New Hospital Art

Here's a piece from the Public Art+Research Scotland website about the two projects at the new Stobhill and Victoria hospitals, for people who might be interested in following some of the process of commissioning and installation of the works.

Collaboration

Here's a quick presentation about collaboration - from macro to micro - for the MA Creative Media Practice students at UWS.

Collaboration

View more presentations from generalpraxis.

Events

I promised an update on events in the New Year, and here it is, all the way into February.

Most of these are connected more with our work in our full time employed state, rather than anything freelance or independent, but Jackie and I thought they could well be of some interest to the readers of this blog.

So here they are, in roughly chronological order:

At UWS, we’re launching Ayrtime, on February 19th. This is a unique and elclectic series of events at funky new Bar Libertine in the heart of the town. This is the brainchild of fantastic (now ‘local’) artists Chris Dooks and Eleanor Thom. Ayrtime has an astonishingly interesting lineup, including alt-folk, astronomy and poetry, drones, travelling cinema, and edgy Glaswegian performance writing. Tickets are free courtesy of UWS and this is an important building block in our plan to engage much more thoroughly where we are, as we move towards the opening of our lovely new campus in 2011. If this works, expect more Ayrtime events (and podcasts) into 2011 and beyond.

There are two Arts and Health conferences coming up in Scotland, both of which Jackie has been involved in setting up (and at which she’ll also be speaking). The first is in Aberdeen on 24th February, and it's been organised by Grampian Hospital Arts Trust.

The second is in Glasgow on 23rd March, entitled 'Spaces In Between' which includes an interesting lineup of speakers including both Scottish Ministers for Health and Culture and Juan Bautista Peña and Inés Sanguinetti from Crear vale la pena in Argentina, alongside many others.

There’s also the Creative Choices Festival at the UWS Paisley campus on 9th March, at which the Sector Skills Council Creative and Cultural Skills will be launching their ‘Creative Choices’ careers advice portal in Scotland. Graham will be contributing to the conference and Jackie will be speaking at a workshop in the afternoon. The lineup has something for most tastes, including the launch of UWS' Scottish Video Games Archive, a talk from crime writer Christopher Brookmyre in the evening and a late night acoustic session from some talented UWS musicians in Caffe Luna to round off the day.

In March we begin a series of seminars exploring practice-led research at UWS. Plus some exciting PhD studentship opportunities, lectures, screenings and workshops, and work with CCA and Film City Glasgow. More details to come soon.

Christmas reading and listening, 2009 edition

It's that time of year when the pace slows and it becomes possible to step back a little. This blog has been exceptionally quiet, partly because I've been busy elsewhere, trying to build up stuff over at UWS - and the UWS tweetstream will give you an idea of the kinds of things we're doing. Lots of interesting developments planned for 2010, but we'll save announcing them until January in case they get lost in the festive haze.

In the meantime, here's a quick roundup of some of the books, music and film and other media that I'm consuming at the moment (in no particular order)...

Art School (propositions for the 21st century): a pedagogic compendium/manifesto for the changing face of art schools in this new millennium

Lots of bits of Bourdieu - including The Logic of Practice and Michael Grenfell's very useful edited primer Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts; this is in preparation for various streams of thinking, including the revival of a proposed series of events around 'Art and Money' and some workshops exploring the ramifications of so-called practice-based research> (oh, no, I'm beginning to give away some of the info I said I'd hold back until January...but there's plenty more to come...)

And I'm looking forward to getting stuck into ex-UEL colleague Tim Lawrence's biography of NYC musician Arthur Russell - Hold on to Your Dreams; which explores the connection between individual creativity and the networks/rhizomes of the NYC downtown music 'scene' in the 70s and early 80s. Russell was one of those technological pioneers and individual musical visionaries who worked across forms and genres long before this became routine...



Michael Sorkin's "Twenty Minutes in Manhattan" - a minor masterpiece of microscopic cultural studies, in the form of a series of essays exploring the twenty minute walk from his apartment in Greenwich Village to his studio in Tribeca, with plenty of detours, literary, historic and geographic. Great little book in a tradition of street-level urban studies with lots of eclectic and illuminating insights - ultimately humorous, playful and optimistic set of proposals about how to live in cities better..

