Toward a More Porous Institution

Posted on August 08, 2011

by John R. Killacky

This speech was given to the New England Foundation for the Arts Board on July 13, 2011

I have been thinking a lot about change recently.

When business leader JJ Flynn and his business partners opened his opulent Art Deco vaudeville and movie palace in 1930, the stated purpose was to offer "Burlington and the surrounding country the highest form of metropolitan entertainment." Thirty years ago, the facility was repurposed when the Flynn Theatre for the Performing Arts officially opened on September 26, 1981.

I now have the distinct pleasure to following Andrea Rogers in stewarding the Flynn into its next chapter. In my first year, I have spent a lot of time listening to and learning from staff, board, and community. The Flynn was awarded an innovation grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. With this, we did a lot of thinking and recalibrating our online platforms with EMCArts in New York.

Their premise is organizational innovations are instances that
• Result from a shift in underlying organizational assumptions,
• are discontinuous from previous practice, and
• provide new pathways to create public value.

As well, this summer twelve Flynn staff and two board members are also working with IBM consultants on a strategic assessment work to inform our next iteration of long-range planning. The Flynn was eager to work with IBM on this project. We cannot do more with less, but now we need as an organization to do different with less.

In this languishing economy, it seems adaptability is replacing growth as a barometer of success. Resiliency is an essential component for vibrancy. Is this a reset moment for the Flynn's operating assumptions? Is this the new normal for fiscal realities?

Arts organizations are small businesses after all and need to change to remain relevant. How many businesses are still in existence producing the same product after 30 years? The Fortune 500 list of top companies today looks quite different than the 1980s. I am not a proponent of forever; focusing on now seems more vital.

Remember when IBM was in the computer business? IBM came into being 100 years ago selling mechanical accounting machines, scales, and time recorders. Over its century, it modeled resiliency, transforming itself time and again in a culture of innovation as it grew, went global, nearly died, and reincarnated itself.

IBM is quite different today. The company that helped invent the Information Age now works with clients worldwide to apply innovative solutions to their most vexing problems. I am grateful that the Flynn is accessing IBM's "Think Tank" as we envision the future.

We as a field are at a game-changing moment in relation to content delivery. Sheet music, radio, television, LPs, CDs, DVDs and downloads; in each these iterations, the arts industry worried people would no longer attend concerts if given access to the arts through evolving technology.

I remember when the Joffrey Ballet did not want to be on Dance in America on PBS, thinking it would decrease their touring income. Quite the opposite was true! Today we can see the Met, National Theatre of London, and Los Angeles Philharmonic filmed live for movie theaters. These films do not diminish, but extend the brand of these institutions.

Our next technology threshold is participatory social media. It has already so radically transformed news coverage. Readers, viewers, and listeners are not just consumers anymore, they help develop and distribute it. Essential in the coverage of the Arab spring, Japanese tsunami, and raid on Osama bin Laden's compound were tweets, FB posts, and amateur videos. Burlington's Free Press now calls itself a media company as it invites readers to comment and augment its coverage.

A Pew Research Center 2010 study found that 37% of American Internet users (29% of the population) had "contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like FB and Twitter."

Another relevant 2010 report was the NEA's, "Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation," that noted the growth of audiences accessing the arts through the media. Despite fears that electronics would cannibalize audiences, the study found electronic consumers were more than twice as likely to attend performances as non-media consumers. The study also showed that nearly three-fourths of adults, who reported using the Internet to access the arts, reported doing so at least once a day. More than half, 52% reported participating in arts performances via the Internet at least once a week.
• 84% used the Internet to obtain arts information,
• 71% to create art,
• 65% to view visual arts,
• 41.5% read articles, essays, or blogs online, and
• 37% viewed or listened to a recorded or live broadcasted jazz, classical music, opera, or dance performance.

