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Photography Project Proposal by Slidesgo copia

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7AAIAM01 Group Presentation Brief 2021-22FINAL

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Theme/Body

identify the most significant challenge in a specific domain

what this means in practice for arts managers

3 case studies

Presentation (15mins)

Group members’ information (1st slide)

Theme/Body

Process of teamwork

Reference&bibliography

Padlet (last slide)

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Logistic:
- Meeting day: Friday, 10 a.m.
- Main points of discussion will be weekly updated on Padlet in rotation (Laura, Cher, Katherine, Haram, Tiffany)
- We are going to practice the recording before uploading the file on the 3rd of December
- Katherine is going to upload the final presentation
For next week:
- Come up with new ideas about what is the most significant challenge of managing art today (Katherine proposed the issues caused by dealing with covid)
- Make some research around these 3 domains based on our preferences: performing arts, visual arts, galleries and museums
- Start to think about case studies
- Always share new ideas and resources

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The Impact of COVID 19 on the Future of Performing Arts: A Survey of Top Industry Executives in Europe and the US

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The Impact of COVID 19 on the Future of Performing Arts: A Survey of Top Industry Executives in Europe and the US

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The global pandemic has affected our lives on many levels, including our health and economic and social wellbeing. Cultural and creative industries have suffered, with the Performing Arts sector being the worst hit by the crisis. Owing to its nature as a cultural practice that requires the physical presence of an audience - no longer permissible under the pandemic - performance activities were among the first to cease. Regretfully, some of these institutions have not recovered from the crisis. The Performing Arts industry plays an important role from many perspectives, including its contributions to the economy and society, employment, sustainable development, tourism, education and a range of wellbeing benefits. In those countries where music and theatre are absent from school curricula, performing arts institutions fill an important gap through educational and outreach activities that help children to learn about this important cultural heritage. It was not until these activities were taken away that many came to realise the true value of live performance experience and how much they missed it during the closure.

According to UNESCO, in 2013 cultural and creative industries (CCI) worldwide generated revenues of $2250 billion and employed 29 million people, within which the Performing Arts sector alone contributed $127 billion and employed 3.5 million people. Europe and the USA represent the second and third biggest markets in CCI, accounting for 60% of global CCI revenues and employing 12.4 million people in total (Ernst and Young, 2015).

From the European perspective, the creative and cultural industries generate revenues of €536 billion, contributing 4.2% to Europe's GDP. The sector is its third-largest employer, after construction and food and beverage sectors. More than 7 million Europeans are directly or indirectly employed in creative and cultural activities, which represents 3.3% of the EU's active population (Ernst and Young, 2014).

The Performing Arts sector includes modern and classic dance, opera, live music, theatre and circus arts. In Europe the sector generated 32 billion euros and employed 1.2 million people in 2012, being the largest employer within the continent's cultural and creative industries, providing more than 1 job in 6 (Ernst and Young, 2014).

The Performing Arts industry also plays an important role in attracting tourists: for example, 9.2% of tourists visiting the UK went to a theatre, a musical, opera or ballet. The richness of cultural heritage in many European countries is strengthened by the dynamism of contemporary theater and music (Ernst and Young, 2015).
Research suggests that public arts have a positive impact on community engagement: the chances that performing arts attendees will volunteer are 3.8 times greater than for non-attendees, regardless of their educational attainment, gender, and other selected demographic traits, and similar results applied to the relationship between arts participation and community meetings (Crossick and Kaszynska, 2016). The difference in levels of civic engagement was even greater for those who themselves created or performed art, as opposed to simply attending.

Considering the importance of the industry and its current vicissitudes, a group of Master's students at Bocconi University (Thais Fagundes, Dina Ivanova and Matteo Azzolini), supervised by Professor Andrea Rurale, have conducted a research project to analyze the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Performing Arts sector, in particular by interpreting the feelings and overall outlooks of a representative selection of its executives. Questions focus on the future of the sector, ultimately seeking to understand how institutions might rethink their post-pandemic strategies.

41 performing arts institutions participated in the project across 6 countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK and USA). These included opera and prose theaters, auditoriums, music halls, orchestras, festivals, performing arts foundations and other performing arts institutions. The data was collected through a sentiment survey and analysis of institutions' financial data, where that information was available. Respondents included leading institutions of the sector (e.g. La Scala Theatre in Italy, Royal Opera House and Edinburgh Festival in the UK, and Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin in Germany).

93% of the sample reported that COVID-19 had had a significant impact on their institution. In the first six months of 2020 the revenues, number of performances and new production titles on average reduced by half compared to the same period in 2019 (a drop of 51% in revenues, 56% in performances, 49% in new production titles), while the number of full-time employees fell by 12%.

In response to COVID-19, the top 3 factors that institutions most worried about are economic uncertainty, sanitary restrictions to performances, and the lack of audiences to attend live events. To a lesser extent, some institutions also reported concerns about financial problems, the unavailability of public grants and funds, and a lack of resources to invest in digital activities.

While both European and American institutions have been negatively impacted by the pandemic, its severity varies between Europe and the US. In Europe, the survey shows the following areas as suffering the worst impact, in order of priority: number of performances, new productions and revenues. In the US, on the other hand, the areas most affected are revenues, performances and number of full-time employees. The different impacts on revenues are likely to be due to different business models in these territories. The largest gap is reported to be in the % change of the number of full-time employees, which reflects far greater redundancies in the US than in Europe (the number of full-time employees has decreased by 2% in Europe, in contrast to 42% in the US).
The research has shown a high level of concern among performing arts institutions, with 58% of European and 80% of American top executives being worried about the financial position of their organization. Differences in the revenue models affect the two geographic areas. Given their heavier reliance on direct revenues, US institutions' incomes were more severely impacted by COVID-19 closures and restrictions. For them, the average reported decrease in revenues in the first half of 2020 as compared to 2019 equates to 68%, compared to 46% in Europe. As European institutions receive a larger share of public funding (on average 56% of total revenues vs. 16% in the US), they could rely on a more secure 'safety net' during the crisis.

Private funding has had a stronger positive impact on innovation and, as US institutions rely on it to a larger extent, they appear to manifest a stronger tendency towards innovation. The research shows that the higher the dependence on both public and private funding, the higher the institutions' willingness to change. Surprisingly, there is a lightly reversed trend showing that the higher the dependence on direct revenues, the lower the perceived need for change.

