 Next up, we have Dominic Smith, Digital Projects Manager at Tyneside Cinema, going to talk about Tyneside's engagement with digital assets and digital material over the years and his current role, and give us some insight into how a reasonably venue-based institution, when a darkened room with a good sound system can engage with the potential, using my word, with the potential that digital has to offer, Dominic. OK. Apologies if I seem a bit nervous. I looked at the delegate list before I stood up. Suddenly you know when you get that sense of impending doom that you're actually preaching to the choir. I'm having that right now, so you'll have to just kind of indulge me as I go on. The title of this piece is Pixel Palace, which is entirely Bill's fault. Bill thought of this name when it first started working here in September. Bill said, I think you're responsible for my job, thank you. Now I'm looking at him thinking, yes, it's all your fault. The Pixel Palace is a really interesting digital arts programme here at the cinema. I've been working here since September. When I came for my job interview here, I kind of left thinking, oh my God, I've done a terrible thing because I sat down and said, I'd give an example project. What do you think would be a good first project to do here? I said a radio station, and I went home and held my head in my hands, thinking I went to an interview at a cinema and said, should we run a radio station? But actually the team here were really on board with that, so I'm going to talk a little bit about the reasons why I thought that would be a good idea. To touch on something that Bill talked about, I'm going to talk a little bit about bootstrapping. Has anybody come across the term bootstrapping before? I think it originates with Baron Vaughan Munchhausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his own bootstraps. It's a metaphor for a self-sustaining process that requires very little to start it. In terms of just a nade out for a second, when you switch your computer on, it goes through the bootstrapping procedure, so a tiny little programme will start a bigger programme than a bigger programme, and as that increases, eventually you have the graphical interface that you use. The process here, and what I'm going to talk about in this case study, is how we're bootstrapping broadcast capacity. Now something that happened while I started thinking about making notes for this talk, and while I was making the notes, this thing called Turn Table FM appeared in the world. Has anybody come across Turn Table FM? Before I was finished writing it, it was already locked into North America because of copyright issues, so we can't go on it anymore. We could only go on it for a couple of weeks, but it looked like a lot of fun at the time. Turn Table FM was just basically a chat room where people could share content. By sharing content, they were DJing for each other, and that kind of desire to share your own material really drove it. I think this was kind of the first of many of these kind of experiences that are going to be made available. How are we doing this? One of the things we've been doing, and the on button for the bootstrap process here, has been to take advantage of the cinema programme. We have directors coming and talking here quite a bit about the work, so I was able to stream those talks for starters just to get an idea of how the infrastructure would work in this building, the actual technology itself, believe it or not, is surprisingly easy, and it's been around for a long time. There are a variety of kind of servers you can use, from shoutcast to icecast to flash to quicktime, they all kind of basically do the same thing, which is to serve up media to your computer, and that works by you sending a single signal to the server, and the server multicasts that out to as many listeners as you want. One of the game changes recently has been the fact that people can listen to this stuff on their mobile devices, so it's taken this experience from a lean-in experience, where you're leaning heavily into the computer, hand-on mouse, eyes glued to the screen, we're getting a bad back, to being a take anywhere kind of experience where I've been doing tests on the small metro route in the north east of England to see where we get dips in signal, so to see how long people can listen to streams on their way to the cinema, so there would be a potential to have shows and events happening in the build-up to people arriving here as well to kind of extend that experience, and I'm pleased to say that the only dip is in Jesmond, of all places. I don't know why that place is made to say that. So in terms of practicalities, I'm going to talk money here as to how small organisations could start this process. So for a streaming server you're looking at about £200 a year for kind of not a massive amount of listeners, but enough to get started and to build that capacity and to build that experience. Again, saying podcasting is a great way of archiving live events. You're going to need a few bits, basic bits of equipment that you've put in there. However, you've probably already got them. And then you're looking at licensing, and if you're looking at licensing, then you start to look at different types of capacity. So the kind of first stage in this bootstrap process would be to kind of get the small microcaster licences, which as you can see aren't terribly expensive. So I'm actually kind of from a kind of art and curatorial background. So I'd like to talk a little bit about what that means to this programme and what that means to broadcasting. Well, it turns out that artists are really good at finding new uses for technology, really, aren't they? I heard a talk a while ago by a chap called Miller Puckett, who is the developer of a programme called Pure Data, which you can kind of use to make your own multimedia software, et cetera. And he said that he was probably quoting somebody else, and if you give an engineer a hammer, it'll read the instructions. If you give an artist a hammer, it'll just start hitting things with it, which is kind of one of the kind of first reasons that I'm kind of really interested in working with artists to find new and unexpected uses for this technology. I would argue that the artist has been at the kind of forefront of uses of new technology from the very kind of onset, from the early kind of diol poem experiments by John Giorno. It's through to a chap called... I will struggle with this guy's name, J.H. Hog, everyone, who is a New York-based artist, who I was lucky enough to interview a couple of years ago. And he had been involved in a bulletin board system in the 80s called The Thing. A bulletin board is kind