This reality is something I am thinking a lot about these days as the Executive Director of the Flynn. We present year-round performances and educational programs for 200,000 people, but have spent the last year exploring using new technologies to change our online platform from a transactional to participatory aesthetic space through the innovation grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

The Emergent Media Center at Champlain College was a conceptual partner in this process. Their students have grown up completely immersed in a digital world and assume this will be the norm going forward, so I wanted to include them in our planning.

As we envision moving into a Web 3.0 environment, (where intelligent searching makes the web more personalized based on user preferences and behavior), it is crucial to engage multiple constituents in new and resonant technological ways.

Ultimately my goal is to have people' curiosity whetted online, hoping this expands and deepens their engagement at the Flynn. However, this does not mean merely adding bells and whistles to our website, but calls for a paradigm shift in thinking about what cultural participation means for our audiences, live and viral.

This shift in thinking and action is threatening to many arts organizations. In the past, the expertise of curators defined culture in a community. Now people want to co-author meaning. I have attended social media workshops for arts organizations and the conversation still defaults to using these platforms still as a one-way transactional marketing medium. Totally wrong!

Consumers now consider themselves collaborators. Therefore it is essential that arts organizations invite community stakeholders into a more authentic relationship wherein everyone finds/defines themselves through participatory media. Engaged online communities co-author experience, meaning, and cultural value.

Ben Cameron, Program Director of the Arts Program at the Doris Duke Foundation, visited the online class I taught for Drexel University last summer. He talked about the differences and change in perspectives that are needed:
Are you trying to merely broadcast information to a group to attend a rigidly pre-defined set of opportunities? Are you connecting audiences with one another? With artists? Are you providing forums where people can register how they feel about the work they see? Are you sharing that response with others--and truly sharing, NOT censoring out unfavorable comments (which distinguishes an authentic site from a marketing site--and consumers smell the difference in a second!) Are you being aggressive about earned income assumptions--and creating accessible entry points? Are you marketing to groups or making relationships with groups?

No longer can we merely invite audiences to attend a performance. Consumers are drawn to an arts experience in which they participate. The experience does not begin and end at the performance curtain, but long before and after: at home, in the lobby, online, and sharing with friends. Technological advances are helping develop effective enrichment programs capable of actually responding to the needs and desires of our audiences.

A Nielsen Company study last year detailed that Americans now spend nearly a third of their time online communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal email, and instant messaging. Notably, email is in third place with an 8.3% share, behind online gaming (10.2% share) and social networks garnering 22.7%. This is significant: social networking represents a 43% increase from one year ago, while emailing is down 28%.

Young people no longer need a watch because of cell phones; in our lifetime social networking and instant messaging will supplant emailing. Remember when emailing was new? (I am so old I still know that cc on the bottom of a letter refers to "carbon copy," although it now translated as "courtesy copy.")

Hand-held devices will out-number desktop computers in the near future. We are only now integrating mobile technology at the Flynn in allows people to buy tickets and learn more from Quick Response (QR) codes from their cell phones. Just as I try to catch up, last week Facebook announced that its 750 million users would soon be able to make video calls on the site through its acquisition of Skype. They will also add a group chat option. Will this threaten mobile phone devices? Facebook certainly hopes so.

The 2010 study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed more and more older adults are using online tools: use of social networks among people older than 50 went from 22 percent to 42 percent from April 2009 and May 2010. (The figures include only people who use the Internet.). The jump was particularly big among those older than 65.

To keep arts organizations relevant and vital, we need to go where are audiences are congregating. We all know how potent word of mouth is on box office, so it seems essential that we marshal the power of social networking and interactive participatory media.

Here are a few illustrative examples of how arts organizations are adapting and adopting technology to deepen audience participation:

The New York Philharmonic has its own Apple iPhone application, and encourages text-messaging donations, even in $5 increments. Audiences for the New York Phil and Indianapolis Symphony text message choices for encores.