As far as skills and competencies are concerned, the institutions across the board reported that the top 3 skills that they are currently lacking are digital competences, infrastructure and technology, and business partnerships. Going forward, the institutions believe the top 5 competencies required for the future of the Performing Arts sector are audience engagement, digital competencies, marketing and communication, new managerial approaches, and fundraising. Regional differences were apparent, with fundraising skills seen as more necessary in the US as compared to Europe. This can be linked to American institutions being less reliant on public funds, and thus having a greater need to find other private funding sources. Executives in both territories saw audience engagement and marketing as a necessity, whereas European institutions appeared to place more emphasis on digital competencies than their US counterparts.

The research has demonstrated that 9 out of 10 executives reported a strong negative impact of Covid-19 on their organisation. Although perhaps expected, this number illustrates how severely the Performing Arts sector has been hit by the pandemic. This sector is historically heavily constrained by the 'technology' of the live performance and consequential limitations for productivity improvements and labour-saving innovations, against the rising costs of living and salaries (the so called Baumol effect), since the end product is essentially the labour of the performer. The pandemic has aggravated this still further.

Revenue models significantly differ between the two territories considered, with Europe being generally more reliant on public funds in comparison with the US. The differences in the effect of the crisis on American and European institutions argue strongly for the importance of government support for the survival of the sector. At the same time, the research shows that private funding stimulates innovation in institutions, which could be crucial for their long-term success.

While industry executives believe that audience engagement, marketing and digital competencies are important for the future of the sector, it was surprising to see that business partnerships occupied the last place on the list of priorities, despite a potential for bringing in additional revenue streams and achieving a more balanced financial position.

Finally, the results of this research indicate that it may be necessary for the Performing Arts sector to initiate a debate on the need to rethink strategies and business models, to ensure both economic survival and versatility through innovation. In light of the fast-changing and uncertain environment the institutions find themselves in, the ability to adapt is needed now and will become even more relevant going forward. The key question is whether the organisations have the resources and the people with necessary competencies and skills to adapt to these changes and thus to survive the current crisis. In the countries where the sector is highly regulated this may bring additional challenges, and the flexibility of the policy makers and regulating bodies is crucial for the success of this process. To provide a competitive digital offering, organisations need to invest funds they do not currently have and may need to retrain the staff or recruit new employees. This also requires financial resources and will take time.

It remains clear that the Performing Arts sector is important for the economy, education and wellbeing of our society. It has survived throughout centuries of wars and crises and deserves to be put at the centre of recovery plans going forward.

References:

Crossick, G. and Kaszynska, P., 2016. Understanding The Value Of Arts & Culture.
Swindon: Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Ernst and Young, 2014. Creating Growth. Measuring Cultural And Creative Markets In The EU.
Ernst and Young, 2015. Cultural Times. The Global Map Of Cultural And Creative Industries.

>>Download the Report: THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON THE PERFORMING ARTS SECTOR

>>Download the Executive Summary: THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON THE PERFORMING ARTS SECTOR

SDA Bocconi School of Management

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the global pandemic has affected our lives on many levels

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including our health and economic and social wellbeing. cultural and creative ind...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Impact of COVID 19 on the Future of Performing Arts: A Survey of Top Industry Executives in Europe and the US

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The global pandemic has affected our lives on many levels, including our health and economic and social wellbeing. Cultural and creative ind...

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Arts and entertainment/Phase2: why recovery will be slower for theaters than museums

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Arts and entertainment/Phase2: why recovery will be slower for theaters than museums

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THREE THEATERS OUT OF 4 HAVE RESORTED TO SOCIAL SHOCK ABSORBERS, AND HAD TO DISSOLVE CONTRACTS WITH SUPPLIERS AND ACTING COMPANIES. THE IMPACT OF THE PANDEMIC HAS BEEN LESS DRAMATIC ON MUSEUMS. THIS IS WHAT EMERGES FROM A RESEARCH LED BY SDA BOCCONI'S ANDREA RURALE, POINTING OUT IT IS HIGH TIME TO RETHINK THE SECTOR'S BUSINESS MODEL.

76.5% of theaters have resorted to social shock absorbers, against (an albeit important) 48.7% of museums. A very different share, witnessing great disparity among cultural institutions, even if all have faced the same harsh conditions. And recovery prospects are not the same either.

The evidence emerges, among others, in a SDA Bocconi Arts and Culture Knowledge Centre's research led by Andrea Rurale. Researchers studied a sample of museums (municipality museums, regional museum centers, galleries, independent national museum foundations) and theaters (symphonic opera foundations, traditional theatres, independent theater associations) from 20 April to 12 May 2020.

"Recovery of activities will be easier in museums", says Andrea Rurale. "Social distancing is hardly imaginable in theater halls, both for the audience (half the seats would be empty) and the actors, who could only stage monologues. Works of art are already present and on show in museums, which can limit the number of visitors and predefine guided pathways in the various halls. Besides audiences, theaters need to interact with managers and artists, instead". Strong data supports this idea: 73.5% of theaters have dissolved, or plan to dissolve, contracts due to force majeure, against 17.9% of museums.

"Both have suffered from loss of revenue (ticket sales and sponsorships)", Rurale explains, "but museums often benefit from the fact that their employees are paid by the government, while almost all theaters have to remunerate their staff". We should also not forget a (substantial) number of people, i.e. zero-hours contract workers like ushers and tourist guides, who have been excluded from early Covid social shock absorbers.

Both museums and theaters have constantly be active on social media, posting content from their archives to create storytelling (77% of sample) and contents for children and young audiences (65%); but these are totally free. This does nothing but highlight how uncertain the present business model is, excessively relying on revenue from tickets and sponsorships (the latter actually focusing almost entirely on health in this period). "The Italian system sits in unstable balance, based on government funds as the main source of financing for theaters", Rurale underlines, "on private sponsorships (which are often short-term), and ticket office income. Our research points at the need for a medium to long period strategic approach, and a longer-term planning not only of theaters' seasons but of other activities as well".

SDA Bocconi School of Management

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three theaters out of 4 have resorted to social shock absorbers

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and had to dissolve contracts with suppliers and acting companies. the impa...

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Arts and entertainment/Phase2: why recovery will be slower for theaters than museums

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THREE THEATERS OUT OF 4 HAVE RESORTED TO SOCIAL SHOCK ABSORBERS, AND HAD TO DISSOLVE CONTRACTS WITH SUPPLIERS AND ACTING COMPANIES. THE IMPACT OF THE PANDEMIC HAS BEEN LESS DRAMATIC ON MUSEUMS. THIS IS WHAT EMERGES FROM A RESEARCH LED BY SDA BOCCONI'S ANDREA RURALE, POINTING OUT IT IS HIGH TIME TO RETHINK THE SECTOR'S BUSINESS MODEL.

