 Thanks very much to the Arts Council and Nesta for inviting me to speak today. What I'm going to do is talk a little bit about blast theory and a little bit about our background. I'm sure some of you in this room are familiar with what we do, but obviously some of you aren't. So I thought I'd just give a bit of context for who we are and then go into this case study of this recent project, all this project that was commissioned last year by Channel 4 Education called IV Forever, which is an SMS drama, the first ever SMS drama commissioned by Channel 4. So blast theory is a group of artists who are now based in Brighton. The company formed in 1991 in London, so it's our 20th birthday this year. And the company really formed not to make works that use technology, but to make works that I guess engaged with audiences in really interesting ways and engaged with audiences outside of traditional sort of gallery and museum and theatre venues. So the company has always been driven by an interest in the audience and how to create sort of really responsive interactive participatory experiences for audiences. And even though we work very much with technology to create that experience, now that is still the sort of fundamental driver of the company. So in 2006 we relocated to Port Slade. I'm sure many of you would know Port Slade. It's sort of on the edge of Brighton and Hove. We have this building here which we've converted into studios and a permanent base for the company. You actually can't see our part of the building. This is on a sort of edge of an escarpment here and where it goes down to floors and we're on the very ground floor in the Travis Perkins woodyard, which some of you might know on the sort of Shoreham Harbour. And I guess something that fundamentally changed the company and really gave it the technology digital profile was a collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab that started in 1997. And Mixed Reality Lab is at the University of Nottingham and is a world leader really in I guess developing and thinking about and researching mixed reality applications and augmented reality applications, which is really as the combination of the real and the virtual world, which sort of Anthony had a question about earlier, which is something that we continue to explore as a company. The company became a regularly funded organisation of the Arts Council in 2003 and we're very pleased to be going into the national portfolio in 2012. So we're very, as I said before, we're very interested in this sort of relationship with an audience outside of traditional spaces. So a lot of our work happens on the streets, it's like specific, it's urban and this work is one of the first works that really used, well Desert Rain was another work in earlier work, but can you see me now, really used gaming technology and created a relationship between online players and players on the street. So this is one of our players on the streets of the city who's having an interaction and being guided by a player on the internet. It was almost a bit like a hide and seek game, but played online and on the streets of the city. It really brought a lot of attention to the company, we received sort of several BAFTA nominations and awards for can you see me now and our other work. But more recently we're sort of focusing on, I guess, mobile technologies, handheld devices and using Wi-Fi, using GPS and SMS. SMS is really of interest to us because it's a way to reach audiences in the lowest common denominator, I guess. Everyone has a phone pretty much, everyone knows how to text. It's a really sort of nimble way to reach audiences and it's a very responsive way to reach audiences. So this was the first work that we created that used SMS Day of the Figurines, it was a game that ran for 24 days and the audience signed in at this sort of gaming table, they took on an identity of a figurine, then played this game for 24 days and basically it's just a series of text messages going back and forth. But for us it's really, we're really interested in how you can create stories and immersive narratives through a really sort of basic textural mode, the textural mode of SMS. So just a couple of other recent works. This is Riderspoke, which is a work. Some of you might have, it was in the Brighton Festival in 2008. I don't know, has anyone, is anyone familiar with this work? Yeah, a couple of people. So you take a cycle ride around the city with a small Nokia N800 internet tablet. You listen to a series of questions and audio recordings and you respond to those, you record your answers to those questions and then you leave those responses in sort of Wi-Fi hotspots around the city and as you cycle around the city you can listen to previously recorded responses from others. So it really creates this sort of layered, intimate sort of storytelling of the city and we presented that in Sydney, which is the iconic Sydney Opera House in the background and it's been a really successful work for us and continues to do. I mean, we are a touring company, we show our works sort of across the UK and internationally. And one of our most recent works is A Machine to See With which was a commission from three commissioners in North America, Bap, New Media Center, Sundance, Film Festival and Zero One Festival and the commission is a piece of Locative Cinema where we were sort of challenged to imagine what cinema could be outside of the cinema space and so the project we've developed is basically six people work together to rob a bank and so it's a series of phone calls and the six people play at the same time and they have to sort of strategize and work together in exchange with each other to rob a bank. And as you can see we demand quite a lot of our audiences to sludge through the snow here in Sundance but we'll be presenting that work during the Brighton Digital Festival and it's a new work that is touring and sort