Experimental Geography: radical approaches to landscape, cartography and urbanism; this excellent and provocative book accompanies a travelling exhibition over in the US. Partly a manifesto for a slightly more practical and, dare I suggest, socially useful, form of cultural/artistic intervention in the situationist tradition.

I'm interested in the conversations going on over at Art Work: a conversation about art, labor and economics; and I've yet to properly digest the various media outputs from the Institute for Distributed Creativity's conference on The Internet as Playground and Factory. Holiday reading? Not sure where the line between work and leisure/pleasure is there too...

On the music front, the generalpraxis page at last.fm has various bits and bobs. Planning to catch up with a bit of composing over the next couple of weeks - working on the music for another Anton Califano documentary - about the slightly surreal Glenrothes by-election.

The Solitary Life of Cranes

Here's a film I wish I had been involved in making. Excellent. Very polished. Great sound, effective music, superb editing, wonderful cinematography. Very thoughtful. Absolutely makes you look at the city in a new way - and makes me nostalgic for London!



Here's the director Eva Weber talking about the film. And the whole film is available to watch (I don't know for how long) on 4OD.

All somewhat in the same vein as The Seafront. A nice clean stream of that film has popped up on the BBC Film Network here.

Keith Floyd

I'm sad about the death of Keith Floyd. Not that it was particularly unexpected - it was easy to see that he'd been in a slow unravelling process for years - but because he was one of the great iconoclasts of British cookery. I grew into cooking watching his programmes with my culinary mentor, my aunt Clare Jeffery, in the late 1980s. His chaotic, passionate approach (which, despite the buffonery, was always underpinned by a rigorous attention to detail in ingredients and processes) opened up a world of possibilities. Gastronomy didn't have to be stuffy, and it didn't have to be difficult; Floyd made it popular and fun.

After Floyd, television cookery could never be the same again. The collaboration with producer and cameraman created an almost Brechtian approach which meant that all the joins, snips and tricks of the trade were laid bare. Floyd artfully and wittily mocked the pretentions and conventions of food TV. The tributes from his successors make it pretty clear that he built the foundations - the informality, the documentary approach, getting out of the studio and into the open air and 'ordinary' kitchens - on which their own towering careers rest. And he worked fast - bashing together the dishes with ebullience and humour, his confidence inspiring the same risk-taking extravagance in others. In that sense perhaps he also embodied the 'live now, pay later' ethic (if it can be called that) that has come somewhat unstuck over the last couple of years. He was flawed, he was rude and difficult, but he was also a brilliant, inspiring cook: a culinary artist.

In the '80s, food taste was changing fast, fuelled by the ever-widening availability of ingredients from across the globe, rising affluence, and the consumerism that Mrs Thatcher unleashed on UK society. Floyd stood for decent ingredients, the pleasure of cooking and good company. He changed the way food was talked about on television, and he played the bon viveur in a way that secretly perhaps many wanted to emulate, despite the destruction that it caused in his life away from the cameras. His shows and his story contain all the seeds of the media forms that have come to dominate the next two decades - he became the apotheosis of the celebrity chef, with books, personal appearances, and all the other paraphenalia of fame - without Floyd there would be no Jamie Oliver, Rick Stein, Gordon Ramsay and the rest. And to his shows he brought a postmodern wit that appealed directly to the viewer, inviting the audience to help to unpick the processes of documenting how to cook, even as it celebrated them.

Here he is, cooking with a family in France, in a clip which captures all that was great about his approach. The Keith Meets Keith documentary is pretty compulsive viewing too but I guess this is how most people will prefer to remember him.

On the road again

Two events coming up which Graham is involved in; both look pretty worthwhile (in our opinion):

Sensescapes: Day of workshops/talks at the British Music Experience, 02 (formerly Millennium Dome!), London
1st October 2009

Cape UK Conference: Creativity: Luxury or Lifeline? National Media Museum, Bradford
30th September 2009

Click the links - more details to follow

Creative Media Practice at UWS

In my day-job at the University of the West of Scotland, we've just launched our new MA Creative Media Practice, starting this September. It's is new and innovative programme focusing on the development of knowledge, understanding and creative and technical skills in the fast-moving areas of screen and broadcast, digital content creation and the wider creative industries, including audio, performance and digital arts.