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https://www.sdabocconi.it/en/news/in-the-bookshop-managing-the-cultural-business-avoiding-mistakes-finding-success

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Escalating complexity in managing art and cultural organizations, the need to achieve commercial success, and the huge economic and organizational hurdles arising from the recent Covid-19 pandemic: all this means managers in the sector are facing daunting new challenges.

A targeted managerial approach, beyond engendering a proactive, mindful attitude of the reality of their organization and the sector as a whole, requires models and tools that support and guide managers in their decisions. The aim to make decision-making processes more effective and efficient, at the same time generating value.

This is the crux of the argument in the book Managing the Cultural Business. Avoiding Mistakes, Finding Success, curated by Andrea Rurale, Director of the Master in Arts Management and Administration (MAMA) at SDA Bocconi School of Management, and Michela Addis, Professor of Economics and Management at Roma Tre University.

We met with Andrea Rurale to talk about how this book came about, in light of what's been happening over the past year on the healthcare front, and the impact that this emergency has had on the art & culture sector.

You started working on the book before the Covid-19 pandemic. How has this health emergency shaped the reflections you make?

The book was inspired by the experience of MAMA. In fact, all the teachers and researchers who curated the different chapters collaborate in the master program in various areas. So it's a synthesis of the research they've done in various areas of managerial know-how, which has become more and more pertinent as the pandemic goes on. To deal with the changes arising from the different ways people are relating to art, organizations have had to rethink their business models, and only the ones that have read the situation with a critical eye have been able to respond.

What are the most common mistakes in the art & culture sector that your book tries to correct?

All the mistakes that the different chapters focus on can be traced back to common sources: the lack of a strategic approach. And the general view that that artistic-cultural context is a sector where creativity, ingenuity, and at times improvisation can sometimes function not only on the stage, or when we create a work of art, but also in the control room, in other words, places where what we really need to do instead is to analyze problems and come up with effective solutions. So this is the reason why, when we talk about the impact of culture, we're mistakenly thinking in economic terms, and not about social aspects or collective well-being. Or we think that fundraising is only about collecting money for a project, forgetting about what comes before and after the donation...

The customer-centric concept emerges emphatically in the book. What do you mean by that? How does it apply in the artistic-cultural context?

In a cultural context, we realize the best way to interpret 'customer-centric' - which has been a key concept in the evolution of marketing for some time now - when we put people at the center of everything we do. Exposure to art is good for us, as many studies show. But this assumption isn't enough to facilitate the interaction between individuals and art in every possible way. Today the stimuli each of us is subject to every day are countless, and time to dedicate to beauty - to visit a museum or go to the theater - is becoming limited. If we don't cultivate young people, and other people who don't acquire a passion for beauty from their family or from school, art and culture will always be for a select few. A museum shouldn't only speak to experts or art lovers, but to novices too, people who've never set foot in a museum. At the same time cultural spaces have to continue working on educating the community, encouraging people to dig deeper if they feel the need. These activities that place people, visitors, the public at the center, can only by activated with a strategic approach, the outcome of analyzing the 'audience,' making the best decisions and monitoring results.

How do you see the artistic-cultural sector evolving in this difficult time? and what strategies should be adopted to survive in the post-Covid-19 world?

The pandemic has shown us that without public subsidies, the arts and culture sector will not survive. We have to consider it a basic necessity, one that the State has to support. If not, we'll gradually watch as museums, theaters, and archeological sites close down. At the same time, the pandemic has noticeably widened the gap between those few institutions that have developed managerial competencies to face unexpected scenarios and those that are waiting passively for State handouts and help. What we need are skills, clear recognition of the role in of management in the sector, along with indispensable artistic and cultural expertise of the people who run theaters and museums. We need the capacity to analyze data, to forecast scenarios and to respond rapidly to changing market conditions, by taking a proactive approach.

SDA Bocconi School of Management

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escalating complexity in managing art and cultural organizations

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Escalating complexity in managing art and cultural organizations, the need to achieve commercial success, and the huge economic and organizational hurdles arising from the recent Covid-19 pandemic: all this means managers in the sector are facing daunting new challenges.

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Museums, museum professionals and Covid-19: third survey

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Museums, museum professionals and Covid-19: third survey

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Art Workers at the time of the Coronavirus

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Art Workers at the time of the Coronavirus

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https://www.sdabocconi.it/en/news/20/4/art-workers-at-the-time-of-the-coronavirus

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By Andrea Rurale, MAMA Director

If concerts, shows and visits to museums continue to be guaranteed free of charge online to everyone, even in crisis conditions, such during the COVID19 pandemic, it will be even more difficult to obtain the protection that cultural operators have legitimately claimed for their sector for years.

Art at the time of the Coronavirus is present, loud and clear and wants to make itself felt. This happens because those who have made art a job, have shown extraordinary generosity and altruism in recent weeks - despite the precariousness, on-call contracts and poor protections. Museum guides are unpaid as their institutions are closed to the public; theatre ushers are unpaid as they work only when the show is on. This is also the case for musicians, singers, artists.

This phenomenon is not sufficiently brought to the attention of the public, as cultural institutions are showing off their best collections, operas, masterpieces in the "online experience." It is never emphasized how the performance is put on stage, how the collection is maintained and described, and studied: in the era of customer engagement through online experience, it is the workers who pay the consequences.

When factories are on lockdown, production is stopped and no one expects the workers to produce. In the case of art, a solution was found to continue to spread the benefits and positive experiences it generates. From online visits at the infinite halls of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, discovery of the treasures of the Egyptian Museum of Turin, free digital performances by some of the best orchestras in the world to recorded theatrical performances. Since the emergency of COVID 19 has intensified, we have witnessed a wave of shows streamed by individual performers who use cell phone cameras to get in touch with the public.

There are daily concerns about the future of festivals, theaters, museums and orchestras. Activities are postponed, structure's closed and festivals and will be rescheduled whenever possible. However, what does not stop is the very creativity, passion and artistic vein of those who carry out a profession in these sectors.

It is a manifestation of generosity that everyone apparently is urged to express and which leads us to hypothesize a new way of interacting with art, which can also be approached and appreciated online. Now the paradigm changes: will people still want to meet together at a concert or in a museum? Will it be worth going in person if you can access everything from home or your device?

When all this is over we will have to deal with the risk of relegating the operators of cultural sector in a neglected corner, that everyone talks about and that everyone appreciates and praises but that nobody seriously thinks of protecting. The ardor for art and culture is so strong in those who work in the secotr, that at the end of the day they will give their professional work for free as they love so much what they are doing.