of doing really well for us and really I think the idea is that the audience is in the film. You imagine yourself as an actor in this highest movie. So on to broadcasting. So Blast Theory has had a particular interest in broadcasting and working with a broadcaster and this has been an ambition over a few years and we're really interested in broadcasting because it provides sort of access to new audiences, the creative and technical challenges, the business development, potential new revenue streams and obviously new contacts and networks outside of the art sector. And we also sort of feel that broadcasters are now really with convergence, with the convergence of sort of television and internet. Broadcasters are really looking for new ways to tell stories on those platforms. The sort of age of linear narrative is sort of long gone now and broadcasters are really sort of challenged by how to sort of reconstruct and reinvent the traditional TV model. So we've actually been really fortunate to have received some money through a grant for the arts to invest in us exploring how we might sort of develop broadcast projects as a sort of business model within the company. But also an element of that is how the company starts to generate more of its own IP so that we can sort of exploit the IP in the marketplace and look at sort of potential commercial opportunities for the company. So this is... And I think this is why this is what we're doing is relevant to the discussion we're having here today because we are really looking at issues of sort of business models, IP, broadcasting and how we can develop new partnerships around that. So Ivy Forever is a purely SMS project. It's a story that centres around this character Ivy who leaves home and it's about... She's around 17 years old and it's about her challenges as a young woman leaving home. We're really looking at issues of sort of family, sex, sort of education, drugs. So it's got all... So we've really tried to, I guess, look at how to create an engaging story around those issues just using SMS. So Channel 4, through Channel 4 Education, sponsored us or they commissioned us to create one episode, a seven-day episode of this SMS drama. At the time, some of you might know Matt Locke. Matt Locke was a commissioner at Channel 4 Education and it was really through Matt Locke championing this project that we got it through Channel 4 Education. Matt, whilst he was at Channel 4, was really interested in looking at new models of storytelling that Channel 4 could support and he was really interested in supporting sort of experimental models of storytelling. So this for Channel 4, I guess, was an investment in an experiment and it was an investment in, I guess, how you could use SMS and how you could use SMS in relationship to sort of education and bring in those sort of issues that are really relevant to teenagers through the sort of platform of SMS. So the project is aimed at 14 to seven-year-olds and we worked with a really fantastic writer, Tony White, who's the author of Foxy T. So how it works is the audience go online, they register their mobile number and email address and then on a certain day, so the trial was set for October 2010. So on, I think it was about October 10th or the 7th, the trial started and on that day, everyone who had registered and signed up received an SMS message to sort of start the game. And once they receive the first series of SMS messages, they can start to text back to Ivy. So the idea is that it's very interactive and that the story is told in the personal voice of Ivy. So Ivy is, I guess, asking you to go on a journey with her, asking you to trust her and to really create a dialogue between the audience and Ivy. And I mean, this was a real challenge for us, was how to, I guess, create a fictional character that was believable and that would engage an audience. But at the same time, the audience had to be aware that this wasn't a real person somehow. So there were many challenges for us in terms of sort of developing the story. And as over the seven days, it becomes more intimate. Ivy asks more of you. She asks advice from you. She tells her your secrets. So it's really the drama become, the drama is really that relationship between Ivy and the sort of participant. And so this is just an example of one of the conversations that went on. Ivy asks, do you know someone who's missed their period? And Caitlin, this was the participant response. And sort of they go on in this sort of quite intimate dialogue where Ivy is asking her help. She's responding and it ends. I feel like I can talk to you about it. Do you mind? No, not at all. I'm happy to help. And of course, these are all automated answers. There's no one sitting at the other end of the phone sending a message back to the participant. It's all entirely automated. And this was an incredible challenge for us in terms of the sort of technical development which I'll just talk about in a minute. How am I going for time, Angela? Hey, okay. So I sort of feel I'm sort of crunching all of this into a short amount of time. So just sort of why we used SMS. As I've said before, it is a native platform for teenagers. Teenagers are SMSing each other all the time. And it's a way we can get into teenagers' pockets. They don't have to spend anything. They don't have to go anywhere. They don't have to... Well, they do have to commit, but it's not as though that we're asking them to do anything outside of their normal lives. And it's free to sign up. Text messages are received at a standard rate. And so it's not costing the sort of young people that play anything more. It's persistent. It sort of mingles with the other text messages on your phone. So it sort of becomes a part of sort of your daily dialogue. And it is sort of anonymous. We sort of really wanted the players to feel as though they could tell Ivy their secrets or be sort of confidential with Ivy