.

[Diagram]