Although based primarily at our Ayr Campus – which has some of Scottish higher education’s finest media, broadcasting, and recording facilities – parts of the programme may also be delivered at Glasgow’s Pacific Quay, and it's also likely that we'll be doing some projects and workshops at Glasgow's CCA, where UWS has just become a Cultural Tenant. Some of the intensive workshops, such as screenwriting and creative documentary, may also be offered as residential 2-3 day or one week events.

Aimed at graduates from a wide range of disciplines, and industry professionals seeking to enhance or diversify their skills, the programme has been designed with industry input, including consultation with Scottish Screen and Skillset. We think that the programme will appeal to experienced professionals looking to consolidate their work or even thinking about a change of direction. We're hoping to build a dynamic learning community and encourage lots of collaboration across the programme.

And we're very pleased to say that under a new initiative from the Scottish Funding Council, just announced, a number of funded places are available for part-time postgraduate diploma study of this programme (which covers the first half of the course).

There's more information here and you can contact the programme leader, Tony Grace, directly at Tony.Grace@uws.ac.uk.

Information Harvesting

It's very easy to harvest information these days - and I'm an avid delicious user as those familiar with this blog will know, which I've now combined with getting stuff from Twitter. Together with all my RSS feeds, that's more than enough information to process per day, quite apart from trying to do my work properly.

So to badly paraphrase Marx, the point is not to have lots of information, but to do more with it. Not only harvesting and interpreting information, but hopefully changing the world with it. There's no point having knowledge at your fingertips if you're not resolved to make something with it. Social media makes possible plenty of sharing, tagging, tweeting and repeating, but that's just the start. The real issue is how to construct new knowledge and useful ideas out of this enormous information flow. Which takes concentration and the avoidance of distractions. It's easy for the information ecology to just become a parade of diversions.

And the second point, which I'm very conscious of, typing with soil under my fingernails from digging in the garden for most of the afternoon, is that screen and web is only one small source of information. There are just as significant news feeds and inputs to be had from face to face, person to person, place to place, person to planet interaction. The web is one part of the knowledge ecology, but there's a bigger and wider social web that underpins it. What's important is to get a balance, and to make real time for considered thought and action. So an afternoon of potting up tomato plants and beginning to cut back the overgrown branches will also, hopefully, provide a decent harvest further down the line.

There's something very satisfying about aching muscles and dirty hands. It's not particularly healthy to live in a cleansed, sanitised, polished and endlessly mediatised world week in, week out. And so I think I'm going to try to weed out my information flow a bit and try to improve the signal to noise ratio, rather like need to cut back the brambles in the garden.

Semantic web, and other searchbots

Amidst the hype about Wolfram Alpha I stumbled on this site at MIT - the "START natural language question answering system". So I thought I'd warm it up with an easy question:

Does God exist?

And I got this response:

Teacher Artist Partnership: a new resource

Teacher Artist Partnership Programme

View more presentations from generalpraxis.

We're about to publish the resource pack for the TAPP (Teacher Artist Partnership Programme). In the meantime (complete with dodgy fonts created by the conversion process to Flash in slideshare) here's the presentation that Anna Ledgard and I made for the Creative Partnerships professional learning network back in March.

Leverage

I've been struggling to stay optimistic, putting it mildly, over the last few months. I've also been deluged by deadlines, many of which I've not met. But this post isn't really about my state of mind, it's more about the state of the world. As any good ecopsychologist would suggest, there's always a connection between the two. And I've been trying to get to grips with the implications of the financial crisis. It's hit our household hard - even with two decent jobs we've been struggling to maintain our overleveraged lifestyle and it's limited my mobility a lot - starting a new job, not having much spare money and trying to keep on top of a massive mortage and household maintenance bill hasn't left me with much time, cash or, frankly, inclination to 'get out there' and keep my networks going. So I've found myself in a very introspective frame of mind - which is one of the reasons this blog has been so quiet.

Which is interesting. One realisation is how much my work over the last ten years has depended on maintaining networks, and the huge hidden subsidy the family and the household has put into the maintenance of those networks - whether that's fronting up travel expenses and increasing the headroom on credit cards, days and nights time spent away from home, and the way the frenetic pace of work has taken away time from other, perhaps more important concerns, like making sure that that family and friendships are well looked after and the garden isn't full of weeds. As I wrote in 'The Creative College', a huge amount of invisible labour and hidden transaction costs get attached to collaborative ways of working, which the rhetoric of 'partnership', especially when promoted by the powerful, tends to ignore or marginalise... So I've been slowing down and trying to work out the most important things, but like most other people, have been transfixed and horrified by the scale and speed at which the economy - both globally and very personally - has unravelled.



