SHINE is a festival taking place in Sunderland from 21-31 January 2010, it will transform the city in to an urban garden made up of dramatic projections, interactive games and magical light shows.
The Sumo team developed the promotional campaign for the festival, as part of our ongoing work to promote Public Art in Sunderland and we will be joining the crowds in the city centre for the launch next weekend.
This strange contraption arrived in our studio today, it is a large wooden pinhole camera from Poland, and it joins a growing collection of primitive photographic devices which we have collected as research for a new exhibition which will be taking place in Autumn 2010.
Living in the North East I am spoilt for great cultural days out. This Christmas NewcastleGateshead have a fantastic programme of activities like The Enchanted Park (pictured above) which I visited last weekend.
Check out the whole NewcastleGateshead Winter Festival programme here.
At the Arts Marketing Association Digital Marketing Day last week there were some useful points raised regarding creating Twitter content. I thought I would put together some of the main ones in a blog post.
1) The importance of re-tweeting
2) Dealing with negative feedback
3) Planning to speak to each of your audiences
4) Lovelinks
5) Meeting your audience
6) The method not the result
7) Calls to action
And one final point which is much broader than just Twitter but, I thought important enough to be worth mentioning here:
I have spent the last few days in the Netherland’s attending and speaking at Kom je Ook? 3 (which roughly translates as ‘Are you coming’) an event run three or four times a year by MediaMatic in Amsterdam.
The theme of the event was ‘The audience as programmer’ and it brought together speakers from the UK and the Netherlands, it was a wonderful conference which I appreciated all the more for having recently organised MuseumNext.
The first speaker was Fiona Romeo from the National Maritime Museum in London, who had some lovely examples of audience participation. I really liked a piece from artist Chris O’Shea which used the big screens that the BBC have in Liverpool to engage the public.
In these a giant hand appears from high to tickle, flick or even remove from view unsuspecting pedestrians. See a film of this here
Fiona was followed by a presentation by Joost Heijthuijsen from Dutch arts festival Incubate, about the Social Festival Model that they have been developing. This is basically an open source format for an arts festival which see’s them trying to create organizational co-creation by asking the public for input in to everything from marketing plans to strategy documents which are all available for anyone to edit on an online wiki.
This is a really fascinating project which I have bookmarked to learn more about, I am both amazed and in awe at an arts organization being so brave and so open.
Joost was followed by a case study about participation without technology and a short presentation about how you get people to participate in social media, and then my own keynote on ‘coproducing the museum’.
This was followed by a number of pitches, from five individuals who wished to win a workshop to help them to apply for funding to develop there idea’s in some way.
These were:
A curator wanted to develop an educational game in his museum, which would turn kids in to detectives and his venue in to a boardgame.
A group who wanted to set up a website which would allow fans of bands to group together online to raise enough money to book a place for that band to play a gig in there city.
An idea which surrounded commissioning five pieces of art which would only appear on mobile phones.
Grannypedia which would record the knowledge of grandparents and make this available online.
Virtual collections which was a plan from a new media company to digitize museums and place them online in a 3D environment.
One winner was selected by the audience who had to scan their RFID tags on umbrellas held by those pitching idea’s and the other by a jury which I sat on.
The winner from the audience was the website which would bring together music fans to co-operate to get the bands they loved gigs in their home town and the winner from the jury was the grannypedia.
Kom je ook? is well worth a trip to the Netherlands, and I am sure I will return as a delegate next year.
Durham’s bid to be City of Culture took a big step forward this weekend with the Lumiere Festival which seemed to be a fantastic success. I went on Sunday night when the city centre was full and had a really exciting buzz about it. People were enjoying the mix of stunning, giant spectacles and interactive, fun installations. The son et lumiere show at the Cathedral was particularly breathtaking, with projections telling the story of the building, even showing it being ‘built’.
The feedback on the Lumiere website and Twitter makes a few comments about the minor details of the organisation of the event but is mostly really enthusiastic, some people even describing it as ‘life-changing’ - you can’t get much a much more satisfying review of art than that! I know of various people who travelled to Durham specially for the festival and I don’t think they would have been disappointed - the city looked magically beautiful and it was fun to just wander around exploring the various vistas and installations and seeing people react to them.
Lumiere is a progression on 2008’s Enlightenment Festival and the chat on Flickr and other sites is that people are hoping this will become an annual event. There’s also a call for some of the lighting, such as the colours higlighting the viaduct, to become permanent fixtures, in place of the comparatively stark street lighting.
ONE NorthEast has a mission to support ‘World-class Festivals’ and this was certainly one of them.
A trip to London to meet a new client gave us the chance to check up on a project that we’ve just completed for the Natural History Museum.
The museums annual Ice Rink always proves a big draw for visitors, and with the fantastic Natural History Museum and thousands twinkling fairy lights as a backdrop we can certainly see why.
Sumo created the identity for the Ice Rink and implemented this both on-site and across the promotional campaign which is helping to spread the word about this unmissable winter treat (see more of this work here).
Unfortunately we didn’t have time to hit the ice, but I’ll be back!
London Shh… was officially launched at a champagne reception hosted by architectural historian Dan Cruickshank last night at Burgh House in Hampstead.
London Shh… is a new organisation highlighting the capital’s Small Historic Houses, it brings together the Freud Museum, Benjamin Franklin House, Kelmscott House, Dr Johnson’s House, the Handel House Museum and Burgh House to bring these hidden gems to wider public attention.
The branding and website for London Shh… was developed by Sumo, with help from Scottish illustrator Iain McIntosh who produced beautiful illustrations of each historic property.
Branding is one of the most challenging and fulfilling things that we do as a company; we totally immerse ourselves in what an organisation is all about and in the process we get quite attached to the client and the final brand, almost disinclined to hand it over to the client in some cases for fear that they might not look after our progeny.
Today I was in Lerwick for a meeting with Shetland Amenity Trust. They commissioned Sumo in 2005 to develop the brand for Shetland Museum & Archives and a series of trails to lead people around the many must see archeological and natural sites on the islands.
With Shetland’s oil starting to run out, it is more important than ever that the islands capitalise on the rich natural and cultural heritage which drive their tourist industry, and the Museum and trails are an important part of this strategy.
I took the chance whilst in Lerwick to visit the museum, which I last saw in 2007 when it was a few weeks away from opening. The venue is beautiful and well thought out and care and attention have been lavished on every aspect of the project.
The brand is still working brilliantly across the museum’s marketing with the team at Shetland Amenity Trust doing a great job of producing adverts, posters and newsletters with our guidelines, but I think it was the bear shown above the entrance and its friends in the shop which really grabbed my attention! One of the important things that we discussed at the start of the project was a total quality experience for visitors, and Shetland Amenity Trust has really taken that to heart, not only in the displays but also in merchandise like the specially commissioned Burra Bears (a local business success story). They have worked with craftspeople from across the islands to bring together a really high quality offer in the museum shop and similar efforts have gone in to the quality of the locally produced food in the cáfe.
The museum has received around 75,000 visitors annually since it opened, which is an impressive feat considering that the islands have a total population of about 23,000!
I left Lerwick (with a Burra Bear for my daughter) delighted that the brand was working so well for museum and really impressed with the continuing work that the Shetland Amenity Trust are doing to make the brand real.
Today was the opening of Junction, the new arts centre in Goole, East Yorkshire.
Sumo got involved with the project earlier this year, helping the team at the art centre and the council to agree a name for the venue through a series of workshops and then developing the identity for the new custom built arts venue.
Junction brings a fantastic cultural resource to the town and the opening season is jam packed with music, comedy, film, craft, theatre and dance. In fact they have something for everyone.