In 2002, I worked with Tate Liverpool on a project about young people’s relationship with media stars and celebrities, in which young people created their own artworks connected to this theme. This activity accompanied the exhibition, ‘Pin-up: Glamour and Celebrity Since the Sixties’ (on display from March 2002 – January 2003).
In 2004, I organised a symposium at Tate Britain, ‘The New Creative Audience Studies’ (19 May 2004). This event was about “new visual, creative research methods being used to understand the place of popular media in people’s lives”. Quite a few items about and from the event can be found here.
In 2012, we collaborated with Tate on the project, ‘Community-powered transformations: A research network exploring digital transformations in the creative relationships between cultural and media organisations and their users’, funded by the AHRC Digital Transformations in Arts and Humanities programme. The brief explanation of that project goes as follows:
A generation ago, cultural and media organisations – such as the BBC or the National Gallery – had a reasonably straightforward relationship with their audiences. They created material – such as TV programmes, publications and exhibitions – in a ‘broadcaster’ mode, and it was consumed (or not) by the public. But today, these organisations are merely one part of a creative ecosystem, within which communities of amateur enthusiasts may be the producers of the most innovative material. This project studies those changing relationships, and explores ways in which cultural organisations can work with creative communities to make great things.
The extensive website about that project is at digitaltransformations.org.uk
Photo by Flickr user Howard Stanbury (see original), used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence.