Man on Wire was one of the films of the year for me. It's hard to say exactly why but I liked the small pun and massive metaphor of a tiny man tightrope walking between two massive phallic symbols of capitalist ambition; I liked the way the film invoked the experimental spirit of the 1970s in which demanding the impossible was still a realistic dream; and I liked the moving meditation that was necessary to keep Philippe Petit alive and on the wire.

It's an example to everyone: find the wire you want to walk, and focus your attention on it; and nothing is impossible.

But at the same time the film was sad - Petit's single minded, obesessive focus on making that monstrous journey destroyed his relationships, his friendships and left everyone around him bereft. A huge spectacle, a huge achievement, but ultimately an existential contract between life and death, an individual and the abyss. And the word 'poignancy' is too weak to describe the symbolic power of that playful act of cultural terrorism that Petit and his co-conspirators achieved in the more utopian days of the early 1970s, especially in the light of subsequent events.

So there's always a balancing act between work and play. It's one which is hard to get right, especially when the flow of money dries up as a social lubricant. And I've been as guilty as anyone else at single-mindedly persuing my various obsessions, wth the result that I"ve burnt up far too much cash trying to keep it all going. So we're having to live differently - as one lucid commentator put it - it's like the restaurant bill has to be paid after the party's over. Ultimately that restriction on money may be a good thing: it's a cleansing process that is forcing everyone to face up to what really matters, and leave other things behind. (But I'm aware that this is an easy thing for me to say, especially as even despite the economic strictures, our household has plenty of options and opportunities - and that's not true for a lot of people who, unlike Sir Fred Goodwin, have been left behind on the breadline in places like Ferguslie Park.)

Living in an overleveraged economy turns us all into tightrope walkers. Another friend, who understands money much better than me, had this to say in a recent blog post about debt:

"Minsky said that debt narrows your opportunity – it limits your future. It took me a while to work out why he was right. If you think about debt as a liability – whether personal, corporate, or national – for every dollar of debt you need an asset on the other side of the balance sheet. For an individual that asset may be your house, or it may be a portion of your future earnings. The key point is that you become beholden to the value of that asset. If it goes down, because house prices fall, or the job market sours – you’re in a pickle. However lean and mean you are. If, on the other hand you’ve got plenty of cash – a lot of fat – on the asset side of your balance sheet – that gives you a great opportunity – in a sense it’s a potential future income stream. You might choose to be lazy – work short hours and commune with your couch – or you might start a business or write a book."

So, when you're carrying debt (in my case an overextended mortgage and rather too much other debt) the tightrope strung between risk and opportunity is very taut indeed. Like a lot of people of my generation, I've been leveraging my skills and abilities but haven't been so clever at preserving cash and watching the bottom line. And now the bill has come in.



And I"ve turned back to William Basinski's incredible piece The Disintegration Loops, the story of which (especially with its 9/11 postscript) so aptly sums up this decade:

"In the process of archiving and digitizing analog tape loops from work I had done in 1982, I discovered some wonderful sweeping pastoral pieces I had forgotten about. Beautiful, lush cinematic truly American pastoral landscapes swept before my ears and eyes. With excitement I began recording the first one to CD, mixing a new piece with a subtle random arpeggiated countermelody from the Voyetra. To my shock and surprise, I soon realized that the tape loop itself was disintegrating: as it played round and round, the iron oxide particles were gradually turning to dust and dropping into the tape machine, leaving bare plastic spots on the tape, and silence in these corresponding sections of the new recording. I had heard about this happening, and frankly was very afraid of this happening to me since so much of my early work was precariously near the end of its shelf life. Still, I had never actually seen it happen, yet here it was happening. The music was dying. I was recording the death of this sweeping melody. It was very emotional for me, and mystical as well. Tied up in these melodies were my youth, my paradise lost, the American pastoral landscape, all dying gently,gracefully, beautifully. Life and death were being recorded here as a whole: death as simply a part of life: a cosmic change, a transformation. When the disintegration was complete,the body was simply a little strip of clear plastic with a few clinging chords, the music had turned to dust and was scattered along the tape path in little piles and clumps. Yet the essence and memory of the life and death of this music had been saved: recorded to a new media, remembered"