SDA Bocconi School of Management

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shows and visits to museums continue to be guaranteed free of charge online to everyone

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Art Workers at the time of the Coronavirus

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By Andrea Rurale, MAMA Director If concerts, shows and visits to museums continue to be guaranteed free of charge online to everyone, even in crisis conditions, such during the COVID19 pandemic, it will be even more difficult to obtain the protection that cultural operators have legitimately claimed for their sector for years.

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Logistic:

- Narrowing the scope of our presentation to the field of performing arts.

- The theme was "digitization" in the context of the epidemic.

The central theme was the current state of digitization and the issues surrounding it. (such as financial issues, the pricing of virtual performances, how arts managers deal with technical equipment, and how to protect intellectual property).

- Use case studies as a vehicle for research, reflecting the issues we raise.
(for example, comparing the different performances of large and small scale companies on digital, or comparing performance organizations from different countries.)

- We can use mind maps to fill in different directions and examples.

For next week:
- Identify the management challenges in the performing arts sector.

- Find specific cases of institutions that respond to the challenges (the examples are not limited to specific areas).

- Share new resources and ideas.

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About digitalization before covid (2016)

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National Theatre

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Can Digital Engagement Transform the Performing Arts?

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Can Digital Engagement Transform the Performing Arts?

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⚠️PS: This article provides several insights about the relationship between the digitalization and the performing art, as well as how this trend cause impact on this domain.

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Can Digital Engagement Transform the Performing Arts_

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Furloughed Musicians and A New Digital Frontier: Performing Arts in the COVID-19 Shutdown

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DIGITIZING THE PERFORMING ARTS An Assessment of Opportunities, Issues and Challenges

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DIGITIZING THE PERFORMING ARTS An Assessment of Opportunities, Issues and Challenges

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DIGITIZING THE PERFORMING ARTS An Assessment of Opportunities, Issues and Challenges

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In partnership with Nesta and AHRC, we funded 52 arts and culture organisations to collaborate with tech companies and researchers to explore new ways to reach audiences or generate income.

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Digital R&D Fund for the Arts | Arts Council England

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FROM LIVE-TO-DIGITAL: Understanding the Impact of Digital Developments in Theatre on Audiences, Production and Distribution

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FROM LIVE-TO-DIGITAL: Understanding the Impact of Digital Developments in Theatre on Audiences, Production and Distribution

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Stream Opera, Ballet, Dance and Music on Demand | Marquee TV

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Sign up now and stream theatre, dance and opera in high definition on-demand with Marquee TV. Available on your TV, mobile device and browser with a 7-day free trial.

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The pandemic has foregrounded the benefits of online engagement, whilst also causing a range of deep damage to the sector, both in terms of those who make up the workforce (in particular the impact on freelancers) and the financial health of organisations. Whilst it's sharpened the hunger of many audiences, it has also created new risks and barriers, even as venues now reopen.

The in-person experience since COVID lockdowns began
Substantial proportions of the population engage with live performing arts, when possible:
In the year pre-COVID
Equally, there have been sharper restrictions on the availability for performing arts over the last year or so:
In the year after the first lockdown (March 2020 - February 2021)

People have definitely missed these experiences though: 60% of respondents said so in fact. 29% 'Strongly agree' (and a further 31% 'agree') that they were missing live performance (equivalent to about 15 million, or 32 million people in total) - higher than for any other types of cultural activity.

There will, of course, be a range of changes for performing arts organisations now that many are able to reopen: whether distancing, limits to capacity, the importance of ventilation (inc. greater use of outdoor spaces) and changes to touring patterns. We'll track sales as they return through the sales dashboard, as well as through Audience Finder. We've also drawn out more detail about 'typical' sales in the Back Light report, which may provide a useful reference for what normal used to look like, in terms of audience behaviour.

Now that doors can be reopened, different performing arts sectors have different experiences with returning audiences. Initial indications show that core audiences seem keen (if hesitant to commit at this stage). But there is likely to be more reluctance from casual or occasional attenders, especially in older age groups. In Audience Spectrum terms, these would be less-engaged Commuterland Culturebuffs, Home and Heritage, and Heydays in particular. There's likely to be a stronger response from audiences to contemporary art forms, especially in larger cities (e.g. New Writing and Contemporary Dance).

We will track these trends and report on them as we know more from attender data.

The online experience since COVID lockdowns began

Online experiences have risen in prominence (and volume of engagement) during the pandemic. However, it's a more nuanced picture than this suggests.
% of digital cultural engagers during lockdown (March 2020 - February 2021) who have accessed:
All of these are similar (within the margin of error) of online engagement in the year before COVID (just as the overall proportion engaging with any arts and heritage online has only risen from 41% to 43%). This suggests that the audiences haven't broadened, but increased in frequency.

Online engagement has been a benefit for accessibility, however, whether in terms of disability, rural audiences, those on low incomes, parents, or as a low-risk way of trying new activity. There's also evidence that even previously engaged audiences have been using it to try new types of work (48% of those who'd engaged online strongly agreed or agreed that they'd 'discovered new forms of art and culture online'). For these reasons alone (let alone potential additional income, brand development etc) we hope that organisations continue, and enhance, their commitment to digital channels into the future.

There is also evidence that the same groups that are likely to be most keen to return to live attendance are the same that have - and continue to expect to - engage most digitally as well. This raises the prospect of blended digital and in-person experiences, enriching and extending engagement.

REPORTS, RESOURCES AND EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT PERFORMING ARTS THROUGH THE CRISIS:

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The pandemic has foregrounded the benefits of online engagement, whilst also causing a range of deep damage to the sector, both in terms of those who make up the workforce (in particular the impact on freelancers) and the financial health of organisations.

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Article - COVID-19 Impacted the Technology & Performing Arts Relationship

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Article - COVID-19 Impacted the Technology & Performing Arts Relationship

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Forced by global pandemic, societal division and economic uncertainty over the past year, every industry including the performing arts adapted or lost the capacity to survive. These changes accelerated the arts field into the realm of reinvention via digital technology, which was both demanding and risky, yet critical for arts organizations to stay alive.

Traditionally, the performing arts has operated with a relatively simply business model involving filling a theater to capacity by selling tickets. In the non-profit world, ticket sales offset the expense of a stage performance and donations close the gap, and in the commercial sector, ticket sales alone (ideally) generate a profit. The model's success depends on consistently congregating as many people as possible in enclosed space.

However, with COVID-19 and the closing of venues across the country, this model was shattered. As a consequence, many performing arts organizations, otherwise slow to embrace digital technology, quickly pivoted to create digital content with live streaming or on-demand offerings. In the midst of managing financial and organizational upheaval, most organizations redeployed staff with little digital training or experience into the role of digital content producers. The beginning efforts often yielded rudimentary-style content not particularly compelling as digital experiences, but, over time, products substantially improved, in many cases rivaling commercial video production.

