Shift Happens….

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Byron’s blog – A dubious quip for Scroobius Pip (or how it feels to fail your peers) got me thinking and reminded me….
Blimey, in less than a couple of weeks, I’m going to be giving a talk about My Place Or Yours at a conference called Shift Happens 2.0. (http://www.pilot-theatre.com/redesign/default.asp?idno=17061)
My brain is full of what I’m hoping to say but at the same time I want to get it right and explain what it’s really about.So it feels like a good idea to blog on My Place about this to share some thoughts with you and get some feedback for the talk.
Shift Happens 2.0 is organised by Marcus Romer and his team at Pilot Theatre and it will be the second time they have run an event like this.It’s a place for people in creative and digital industries to come together and have a conversation.When I went last year, I was completely inspired by the big-ideas thinker Bill Thompson. http://www.andfinally.com/
I can’t deny that for me (and I realise not for everybody), there’s something brilliant when someone wows you with predictions like – “in the future we’ll have microchips in our retinas that will tell us what the person in front of you really thinks!”, “we WILL be able to use jedi mind tricks and make our own lightsabers AND take them to work!”.

Imagine that! So I did, and then I googled it and found on www.thinkgeek.com that people (and squirrels apparently) already did have lightsabers and were probably taking them to work – and that’s my point really.
Sometimes, when I join conversations on the arts and digital technology there appears to be an emphasis on the future tense and the use of the word “digital” as a solution to all the issues we face currently. For me, it’s a wider experience, it feels like we are all going through massive social change and there is this thing called digital that is driving a lot of that. The videos on TED are a great way of broadening our thoughts on this www.ted.com and a book that explains this really well is Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations – http://www.shirky.com/
When we first started thinking about My Place Or Yours (three years ago) I thought this project would be a future tense solution but what I’ve discovered is that some things are simpler than you realise. This is a project and we are a creative organisation who are experimenting and working with digital technology. My Place is building an online community and we’ve still got a lot to learn, but by being open and creative through our blog I’m confident that will happen. I’d like to think it’s a collaboration between artists and audiences which presents ideas, creative work and has conversations. That’s not to say that this is entirely new, I’ve learnt that’s not the case, all this was already happening but in different places on and off line and it’s been fascinating seeing this coming through on this blog.

My Place Or Yours

Shift Happens….

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