Perhaps some of the economic carnage will lead to some more radicalisation and even political polarisation, which might be a good thing. The political landscape suddenly seems much more like the 1980s, which is strange to behold in the months I approach my 40th birthday. We seemed to have left those days of less fuzzy politics behind in the Blair bubble - (now there's someone who managed to flee the crime scene at the top of the market and leave his aides to pick up the pieces!- a bit like the trickster Petit!), and the smug parade of bankers walking off into the sunset with multimillion pound pensions while the towers of capital crumble, makes the dividing lines seem much more sharply drawn. But there are some interesting emerging ideas floating around about opportunities to rethink how we live in the wake of this disaster. I'll try to chronicle some of them here and over at Creative Crunch.

Spawning blogs

It seems that from the loins of generalpraxis a number of offshoot blogs are springing. For the sake of completeness, here's the current list, apart from this one:

Museum of the 70s - an eclectic collection of resources, links and occasional musings about culture, design and society in the 1970s

Museum of the 80s - much the same, but smaller for the 1980s

Repetition Machine - a liveblogging experiment in social news media started on Obama's election night and continuing sporadically

And a new one: Creative Crunch: exploring the impact of the recession on the so-called 'creative economy'

...and I'm finding socialmedian an interesting way of gathering and aggregating news stories that don't always find their way to the top of the big news agenda. It's still a bit geeky but that could change over time...

Repetition Machine

It's interesting how this election has turned into a huge swarming experiment in social media. As I watch the coverage unfold, partly to keep myself amused in the lulls, I"m going to aggregate the various sources and tools I'm using into a new blog called Repetition Machine.

This is partly because in the last three hours I've found myself watching five different US news networks, listening to 6 different radio stations, browsing 3 or 4 different newspaper websites, using del.icio.us, digg, facebook etc etc. Such is the hunger for information. Or maybe I'm just informationally dysfunctional or deranged. Maybe it's just a substitute for 'being there' whatever that means. Maybe it's because there's only me and the family here in this lonely old house in Scotland to share talking about the election with. Where is 'There' anyway? But this has been a hypermedia election and really is the greatest show on earth right now.

A kind of virtual newsroom. Earlier this week I posted a video clip of Gil Scott Heron's "The Revolution Will Not be Televised" to my facebook page. But thinking about it I"m not so sure. This is no revolution in the Marxist sense but it is a revolution in some ways, in how politics is conducted. It's just a shame that so much of what is said is virtually content free, and still panders to the usual suspect platitudes. What is "Change We Need" anyway? But Obama's campaign has touched on a powerful emotional need for a sense of connectedness and community that has been woefully absent through the Bush years. Anyway, for more rambling like this, head over to the Repetition Machine.

Autumn

The light has suddenly changed; we're getting long shadows and golden early evening sun slanting across the garden; the temperature has dropped; autumn has definitely arrived in this part of western Scotland. Our food growing efforts this year have been nothing short of pathetic - this is the remnants of the vegetable patch, which mainly has provided delicious meals for the slugs throughout the summer months.



Nonetheless the garden has given us a magnificent crop of blackberries. For next year I think I'm going for more passive cultivation - so potatoes, herbs, and fruit trees and bushes. Nothing else seems to work...

After a hiatus

It's been a busy and tumultuous summer, and this blog has been very quiet. However, it's back. A roundup of some recent news from the generalpraxis stable:

Graham has a new job, as a Reader in the School of Media, Languages and Music at the University of the West of Scotland. That means that the freelance side of his work is likely to abate for quite a while but he'll keep updating this blog with useful snippets of information and occasional posts.

The report The Arts and Community Radio, which Graham did a lot of work on back in 2006 has now been published. You can download it here.

There's a new academic journal focussing on participatory and 'community' arts - which Graham is on the editorial board of - The Journal of Arts and Communities.

Creative Scotland?

This is an edited version of a talk I gave last week at a half day ‘thinktank’ exploring what vision the new body Creative Scotland (formed by a merger of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen) should have for ‘learning and skills.”

Building creative capacities

How is Creative Scotland going to make a distinctive contribution in a very crowded field of policy and practice? And what should its ‘vision’ be?