Performing arts organizations experienced a steep learning curve that dictated a digital competency most probably never aspired to. Whether this new learning is the catalyst for widespread embrace of a technological revolution remains unclear: Was digital production simply a bridge to mitigate a difficult year? Anchoring the digital strategy of many organizations lies an unexamined assumption that digital work exists only until they "return to normal" and are back to the business of traditional live performance.

The flaw in this approach, according to Kamal Sinclair (executive director of the Guild of Future Architects, and senior advisor, Digital Innovation, at The Music Center) is that "COVID-19 ripped the band-aid off" and what patrons will expect when they return to arts venues will be vastly different than what they expected back in March 2020.

According to Sinclair, we will never get rid of "aliveness" in the performing arts, but for the sector to remain relevant, the "brick-and-mortar experience" needs to join a larger creative conversation involving new technologies and multiple platforms.

"More importantly, digital frees up our potential to create art for and with younger and diverse audiences in a medium that is relevant to them."

Embracing the promise and opportunity of a digital revolution, arts organizations are recognizing that their reach to new audiences expanded exponentially under COVID. Many performing arts organizations struggle with the growing impact of audiences and donors that do not reflect the communities they serve, deeply lacking diversity regarding age, race, ethnicity, and class. At the same time, we witness through digital work how challenges of geography, mobility, and limited financial resources are mitigated, and how a wider range of communities engage with the performing arts in ways once unfathomable. More importantly, digital frees up our potential to create art for and with younger and diverse audiences in a medium that is relevant to them.

According to Sinclair, "The promise of interactive digital culture has yet to be realized", but by using current digital technologies, an artist can tell a story across multiple platforms and formats, transforming venues and live performances into experiences that are much more immersive, engaging, and resonant with the times.

Over the past year, audiences learned many new ways to engage in arts experiences. Going forward, driving an hour in traffic to see a traditional proscenium-based arts performance will not be enough-audiences will want something richer. This expanded expectation represents the promise and the challenge of a digital future for the performing arts. Exploring what that might be, the institution I lead is starting by experimenting with innovative "touch moments" during a dance experience (pre-, during, and post-concert), finding ways for audiences to engage creatively with one another via digital technology, including the use of interactive graphics, projected visuals, as well as audio and lighting design. We have volumes more to learn on this journey.

While very real concerns remain about the performing arts field's capacity to meet the
challenges of societal and technological change, the COVID lockdown could be a catalyst for renewal. With new digital tools, the arts can move beyond the traditional performances of the past and deepen and expand the artistic experience. For many of us, the work ahead involves creating and producing arts experiences in the digital realm that strengthen our collective capacity to heal and to grow from and move beyond the challenges of the pandemic.
Rachel S. Moore is President & CEO of The Music Center (Performing Arts Center of Los A Want more thoughts from experts? Read all our coverage here. ngeles), which operates the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Mark Taper F orum, Ahmanson Theatre, Grand Park and Jerry Moss Plaza.

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COVID-19 Impacted the Technology & Performing Arts Relationship

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Forced by global pandemic, societal division and economic uncertainty over the past year, every industry including the performing arts adapted or lost the capacity to survive. These changes accelerated the arts field into the realm of reinvention via digital technology, which was both demanding and risky, yet critical for arts organizations to stay alive.

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Audience Agency - Using Evidence to... Re-open Indoor Venues

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Audience Agency - Using Evidence to... Re-open Indoor Venues

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While the ability and process for re-opening indoor venues - theatres and concert halls - may not be straightforward, evidence shows that a certain proportion of existing audiences are keen to get back. So, in preparation for welcoming audiences, and seeking out how to engage new ones, here are some examples of evidence you can use to guide you. We're learning all the time and as venues open up we'll be increasing the insight and evidence we can use to understand and predict who is returning for cultural experiences.

With that in mind, here are 5 things to consider:

1. Understanding your usual audiences

2. Understanding your digital audiences

3. Understanding audiences' experience of and response to COVID-19

4. Aligning audiences and the return environment

5. Monitoring audience profile, experience and feedback once they attend

1. Understanding your usual audiences

Question | Where can I find up-to-date information on my audiences?

Evidence | If you have been contributing data to Audience Finder, take the time to mine through it to refresh your understanding of your audiences, whether you have ticketing data and use the Audience Finder dashboard, Show Stats for your tours or audience monitoring surveys. You may also have other sources that are worth digging out, or you could get in touch with those organisations you work with most closely to see what they might be able to tell you. This will give you information on:

1. Audience profiles and behaviours - using Audience Spectrum, demographics, group make-up, frequency and recency data.

2. Audience motivations and satisfaction.

3. Your core, most enthusiastic audiences.

Question | Who is likely to want to come back soonest when we re-open?

Evidence | Check out our resource on Audience Spectrum in the time of COVID-19 and refer to your own audience profiles. By engaging with your most enthusiastic audiences first, they can be your ambassadors for encouraging wider audiences to return.

2. Understanding your digital audiences

Question | Who is engaging with your digital work? And are they similar to or different from your physical audiences?

Then you can put what you find in the context of audiences for physical work in terms of key metrics of geography and age range, and - if you do the survey - wider metrics including Evidence | Make sure you have your digital analytics set-up in the right way to track your digital audiences - for top tips sign up to our digital evaluation webinar. And use our Digital Audiences Survey to get deeper information about who they are and their experiences digitally.Audience Spectrum.

Question | How likely are your digital audiences to attend your venue?

Digital Audience Survey you can ask them. Or set-up some pop-up questions on your website or social media platforms with some key questions about what else they may be interested in. Evidence | If you use the Audience Spectrum portraits will also tell you about how likely different profiles are to engage digitally for culture.

Question | Will offering digital engagement along with physical grow audiences?

(see our means that you cannot reach all parts of society with a digital offer. However, it is still very important to think about what you are offering digitally and to whom. Our Evidence | We understand that some people engage digitally who don't engage physicallycase study on National Galleries digital audiences for some insights) and that digital exclusion report on digital engagement for Creative People and Places gives some key insight into developing a digital offer in areas of low cultural engagement.

3. Understanding audiences' experience of and responses to COVID-19

Question | How have your audiences found lockdown? What cultural experiences have they engaged with during this time?

Evidence | Check out our resource on Audience Spectrum in the time of COVID-19 - drawing on wider surveys and data being generated.