Pittsburgh's Symphony Orchestra mounted a screen on the side of the proscenium displaying factoids about the music, the conductor, featured composers, the hall and upcoming events. Text messages were displayed before the concert, between pieces, and during intermission (but not while the music was playing).

Cell phone texts at New York's Symphony Space determined who would marry whom in the wedding scene in a revisionary "Cosi fan Tutte." The Chicago Opera Theater raised $33,000 by having audiences pay $1 a vote to select one of the operas for the 2011 season. That's 33,000 votes!!!!

Pittsburgh's New Music Ensemble subscribers meet digitally off-season: engaging with staff about artistic decision-making, and sharing audio and video files. This is not about buying tickets, but increasing audience buy-in.

Allowing audiences to participate more deeply does not just have to be only online. Vermont Symphony Orchestra annually auctions an opportunity for a donor to conduct a short piece as part of their outdoor 4th of July outdoor concert. Skill - not really, donor loyalty - absolutely!

Last year, the Shakespeare Festival/LA auctioned on EBay a speaking role in "The Comedy of Errors" alongside Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson. The Royal Shakespeare Company in London has been inviting schools and amateur dramatic groups to perform on their main stage.

Here are some participation experiments at the Flynn. In June, our Burlington Discover Jazz festival focused on the "Bitches Brew Revisited" concert celebrating the landmark Miles Davis album released in 1970. Visual artists were solicited to re-imagine the iconic album art, and ten finalists chosen via a public online vote, with one grand prizewinner.

The art was projected during the pre-show on the stage, in the lobby, as well as exhibited in the Flynn Gallery. A post-performance event was held in the gallery, with DJ Logic spinning Miles Davis' music and audience members gathered to talk about the performance and the artwork to share their impressions.

The jazz team also created ‘Miles is...' a series of short video interviews with Festival goers about their experience of Miles Davis' music, that was captured and posted on the Festivals' YouTube page and will be incorporated into 2011 Festival footage clips.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iZPYz_VXTQ&feature=related

The Flynn's Education Department produced the annual Vermont Young Playwrights festival. The team solicited videos form 16 winning playwrights to post on FB, live streamed performances, and incorporated texting from audiences into the young writer's project website afterward with the text of each play, so that continued conversation and feedback were encouraged. Audio recorded at cold readings of each play was also posted to the young writer's project website to invite further extension of the performance experience, and further feedback.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKqFN7LWLPA

As an organization, diving into this online space has been complex because it is no longer just the domain of the marketing department. I have asked everyone to partake and some are more comfortable than others. Over the last few months, staff learned new skills, adopting and adapting new strategies in the social media online universe.

We bought FLIP cameras, had an editing class with a local filmmaker, passed out cameras, and asked every department to experiment and make a one-minute Flynn-centric video from their perspective. At monthly staff meetings we shared these and had each person talk about what challenges they encountered. We uploaded ten staff-made videos to the Flynn's YouTube Channel and shared through Facebook.

http://www.youtube.com/user/FlynnCenterVT

As we look toward the future, we want to build on these beginning steps to become a much more porous institution, sharing and distributing our aesthetic content through online platforms. The universe is only limited by our technological and personnel bandwidth.

Currently the Flynn's education program serves 40,000 students on-site through our Student Matinees, but this only reaches children within a 90-minute driving radius. Vermont, as part of a federal stimulus grant, is expanding broadband access and 80% of all schools will be connected to the Internet this year. It is conceivable that the Flynn could be broadcasting student matinees into every school in Vermont. This season we plan to beta test online program delivery to every bed at our local hospital in partnership with Vermont Public Television.

Museums are diving into co-authoring of meaning. This summer once again Walker Art Center is staging "Open Field" on its grounds, where artists and the public create, perform, attend demonstrations, or just watch everyone else. The Walker lends radios, blankets, playing cards, sketchpads, scissors and iPads to participants in this "cultural commons."

Their public was invited to vote on which works on paper, drawn from the Walker's collection, was shown in its "50/50: Audience and Experts Curate the Paper Collection" exhibition last December.