There is a tendency for people to talk about creativity as if it were one thing. In fact there are many different kinds of creativity and many different Scotlands. That’s a source of social strength and cultural richness, but although glib elisions of ‘learning, skills, creativity and Scotland’ alongside photographs of kids with video cameras, crowded auditoria and enthusiastic library users might conjure up images of national success, competitiveness and innovation, it will take a lot more than the rhetoric of a knowledge economy to produce a knowledgeable and talented society. Getting the headline narrative right is important but it will be no substitute for enabling people to make real changes.

We shouldn’t just assume that learning and skills can be boiled down to one thing either – in fact you can probably be trained in ‘basic skills’ without learning very much, or at least developing the capacity to learn for yourself. But perhaps creativity and knowledge are two sides of the same coin, and ‘skills’ all the different ways in which the coin can be flipped, and if Scotland is going to be a place which develops the skills of its whole population then creativity is going to be vitally important.

Knowledge isn’t raw information, it’s the capacity to interpret, process, analyse and create new ideas from existing materials. Skills aren’t just measurable competences that can be ticked off on learner profiles; to be genuinely skilled is to possess a kind of artistry which is the capacity to go beyond the routine and everyday, and mobilise tacit knowledge, intuition and a deep sense of purpose and possibility – in whatever field you happen to be working.

Of course Creative Scotland needs to promote the value of creative and cultural learning, but there are three important caveats:

1. Not all forms of culture are necessarily experienced by audiences or participants as 'creative'. A lot of cultural and educational institutions have a lot to learn about creativity, even though aspects of their work can teach us a lot about creativity too. Moreover, different communities find different value in different kinds of cultural activities – there can be no single arbiter of quality in a complex culturally diverse society.

2. Science, technology, management and accounting can all be creative too

3. The challenge is to articulate a vision that is inclusive and inspiring, but not vague

As a colleague from the US, Mat Schwartzman, who has a talent for one liners, puts it:

“creativity is a muscle”

which can be used in lots of different ways.


Creative and cultural policy?

In policy speak there tends to be elision of creativity and culture. The official line tends to stress the economic benefits of the creative economy – and have a strong rhetoric about capacity for innovation and supporting ‘excellence’ in cultural provision – but:

• creativity and cultural questions can be uncomfortable and challenging
• culture can give rise to knowledge that doesn’t fit easily into official versions of the knowledge economy,
• truly innovative and creative work challenges consensus - curators, commissioners and customers have to cross the lines between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the traditional and the avant-garde, all the time if you want work that is going to be challenging
• a lot of the reasons why people participate in art and culture aren’t primarily economic, but artists still have to eat...

If we agree that creative and cultural learning is important then Creative Scotland needs to be a champion of a country in which everyone can experience creative learning.

For me, creative learning is fundamentally about a sense of agency, of being able to make and remake, of being able to invent – in small or large ways. Not everyone will innovate (that is to say, embed their creativity systematically and change social or technological processes) but everyone is creative – and the notion of promoting creativity as a life skill is important – a skill not just for work (although that’s important too) but a muscle that can be exercised at all stages of life, in all situations. It’s welcome that this is clearly flagged in the public thinking around Creative Scotland to date.

Creative Scotland will need to address:

• training for arts and cultural, and media professions – building and advocating for the infrastructure in Scotland for this – and addressing issues of funding, pathways, and partnerships along with all the other agencies responsible for education and training

• professional development and professional learning for practitioners in the creative industries at all stages of their career, from entrance to exit

• learning about and valuing culture across all sectors/segments of learning

• lifelong learning and community learning, experiencing and learning through different media and the arts

• the contribution that artists, cultural institutions, and storytelling through media make to placemaking, well-being and quality of life.

• how culture creates a sense of distinctiveness and identity. It’s the quality of cultural expression that gives a place its distinctive characteristics – and this cultural expression appears in architecture, in design decisions about the built and social environment, in literature and storytelling, in fashion, media, cinema, radio, television, and everyday language. Culture is the conversation that a society has with itself on a daily basis. So learning and culture are totally intertwined.