Question | When and how are they likely to re-attend your venue ? What are the key factors that would affect th at?

Evidence | Draw on available surveys in your nation - in England , in Scotland - which indicate who is most likely to return and what factors are at play in their decisions to return. Keep checking out further resources that we'll publish on the w ider national picture in the E vidence H ub Resources Roundup.

Question | Who is there in my local area who might attend, even if they don't already? What might their barriers be?

Evidence | If you are thinking that there are audiences who make up a large proportion of your own catchment area, but who have not yet made up a significant proportion of your current audiences... then explore who they are by using population data such as our Area Profile Report; Engagement Area Profile Report; Taking Part Survey Interactive Online Tool; or look at the Audience Spectrum mapping.

4. Aligning audience needs and the return environment

Question | What are audiences' motivations for attending? Have these changed post COVID-19?

Evidence | Think about which audiences may return soonest using the resources listed here and relate this to your usual audiences. What were their motivations pre-Covid-19 , and how likely are they to have changed in a new environment? Understand their needs, concerns and how you can ensure they feel comfortable and safe. It may be that your most frequent audiences are the most cautious, but a smaller proportion of your usual audiences may be very willing to come out. You can also of course talk to them yourself - through a short survey or (socially distanced) conversations digitally or in the open air.

Audiences will be looking for much more information about what they can expect than they previously required. It might be useful to think how other sectors are having to think in terms of Track and Trace so that you can apply the same approaches. Our Evidence | Consider your different audience groups - who's going to come back soonest, what they'd like to see - and tailor your messages and information accordingly. masterclass on this may help you to communicate effectively with your audiences.

5. Monitoring audience profile, experience and feedback once they attend

Question | How can I track who's buying tickets and how it compares to previous years ?

Evidence | Have a look at our tracker insights, using Audience Finder data, to see the pattern of bookings over the years and we'll be adding forecasting insights to this as ticket buying gets under way.

Question | Which types of audience and group types reattend first? How does that change over time?

Evidence | Audience Finder survey and ticketing , comparisons in the Audience Finder dashboard by quarter, or download of responses and analysis by date, including Audience Spectrum profiles, previous attendance, group type. Venue ticketing system.

Question | How do your post-Covid visitors compare to your previous visitors?

Evidence | Audience Finder survey and ticketing , comparisons in the Audience Finder dashboard to same quarter in a previous year, or more detailed timescale splits in Enhanced Dashboard . Venue ticketing system.

Question | How satisfied are your visitors when they attend? Is this different for first-time or repeat attenders? How does it compare to before?

Evidence | Audience Finder survey , comparisons in the Audience Finder dashboard, including Audience Spectrum profiles, previous attendance, satisfaction; front of house staff feedback; other customer feedback processes; social media and online reviews, including sites like Tripadvisor .

Question | What is the likely word-of-mouth response? What may you need to change in your new configuration?

Evidence | Audience Finder survey download of free text response, satisfaction, likelihood to recommend.

These are just some of the many things you may want to find out: see The Audience Agency's Bounce Forwards COVID-19 Response Hub for more suggestions, or get in touch for further advice and support about how to act on what you find out via workwithus@theaudienceagency.org

If you have suggested additions or amends, do also get in touch at the same address.

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Using Evidence to... Re-open Indoor Venues

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While the ability and process for re-opening indoor venues - theatres and concert halls - may not be straightforward, evidence shows that a certain proportion of existing audiences are keen to get back. So, in preparation for welcoming audiences, and seeking out how to engage new ones, here are some examples of evidence you can use to guide you.

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Logistic:
- Recognize the fact that digitization already existed before the Covid-19 pandemic
- Survey (by AEA Consulting for Arts Council England, UK Theatre and Society of London Theatre) responses that theatregoers are neither more nor less likely to attend live theatre if they experience it digitally
- Digital R&D Fund for the Arts in partnership with Nesta and AHRC funded 52 arts and culture organisations to collaborate with tech companies and researchers

- Come up with four directions starting from the digitization of performing arts:
- 1. Financial problems: people not willing to pay for online performances; how to control costs (since recording a show could cost a lot of money) and increase income

- 2. Copyright issues: how to protect the legitimate rights and interests of artists; pirated copies of illegal recording
- 3. Capability: leveraging digital technology on stage or off can be daunting for practitioners of performing arts for a number of reasons—lack of capacity, lack of technical expertise, lack of understanding about who partners and audiences are, or might be, and where to find them. Additional training for the sector may help organisations overcome perceived barriers
- 4. Audience engagement: how to attract diverse audiences online and maintain the relationship—whether they will stick with offline events after pandemic

- The Audience Agency transformative solutions for the cultural sector: using evidence to...re-open indoor venues

For next week:
- Find specific examples of institutions respond to the challenges mentioned above (no less than 2, maximum 3)
- Theories related to the above directions
- Examine which cases are more representative
- Always share new ideas and resources

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COVID-19 Community Story | The Torch Theatre

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COVID-19 Community Story | The Torch Theatre

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January 2021

Based in Pembrokeshire, the Torch Theatre is a vibrant centre for the arts, priding itself on extending a warm welcome to all visitors. As the major theatre producing venue of West Wales, the theatre is used to offering an excellent programme of distinctive, relevant and accessible arts activity to a loyal and growing audience of Pembrokeshire residents and seasonal tourists. We spoke to the team about their Covid-19 response strategies and how they have been coping in the face of a pandemic. The Torch's five-point Community Story covers:

Life in Lock-down

Like all arts venues, at the end of March we were told to close and have had to grapple with all the challenges of furloughing staff. We had no real marketing assistance until November and had seven or eight months with just a handful of managers working as best as they could to try and maintain operations and keep going, engaging our audiences.

Then there were applications for funding support to write, and trying to get the staff back into work. It's been a challenge but we got there, and now we have had support from the Cultural Recovery fund and a number of others including the BFI. Securing these have let us finally plan our way forward, re-engage, and hopefully reopen again in 2021.

Adapting to New Approaches

We launched Torch Virtual Voices using Facebook Live during lockdown with live performances and updates from our choir MD, Angharad Sanders. Amazingly we've reached an audience of around 45,000 people across the last few months. We've also done live streaming of several performances, including Daniel Kitson and then our popular production 'Grav' - telling the story of Welsh Rugby player and icon, Ray Gravell.

The other thing we did was to tell other peoples' stories. We found ourselves in a position to support creative associates and freelancers, as well as other theatres, by sharing the work that was being done across the sector, speaking with local theatre companies and using our platform to engage new audiences. It's been about making sure everyone is included in our community and sharing the positive stories, not just those that are going on in Pembrokeshire but across the country and possibly across the world. For us, this really was a different way of working and a different way of thinking.