Oakland Art Museum invites visitors to draw a portrait on a computerized pad and have it hang alongside other paintings from its collection. Denver Art Museum patrons printed out posters, created their own light shows, and recorded ‘60s memories as part of its "The Psychedelic Experience: Rock Posters" exhibition.

The Tate in London had choreographer Michael Clark in residence last summer. Clark invited dancers, via the Tate website, to apply on a first-come-first-served basis. The only stipulation was they should not have been trained, and be available for rehearsals. Of the 86 dancers participating in his project, 78 have had no previous training. The remaining eight were Clark's dance troupe.

These examples do not dumb down the artistry of these organizations, but expand cultural participation opportunities for audiences. The key to success is to find genuine ways for audiences to contribute and find meaning -- before, during, and after events. Arts consultant Holly Sidford reminds us, "Participation is the most important renewable resource."

YouTube
Michael Tilson Thomas brought the YouTube Symphony to perform at Carnegie Hall. Ninety musicians from 33 countries were selected from 3,000 videos submitted. Here's MTT's invitation to musicians:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itTk01qJTus

Composer/conductor Eric Whitacre's virtual online choir became a YouTube sensation, garnering him a contract with Naxos and a #1selling classical CD in Britain.

A friend emailed him a link to a video of a young woman singing the soprano part to "Sleep," an a cappella choral work he wrote in 2000. It occurred to him that if 100 people all recorded their respective parts (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass) he could line them all up and create a virtual choir.

So he dove into social marketing and asked people to buy the same recording of "Sleep" by the British choir Polyphony from iTunes. Singers from around the world posted their individual parts, simply singing along to the recorded piece. Scott Haines volunteered to cut it together.

Whitacre then wanted to see if he could push the concept to the next level. He posted his conductor track with piano accompaniment for his work "Lux Aurumque." He offered the sheet music as a free download. His goal was to see if people could not just sing their parts separately and cut them together, but if they could actually make music. Here is how it came out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7o7BrlbaDs

His ultimate goal "to write an original piece for the Virtual Choir and have it receive its world premiere in cyber-space, hundreds (maybe thousands) of people singing alone, together."

Virtuosity is not dead, but celebrated in these online experiments.

"Glee"
The arts community can learn a great deal about content sharing and co-authoring of meaning from the television program "Glee."  This highly rated and award-winning show has made choruses hip and sexy for kids, spawning "Glee" camps all over this country. The Flynn now has three Show Choirs.

One aspect of "Glee" that I love is every stereotype is celebrated here: the fey sissy boy, the entitled Jewish princess, the big black girl, crippled boy, dumb jocks, and vapid cheerleaders. The disenfranchised outsiders are now in! The butch dyke cheerleading coach's war with the sensitive straight choral director is priceless, beyond camp!

Part of the extraordinary success of this unorthodox series is how the producers allowed fans to create their own stories and share them online. Every week, Gleeks upload their own versions of themselves lip-syncing and dancing to whatever songs were featured in that week's episode.

Gleeks' Say A Little Prayer parody:
http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=gJzDww8gQUY&playnext=1&videos=a-n2jPwyWzE&feature=feedrec

Instead of shutting these down as copyright infringement, the producers are genius in encouraging these co-authoring of meaning through YouTube. Ultimately of course, emboldened fans become ever more loyal to the juggernaut that is Glee: television, CDs, summer tours, and even a possible Broadway show.

Here's a fervent fan's response to "Glee's" take on Lady Gaga's "Born This Way":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy71yOP1cyg&feature=fvsr

Or how this for a publicity stunt with a flash mob in Seattle:

http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=g5PyIVVKoWU&feature=related

"Glee" understands active fans become ever more loyal viewers, buy more CDs and attend concerts. Now that content is free, experiential relationships are the next frontier for the arts community.

Thank you for your attention. I welcome our conversation.