and that they could trust her as well. So to develop the story, we actually conducted quite a few focus groups with young people. Of course, finding the right text language was really difficult because one group of young people would go, oh, that's, you know, text language is really naff. You know, we hate the way that people don't spell on text. You know, we really, you know, would prefer you to use proper spelling and good spelling. And then other people would say, oh, no, you know, text languages make things really short and snappy. So we're getting really conflicting sort of messages from our focus groups. So we sort of tried to incorporate most of that feedback into the script itself. And then, of course, Channel 4 were very involved in the process of signing off the scripts and I guess feeling confident that it was rich enough to sort of engage sort of that our target audience of 14 to 17-year-olds. So a challenge for us was really to reach the audience that we were after. I mean, Blast Theory doesn't work. We don't really work with young people. It's not a sort of target audience. It's not an audience that we work with regularly for. So for us to reach a sort of broad demographic, we really wanted to, I guess, make this a national project, a project with national profile and to reach an audience in an age range that isn't familiar to us at all was a real challenge. And we worked with a marketing company, Holler, who have done all the publicity for skins. So obviously skins is huge and, I mean, they provided some really sort of essential advice to us on, I guess, how we might reach teenagers and to go where those teenagers are. Social media was really important. We created an Ivy Facebook fan page and a Twitter identity. And Twitter actually became really important for us in terms of building, not only promoting the work, but starting to build a dialogue with the people who were taking part in the trial. So Twitter was sort of quite unexpected for us because there was this, not only while the trial was happening and people were, the audience was sort of participating in the drama, they were also tweeting about it. So, and I think one thing we really learnt was that, because how we structured the episode was that once you registered, you had to start on the day. And we sort of realised that the word of mouth really started to build during the week, during the seven days. And that if we'd left the registration open, we probably could have at least doubled our numbers, you know, through that sort of word of mouth. And because our target for the trial, which took place in October, was 1,000 users, and we got to about 800. And so it was sort of disappointing for us to not reach that target. But at the same time, 800 users really, I guess, provided the sort of feedback we were wanting in terms of how people were engaging with the script and the text, and also testing the technology. And I mean, obviously it was fantastic having Channel 4 on board with us, and we got a couple of nice little tweets like this one, you know, it's not only the future, it's the present. So, you know, but by this time it was sort of, I think they tweeted this the day before registrations closed. So it was, you know, that was a real learning curve for us. So just on the technical development, we developed the sort of SMS platform, the back-engine, totally from scratch. We worked with a local company here in Brighton to talk web solutions on the implementation of that platform. We worked very closely with them in terms of the design and the implementation because it not only had to sort of deliver the text messages, it, we had to sort of build in various requirements from Channel 4 like moderation. We had to build in privacy settings, data protection. But we also built in, I guess, mechanized sort of evaluation systems that we used at the end of the project. So it was really fantastic for us to work, I guess, in collaboration with this company, to talk web solutions on building this platform that was totally customized for what we wanted to deliver. It wasn't all smooth sailing, but it, you know, it really, it functioned very well by the time we got to the trial in October. A really important aspect of this is that we own the IP in that platform. So it means that we can, we have a platform that we can use either to continue the Ivy Forever project or to use for future SMS projects. And it's also, you know, has the potential to sort of license to sort of other organizations who are interested in using SMS. So I think just to visualize some of... Oh, out of time, okay. So I just wanted to say, giving an indication of the engagement, we had nearly 100% engagement on, this is called the pregnancy ladder, which is the sort of story about Ivy worried about being pregnant. These are the sort of responses that we got to her question, you know, what if I'm pregnant? Business development, I've sort of already covered that, I think, but I think internally we've sort of developed a whole range of schools that include sort of IP and rights management, data protection regulations, which is a whole other ballgame. A lot of learnings come out of it for us, especially the sort of contracting and legals with Channel 4 that went on for months and months and months, but I'm happy to answer questions about that. And obviously it raised sort of ethical issues about talking in an intimate way with teenagers and how intimate can you get and trust. And so I think these were issues raised for us and sort of outcomes. You know, a really key outcome is that we've developed a relationship with a broadcaster. We're now a preferred supplier. We're not sure if it's going to go to the full six-episode commission, basically because of the sort of turnaround that the commissioners at Channel 4, but it's been a really fantastic project for us and has opened a lot of doors in terms of sort of our networks of broadcasters.