The situation has really strengthened our relationship with our friends in other theatres. We've all been tackling the same issues and, as a result, a culture of supporting and confiding in each other has grown. It's been heart-warming to see so much resilience and so much mutual love for one another in these trying times.

A similar thing has happened between the theatre and our local community too. In March when we closed the building we gave away a lot of food and drinks to local Pembrokeshire charities which provide support to people in difficult circumstances. In addition our technical team spent hours chopping up wood to give to local communities to keep their fires going. We spent 3 or 4 days delivering it, alongside face protection that we had made during the initial lack of PPE in early lockdown. Between four 3D printers run by our technical team as well as some outsourcing we delivered over 1000 face masks.

Overall, the pandemic has really allowed us to step back and ask ourselves what we can really do for our community. What does our community need? And yes, we are limited in many ways, but we are capable of pulling an amazing operation like that together as a team. For a small theatre in this part of Wales that sense of bringing the community together has not only been brilliant, but critical really.

Considering our Comeback

Right now it's all about planning. We're trying to look at what we've got and what we're trying to do.

Obviously, we're focussing a lot on digital aspects and on making the building secure and inviting. In terms of how we operate, we're hoping to move forward to a point where we can get the cinema open as soon as it is safe to do so. If we can do that then the theatre would ideally follow around April. We're aiming to get productions back on stage but we're also looking to see how we can engage with the community and run more community led projects.

We've begun looking more deeply into how to use our digital platforms, how to engage audiences, but also how to get a better understanding of how the population of Pembrokeshire sees us. We're taking the time to understand our key bookers but also the ones who aren't really engaging at all.

It has been a time of strategizing and planning and looking at how to fundamentally change the way we work. In fact, that chance to step back has been the biggest change. When you're in the normal swing of things you're full force and every department is working flat out. Now we've been given an opportunity to sit down and listen because everything normal has gone. Now is our time to talk to audiences and let them know we can hear them. We can engage in new conversations. We will work with local stakeholders, charities and organisations and just sit back and listen. We'll be asking: What do you want from us? When we reopen what do you want to see? What have we not given you in terms of artistic offerings, or as a community hub? What would YOU like us to provide?

It's a really exciting prospect to launch into 2021 and beyond with that attitude. A lot of our audience feedback has reflected that we are seen as a major part of the local community, which we pride ourselves on, but inevitably there will be some areas we will have missed, simply due to following traditional ways of working and thinking. It's a real opportunity to sit back and listen.

Navigating the New Normal

It's a very exciting time and we're really looking forward to reopening our doors.

When we do, it's really important that our audiences feel confident to return. We've put screens up in box office, signage for one-way systems, and reviewed our capacity based on the 2 meter distance rule, which has been the biggest challenge. We're are also opening up the air flow in the building, installing hand sanitisers, looking at cleaning rotas and our food and drink offer in the café bar. A lot of reviewing and reflecting so that we can work with the Welsh Government guidelines and recommendations from the Local Council and Arts Council of Wales.

We're also taking the opportunity to splash the odd lick of paint around and look at lighting and flooring in some areas, so that when we're ready to open everything is looking brand spanking new.

It's also important that we are looking at messaging around the relaunch in some detail, giving enough guidance so that people feel empowered to come into the building and know what to expect.

One thing we've learned in the run up to reopening is that we'll always need to be able to adapt. We were looking to open in November around the big film launches like James Bond, but every time a release date gets set back we have to adapt alongside it. Of course we have also been effected by the January lockdown and the latest set of Welsh Government restrictions. It's been challenging.

Data-led Decision Making

We've had to spend time getting to understand our audience using Audience Finder to analyse our ticketing data and results from a monitoring survey we undertook on our 19/20 audiences, collected from across the year. We also looked at the After the Interval survey we ran in the Spring, and obviously our box office data, to get a general feel of the consensus among people and see how it differed from the norm. We're interested to know what people really want, what activity they want to see, what level of security or protection they feel is adequate to come back to the building.

Like many rural theatres, we have a more mature audience here, many of whom could be classed as vulnerable. Plus we have community groups like Dementia Choirs and disability movement groups - we're very conscious of how we can integrate these groups into our spaces when the time is right, making sure they have a safe and secure environment to operate in and do what they love doing.

So, there are lots of conversations going on behind the scenes with focused sections of our community as well as general audience surveys. Without having this kind of feedback and audience data you are clutching at straws. We need to be confident we can deliver a plan of action to make everybody feel welcome again.

In terms of who we've engaged over the last year, the data is looking slightly younger than our usual demographic. Part of this is due to online engagement. Obviously, figures have gone down overall for all kinds of engagement - with no product and offer our website gets fewer visits. But our social media is hitting a younger audience for sure.

The biggest change is probably our geographical reach though, with our live sessions generating engagement from across the world. There have been viewers in Mexico, Scotland, Huddersfield joining us every week. Our live stream of Daniel Kitson saw people booking tickets from Australia and America (and a large group from Sheffield which was interesting).

So digital platforms have certainly widened our audiences. These new audiences are unlikely to come and visit the theatre but it has been a great exercise in getting the Torch brand out beyond this part of Pembrokeshire. At the end of the day, the data shows that we have a global audience in some way, which is brilliant for a small theatre in west Wales. It's amazing.

A word of thanks
We couldn't end this without saying a massive thank you to our patrons and supporters through these tough times. We all want to be back where we were. We are desperate to get our doors open and keep building on what we do and continuing to support our community. For those of you in the arts, we're here to support you if you need us. It's been great that so many of you have been part of this journey thus far.
Interested in contributing a Community Story of your own? Download the template HERE.
If you have any questions or are ready to send over a story, please get in touch with vanny.lambert@theaudienceagency.org

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COVID-19 Community Story | The Torch Theatre

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Based in Pembrokeshire, the Torch Theatre is a vibrant centre for the arts, priding itself on extending a warm welcome to all visitors. As the major theatre producing venue of West Wales, the theatre is used to offering an excellent programme of distinctive, relevant and accessible arts activity to a loyal and growing audience of Pembrokeshire residents and seasonal tourists.

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Theatre During COVID-19_ Perceptions of High School Students and

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About Boundless Creativity

Boundless Creativity was set up as a joint research project by UK Research and Innovation's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), in partnership with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS). The project has examined the role of innovation in shaping cultural experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and generated a new evidence base to inform the recovery, renewal and future growth of the UK's cultural and creative sectors.