I worry about Paisley, where I live, when the most visible monuments of its incredible cultural heritage, other than a lot of great 19th century architecture in fairly poor condition, are black and white photographs of Victorian mill workers on the walls of Morrisons supermarket. The everyday disconnect with the place’s incredible cultural heritage – and potential - is evident in the lack of ambition for the place, which often seems to be limited to more supermarkets, more retail sheds, more service centres, more motorways, more low grade jobs. That’s no recipe for a cultural or creative renaissance. Other towns and cities in Scotland with a similar history have fared rather better – perhaps a job for Creative Scotland is to champion the ways in which culture and creativity can contribute to place-making in its broadest sense.

And we know that although the arts, culture and media can make an important contribution to the economy, they are also there precisely because they speak about those things that can’t be accounted for or measured.

The arts are too important just to be left to the market.

Creativity and Scotland’s cultures

Creative and cultural learning isn’t just about more entertainment, beautification and aesthetic appreciation – bread, circuses, monuments, or classic texts - but also about engaging in dialogue and debate – isn’t that what effective learning is supposed to be about? Culture is a conversation – sometimes it’s a constructive dialogue, sometimes it’s loud, vocal, dissenting, difficult, sometimes obscure and hard to understand, sometimes direct and to the point.

Scotland has a fantastic heritage of critical dissent and activism which continues to be kept alive by new generations of artists through places like Citizens Theatre in the Gorbals, the Greater Easterhouse Arts Company, Craigmillar, and in communities in the Highlands and Islands that have sustained an incredibly rich cultural life on very limited resources.

Scotland has big questions to confront and I’d suggest that the arts, film and theatre do this rather better – you get more subtle and nuanced responses - than the politicians generally do.

There will be many Creative Scotlands - the commercial and the subsidised, the classical and the vernacular, the traditional and the popular – and lots of different types of work. In fact, especially in a small country, many workers move almost seamlessly between these worlds and perhaps its better not to get too hung up on the distinctions. On the other hand it’s important to understand some of the differences. Paying for the time of some musicians and some artists to undertake some artistic experiments in a cave and make an experimental film, like the one I worked on with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Durness last year, is a very different proposition to trying to produce a No 1. single or the next big movie made in Scotland.

But without the creative soil to grow the big moneymaking trees in, they will fall over and dry up for lack of nourishment from the grassroots (to over-extend an already over-used metaphor).

We need a vibrant commercial media/culture industry, we need a strong education/training sector and we also need not for profit organisations. We need to recognise the value of informal participation and the work of the voluntary and community sector, because culture and creativity is too important to be left to the marketplace. So a learning strategy needs to acknowledge all this and ensure it provides more than the minimum for all. This is a considerable challenge/balancing act because each of these sectors speaks different languages, has different antecedents, and different expectations. There’s a translating and negotiating job to be done. But value can be found in linking together the formal and the informal and developing conversations between different communities.

A second related issue, which it’s really important not to overlook, is what I call the informal creative economy – i.e. all the activity around and on the fringes of the officially recognised cultural sector. If we’re talking about the creative economy we need to pay attention to the shadow economy – the ways in which people find ways in – not just the official economy. That includes voluntary participation, informal clubs and associations, and the role of religious, ethnic and political affiliations in making meanings through cultural activity.

The simplest way to do this is to make time and space for people to do their own thing. When I think about my students working flat out in breaks between lessons in the studio to rehearse and record, I realise that those sort of informal learning places and spaces, because they are immersive and self-organised, are often more productive for musical learning than formal instruction. Room 13, which is developing offshoots all over the world, explores similar ideas using the visual arts and a radical commitment to learner autonomy, from Fort William. But because policy money usually has to be attached to measurement of outputs, for reasons of ‘value for taxpayers’ etc, there is often a squeeze on space for informal experiment. When public funding is attached to creativity, there will always be tension between ‘delivery’ (delivery of what?) and incubation (preparing for the unknown).

I suspect that the strategic potential of arts and media activity to support cultural cohesion and sustain community development, as well as the tourism, retail and media industries, are still not fully understood by government agencies and policymakers, who sometimes confuse the ends with the means. Culture does not exist to ‘deliver’ social policy objectives, but there is plenty of evidence that participation in cultural activity can lead to social gains. However, artists are artists precisely because they don’t want to tow the line and because they can offer a different perspective to established orthodoxies. Grit and challenge are important – part of a democratic culture.

A confident and vibrant society would be one in which there are creative opportunities – in which quality of life, health, and a sense of wellbeing, engagement, and citizenship are all present.

