Oliver’s inside view
Our founder Oliver talks about Contemporary Vintage and what we do…
A post-digital perspective
I was flattered to be invited to speak at this year’s TiLE Forum in Florence as part of a panel on innovative design and interpretation. TiLE stands for ‘Trends in Leisure and Entertainment’ and has been running for over twenty years as an international forum for exploring best practice in creating engaging visitor experiences in museums and attractions.
Following on from three interesting speakers who had shown all manner of impressive visuals, it was with some trepidation that I took to the stage armed with nothing more than an orange…
I decided to share my personal journey ‘from the physical to the digital and back’. This seemed particularly appropriate since it started in Florence around twenty years ago when I was there studying art history, surrounded by all the wonderful art works that up to that point had only been accessible to me through books. It was that experience which led me into working with museums and to the preoccupation with the object so inherent in the cultural sector.
In my case however, it didn’t take long for that preoccupation to give way to frustration with the limitations of the physical object and a desire to go beyond. After all, an object can only be in one place at a time and be shown in one context. It wasn’t long therefore before I became a digital evangelist, championing that brave new world of virtual museums through major initiatives in the ’90s such as Tate Insight. It wasn’t easy to convince the sector back then and I quickly found out that ‘innovation’ is just a polite word for ‘disruption’. My work was less about technology but more about driving cultural change in museums – institutions where the central mission of preservation and specialism might be seen to run counter to access and innovation.
So does digital provide the answer? If I was to continue driving change through use of digital I needed to believe it did. However, as the years went on I was increasingly dogged by a nagging doubt about this, which was brought into perspective one day (and this is where the orange comes in) by the realization that there is nothing I’ve seen in the world of digital that I would swap for the simple yet visceral experience of eating an orange!
That’s a bit of a dilemma if you’ve forged your career on being a digital evangelist, but the simple reality is that digital is great at offering a ‘representation’ of something but really not so great at providing an ‘experience’. It is clear to me that the more we continue to weave our digital worlds, the more need there will be for the live experience to bring people together and for building bridges to connect the digital and physical. It is this ‘post-digital’ challenge which we should all now be grappling with.
I set up Contemporary Vintage to connect audiences to culture in new and unexpected ways with a particular focus on the physical/digital divide. We are interested in telling old stories in new ways by mixing traditional and modern forms of communication. We look for ways of taking messages out to the audience, rather than expecting them to come to us, by utilising the tools people are already using. Perhaps most importantly we are interested in giving the audience a voice and putting them at the centre of the action; it is this factor which has become increasingly key to creating the authenticity necessary for real public engagement. What we do is less about creating finished products and more about creating starting points for interaction.
To take the example of our recent Glamour Factory project to complement Glamour of the Gods at the National Portrait Gallery. Here the brief was to extend beyond the exhibition and fully involve the audience, using the exhibition theme as the starting point for an evolving dialogue. One of the challenges facing museums is to take a more joined up approach to the ‘before–during–after’ visitor experience, so we conceived this project to closely connect the marketing–exhibitions–learning functions. Digital was key to this and social media was used not only for marketing but to extend interpretation of the exhibition and interaction at the event. We used simple devices such as Twitter #Tags on the gallery labels and and played with the relationship between the physical and the digital in our ‘Vintage Twitter Bureau’.
The Glamour Factory was highly successful in enabling the National Portrait Gallery to reach a new audience of close to 5,000 fun-loving Londoners who turned up for the live event. It was amplified through different platforms and creative partnerships which added enormous value at very low cost. Importantly, it helped the Gallery to experiment with new ways of connecting virtual and live experiences.
My perspective seemed to go down well at TiLE, since I was invited to form part of a small panel for the closing session on new creative approaches for audience engagement. The mission continues as various commentators speculate on the emerging post-digital landscape…
Connecting audiences to culture
This is our vision, but what do we mean by this?
Contemporary Vintage connects audiences to culture using three main platforms:
- Digital to connect with niche audiences
- Broadcast to connect with mass audiences
- Experiential to connect with hearts and minds
A diagram of what we do might look something like…
Clearly I’ve spent too much time as a consultant!