of pre-internet, really early system for kind of exchanging messages. And he had produced this piece called called Barbie and Ken, politically correct. As you can kind of imagine, he released a picture a week, which was kind of one of those kind of jockey, annual kind of things with their speech bubbles, et cetera, and Barbie and Ken in compromising positions. But the point that I'm going to make here is that he had gone round various galleries in New York cap and hand kind of looking for an exhibition. And he went to a gallery called YK Arts in Emma Hutton, and he was kind of begging for an exhibition. And the door went and the guy was like, oh, just two minutes, he'll go and answer the door. Then he looked at his computer to find that his work was a screensaver on the curator's computer. So he had kind of bypassed that whole kind of gallery system where you have to kind of work your way through to he was already in the gallery without knowing it. So this is kind of also a thing that I'm quite interested in as broadcast as an artist space, not just a means of marketing artwork, but actually a space for artwork to exist in its own right. And to get to that point, really we have to look at the curated model. Now, I would kind of argue that the curator's job is very much to do with interpretation of the work as well, and there is so much kind of going on out there that we really kind of get to the point now where we need, I'm going to break this. We need to kind of look at how we present our information to other people and how we manage that content. And one of the important factors in that is gatekeeping. Now I'm from a kind of hacking open source kind of background and the idea of gatekeeping might seem quite foreign to that, but in actual fact that's one of the, the open source kind of models have a very strong levels of gatekeeping to stop somebody taking a piece of graphical software and turning it into a music sequencer. People tend to have these kind of crazy ideas on the internet. So it's really important that we kind of look at how we gatekeep that process. So revenue, I think probably a few people are interested in revenue and I'm not sure if I have great news about it being kind of a major source of revenue. What I can tell you is that not only will it bring new audiences, but it's also a way of engaging with your existing audiences and finding out kind of what they want and building a sense of community around your work. One of the things we're developing that I'll talk about later is a way of kind of having the artists who are involved in the broadcast communicating at the same time as those broadcasts are going out with the audience at the same time to build that sense of community and to have that kind of conversation as the work is going on. And then doing that, I suspect that we will also kind of get more people coming into the building at that point as an organisation. I'll put micro payments in there if everybody puts micro payments in under the revenue hadn't done it. But there is a possibility of much of desired content being funded via micro payments not in a kind of pay-to-view way but more in a kind of kick-start-away where people would fund future content that they're interested in being developed. So the future for Pixel Palace really where we're taking this at the minute and doing what we just successfully received a GFA application from the Arts Council. So what we're going to be doing with that is one of the things we'll be doing is to be releasing a series of monthly broadcasts and developing a series of monthly broadcasts as we kind of increase capacity. We're in the process of redeveloping the website. As you can see there's a tiny bit of it but the important factor is the launch radio button that we're developing. So that'll be one of the first things that happens when you go on the website rather than just kind of what's on. Isn't this cool? Look at these pictures. You're going to be straight into that kind of shared space. And this kind of monthly broadcast is building up to a collaboration with the AV Festival to produce a month-long 24-hour day broadcast in collaboration with Vicky Bennett here who goes into the name People Like Us and we're talking to Kenneth Goldsmith at the moment. So that's kind of where we're kind of heading in terms of capacity. Building capacity has still got kind of a ways to go. But one of the things that this kind of enthusiasm led to was a larger project that became kind of is currently going under the title what was going under the title Populae but the Latin title isn't necessarily the most accessible title for large groups of people. So it's now the culture network and it's working across the NGCV network in the north-east of England which is NGCV's near Castle Gateshead cultural venues. That would be a real faux pas to get that wrong at the moment. And doing that, what we're developing is a collaborative structure to do larger kind of broadcasts and to prepare the way for internet protocol television which has taken on a life of its own at the moment. So there's that kind of, there's the kind of small grassroots getting things done level and then there's this much larger kind of system that's kind of coming out of that enthusiasm. So I'm not sure if I've gone over or under time. I'm kind of, I'm fine. Yeah, so really, yeah. Sorry, I just remembered the last bit. In 2012, after the month-long broadcast we'll be kind of working more towards kind of video as well. We have done a series of video streams from the cinema and what we found was the early stream process you'd get like, it'd be really quite disheartening just to kind of let you know if you do start doing this you'd put a lot of effort into something and get five listeners which is kind of like devastating news at the time and one of the important factors is to keep doing it to keep going and to keep going regularly because people expect it to be a place to go to at a certain time to find certain things and if you don't provide those things, they don't come back so you just have to keep going and going and going. So we started off getting five the last time we did it we streamed Mike Hodges in the cinema and we went over capacity we couldn't kind of keep the thing kind of the server kind of wouldn't let anybody else in to listen and watch especially when Aunt Armstrong came on telling jokes about bees for some reason and kind of maxed out and the chat room aspect of it was really useful as well to kind of keep that conversation going and make people who weren't physically in the venue feel like they're still part of the conversation they're still part of the event in itself and I think that's all from me thank you very much, cheers.