Ideas

So, to conclude, here are four ideas for the dimensions of a possible vision to consider:

1. Infrastructure issues – the institutions and networks which provide the learning opportunities – how they work, how they are funded, how they are supported, how they can collaborate and build shared agendas. Because resources are scarce, collaboration tends to work better than competition but people in educational and cultural institutions need to learn how to make these work better...

2. Intelligence issues – helping practitioners and participants to access knowledge and skills – to advocate and publicise work, to access the learning resources that they need – given that a lot of artists and cultural practitioners have a pretty precarious existence it will be important that Creative Scotland is forward looking, strategic, helpful and a source of good information and intelligence...

3. Innovation issues – professional learning and development to make creativity sustainable, and systemic change in the cultural sector, in the education sector, in the public and private sector which embeds a vision of creative learning not just in the school curriculum but throughout all stages of life

4. Inclusion issues – how to maintain open and participatory institutions, remove barriers and obstacles to participation, enable dissent and difference and embed a sense of opportunity – I was really pleased to see the idea that formal/informal learning will be woven together in the new Curriculum for Excellence – that’s an essential ingredient of creative teaching and learning

To which perhaps we could add a fifth – internationalism – not just taking cultural products from Scotland and the UK to the global marketplace (although that’s important) but also to exchange learning – with europe, the US, the developing world, etc. and to understand that forging links and networks with like-minded people globally will be the way to build a sense of momentum and opportunity around this work.

In a difficult economic climate, advocacy and innovation will be crucial and it’s really important that we don’t just have retrenchment to the tried and tested given that public money will be tight – therein lies a failure of nerve and ultimately this will also lead to economic failure, as well as further social divisions.

Culture and creativity provide the tools to make sense of the world – to tell meaningful stories – to make sense of the present and to build and imagine possible futures.

So – let’s hope that Creative Scotland will be funding work which is catalytic, which moves the debate forward, which isn’t about duplication, and which builds capacity for creativity...so that the all the different Scotlands can train, build and flex and their creative muscles in the years to come.

Folkestone

Because I’m the external examiner for the new degree in performing arts based at University College Folkestone, I got the opportunity to have a morning walk along the seafront on Friday. Folkestone has been the lucky recipient of considerable private investment in the shape of local philanthropist Roger de Haan’s Creative Foundation; there’s an ambitious and brave plan to reinvent the town as ‘Creative Folkestone’ with massive investment in built environment, in artists premises and in education and training, including a new Academy, a performing arts centre and a university centre. Certainly the Coastal Park and the range of new places on offer are impressive enough – it seems like nicer place to live and visit than it was when we were there in the mid 1990s and the town is blessed with a great microclimate and fantastic links to Europe and the rest of the South East. But severe inequalities, divisions and difficulties remain, probably exacerbated by Kent’s antiquated policy of selecting out affluent and middle class kids and putting them in grammar schools.

The next few years will be critical for Folkestone’s regeneration. Perhaps the creative stuff will give it an edge, but in spite of a forthcoming high speed rail link to London I suspect that in these difficult economic times the town’s resilience will be sorely tested. Property prices are plummeting, and what really caught my eye was the strange erasure and the remaining traces of Jimmy Godden’s Rotunda Amusement Park, which mysteriously burned down a few years ago, the site bought up by Roger de Haan and now the subject of yet another masterplan – photos here, together with a video of the rollercoaster from the days when it worked.

Evaluation

The Scottish Arts Council has just published an evaluation of the first two years of Jackie's work at the greater Glasgow and Clyde health board. It makes interesting reading, particularly for those concerned with how to sustain innovation in large public sector organisations...

Events, happenings, consultations

A few events, publications and bits and pieces forthcoming:

With CapeUK we have launched a consultation on the resource pack for TAPP (Teacher Artist Partnership Programme), which provides template exercises, pedagogical models and literature for those involved in joint professional development programmes for teachers and artists. Get in touch if you would like a copy to be emailed to you. We are seeking responses and will publish the full version later in the year once we have got some feedback.

The 5th Arts and Medical Humanities conference, organised by the Association for Medical Humanities, is at Glasgow University between 8th and 9th of July. Jackie will be presenting a plenary session on architecture and design for new healthcare spaces in Glasgow.

Void International has been resurrected for a conference in Manchester between 19th and 21st June. The Void blog has more details.