Seth Godin Is Talking About Tribes
Seth Godin talking to a room full of arts marketers at the Capacity Interactive‘s Digital Marketing Boot Camp for Arts Marketers and he, quite rightly, says that everyone in the world, but these groups in particular, needs to think about organizing groups of highly energized people instead of trying to interrupt people in the course...
A Question To Help Individuals Working In The Arts
I wrote this as a comment for Diane Ragsdale’s excellent post on digitisation in the arts, and some of the different thinking about new trends and technologies surrounding the question. It got a good bit longer than I had intended, and I think there’s an interesting thought here. Instead of framing questions for “the field...
David Smooke’s Imaginary Audience
About a month ago David Smooke wrote a great piece for NewMusicBox called The Audience Does Not Exist. In it, he argues that imagining “the audience” in your head, and then trying to write music in order to please it, is basically a fool’s errand. He argues that it’s much more sensible to trust your...
Steve, Usability, and the Gradient Audience
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. The tributes to Steve Jobs, and this recent blog post from Ian Moss on usability studies in arts programming seem like a good jumping off point. The thing I’ve always loved about Apple products, and the thing I’ve sometimes found irritating about Apple products, is...
More thoughts from the FMC – intersecting art and marketing
Commence the heresy: art and marketing are fundamentally the same. There’s a reason that Jim Henson‘s work flowed so easily from commercials to purely Muppet-based stuff. Both the artists and the marketers are trying to make awesome experiences. But marketers are trying to get you to buy stuff because of that experience (or recommend a...
Fantasy Software inspired by the Future of Music Coalition 2011 Policy Summit
It’s still day 1 at the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit 2011, and I’m sitting in the conference hall as I write this. Talking to Glenn from ReverbNation, and listening to this morning’s panel on ticketing has me thinking about software. Specifically, I’m thinking about how text analytics (machines that can read and understand...
Summer’s Twilight video libretto
Earlier this month Rose Ginsberg and I got together a group of actors to workshop some mime sections of Summer’s Twilight. We spent the afternoon trying out different things, working scenes till they gelled, and filming the process to create a kind of video libretto. The filming was as low-key as you can get, just...
The .doc file of J. Alfred Prufrock
A friend of mine just posted this on facebook, and since it’s a fun webby parody of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, I thought I’d post it here. You can hear Zachary Herchen playing my setting of the poem for acting saxophone here.
“Making Of” vs. “Actual Thing”
Eddie Izzard did this British political ad, a party political for the Labour Party. It’s good. But the ‘making of’ video is totally amazing, and they just made it as a side thing to what they were ‘officially’ doing. It’s more convincing, it’s funnier, and it’s even got the key political slogans. Take a quick...
I always get ideas at concerts
I don’t know what it is about live performances, but I always get ideas in concerts or plays. Something about seeing other artists working live always sends my mind straight to whatever project I’m working on. Last week I saw Sondre Lerche and Scott Alexander live, and I came out with two good ideas about...
Busy Week
This has been a busy, busy week. Last Thursday, the film version of The Seafarer screened at a Thesia Arts event. The film, not quite finished, was very well received. It was screened in the company of about a half dozen other films, including experimental mixed media animation, a pop music video, a rather elaborate...
Good Meeting
Last night I met with Summer’s Twilight director Rose Ginsberg, and a potential scenic designer for the piece. In the short term we’re hoping to develop some concept art to help promote and develop the work for the next phase. Of course, in the long term we’re going to actually have to create a practical...