The key aims of Boundless Creativity are as follows:

Provide new data and real-time intelligence on the impact of COVID-19 across the UK's arts, cultural and creative sectors;

Investigate the impact of COVID-19 on new technology-enabled distribution platforms and online cultural participation, consumption and user preferences across a range of audience groups;

Identify how the cultural and creative sectors can innovate through their content and business models to build resilience against future shocks;

Explore the links between cultural participation and mental health and well-being and how these differ across audience and population groups;

Recommend specific research and policy interventions to drive engagement with the issues highlighted in this report, including those which will allow the sector to maximise the potential of new digital and immersive technologies in engaging and diversifying audiences.

Between September 2020 and February 2021, the project held a series of roundtable discussions with representatives from across the cultural and creative sectors, under the guidance of an Expert Advisory Panel. The Panel brought together expertise from across the arts, cultural, creative and higher education sectors to discuss key insights and findings and to make recommendations.

Membership of the Expert Advisory Panel

Lord Mendoza, Commissioner for Cultural Recovery and Renewal (Chair)

Professor Andrew Thompson CBE, University of Oxford (Chair)

Dr Joanna Abeyie, Blue Moon

Maria Balshaw CBE, Director, Tate Arts Museums and Galleries

John Cassy, Founder and CEO, Factory-42

Professor Helen Chatterjee, University College London

Professor Andrew Chitty, UKRI

Professor Edward Harcourt, AHRC

Imogen Heap, Recording Artist and Tech Founder

Dr Chris Michaels, National Gallery

Neelay Patel, Digital Theatre

Dr Sara Pepper, University of Cardiff

Professor Christopher Smith, AHRC

Dr Jo Twist, UK Interactive Entertainment

List of contributors

Hasan Bakhshi - Director, Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre

Alex Beard - Royal Opera House CEO

Professor James Bennett - Royal Holloway University

Patrick Bradley - Managing Director, Station12

Nica Burns - Chief Executive, Nimax Theatres

Craig Chettle - Confetti Institute of Creative Technologies, Nottingham

Professor Paul Crawford -University of Nottingham

Michael Eakin - Chief Executive, Liverpool Philharmonic

Phil Edgar-Jones - Chief Executive, Sky Arts

Sarah Ellis - Head of Digital Development, Royal Shakespeare Company

Nadia Fall - Artistic Director, Theatre Royal Stratford East

Dr Daisy Fancourt - University College London

Peter Florence - Director, Hay Festival

Dominic Gray - Projects Director, Opera North

Cassian Harrison - Senior Vice President of Commissioning and Global Content Services, BBC

Victoria Hume - Director, Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance

Caroline Jones - Chief Executive, The Story Museum Oxford

Anthony Lilley - Magic Lantern Productions

Anna Lowe - Co-founder of Smartify

Dr Kamal Mahtani - Co-Director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine

Kate Mavor - Chief Executive, English Heritage

Maddy Mills - Artistic Director, Entelechy Arts

Caroline Norbury - Creative England, CEO

Karen O'Brien - Head of Humanities, University of Oxford

Rene Olivieri - National Lottery Heritage Fund Interim Chair

Lorna Probert - Producer, Aardman Animation

Laura Pye - Chief Executive, National Museums Liverpool

Harman Sagger - Head of Analysis, Arts Heritage and Tourism, DCMS

Professor Caroline Scarles - University of Surrey

Lucy Shaw - Head of Partnerships, Oxford Galleries, Libraries and Museums

Dr Martin Smith - Creative Consultant and AHRC Creative Industries Advisory Group

Alistair Spalding - Chief Executive and Artistic Director, Sadler's Wells

Nick Starr - Chief Executive, The Bridge Theatre

Sean Taylor - Project Director, InGAME

Dr Stephanie Tierney -University of Oxford

Professor Ben Walmsley - Director, Centre for Cultural Value

Jonathan Williams - Deputy Director, British Museum

Roger Wright - Chief Executive, Britten Pears Arts

Foreword from the Chairs

At the launch of Boundless Creativity, the actress Fiona Shaw described 'culture as everything - a way of travelling, even at home'. Amidst the restrictions of the past year, it is culture we have fallen back on. Thanks to modern science, vaccines will allow our lives to return to a new normality. But it is culture that has kept us going. Helping us to deal with a weight of solitude. Educating and entertaining. Consoling and comforting. Reminding us of the values that make us human. Boundless Creativity highlights the central role of culture in a flourishing life - before the pandemic, in the midst of it, and in the new normal, whatever form that eventually takes.

In March 2020, the UK's theatres, concert halls, festivals, galleries and museums fell silent. It is testimony to their resilience that they were not silent for long. As Ben Okri says, 'it is in crisis when we need the wisdom and perspective of art the most'. To be sure, many aspects of our cultural life have suffered the damage and disruptions inflicted by the pandemic. From the visible crisis of venues, to young artists and creatives denied opportunities for work, to redundancies of backstage staff, the cultural sector has had to contend with a public health crisis the likes of which we have not hitherto witnessed in our lifetimes.

But culture has fought back. From the livestreaming of ballet into our living rooms to interactive plays on Zoom, from behind-the-scenes tours of galleries to concerts in Epic's 'Fortnite', culture during the pandemic has flourished in new forms. Amidst the unprecedented cessation of live performance, we have witnessed an equally unprecedented expansion of live streaming, digital offerings and online content. During lockdown games, subscription video on demand, and digital and recorded music have all enjoyed positive revenue and audience growth. New partnerships between the digital and cultural sectors have driven new forms of innovation.

At our launch Mary Beard predicted that 'one day, we will look back to these dark and cloudy times as the moment when we really did harness technology to open up the best of what arts and culture have to offer on a wider and grander scale'. For this prediction to come true, we must harness the lessons we have learned over the last year. As the virus' threat to our physical health recedes, culture will increasingly serve as the marker for the spiritual health of the nation.

Central to this recovery will be a process of healing from the secondary effects of the virus. Around the world countries opening back up from the pandemic will be engaged in vast natural experiments. Lives as much as livelihoods will be at stake. The cultural and creative industries will be a key tool in reconnecting societies, processing the emotional and psychological trauma of COVID, and emerging from this pandemic as stronger and more cohesive communities.

Boundless Creativity was established by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in partnership with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport to capture the extraordinary ingenuity and imagination that have marked our cultural life during the pandemic. What is clear from everyone we have spoken to - and from our assembled case studies - is that cultural organisations have adapted and innovated to sustain our national life when we have needed them most.

The government, recognising the importance of these sectors, has provided targeted and unprecedented support during this difficult period. Rapid interventions like the £2 billion Culture Recovery Fund and the £500 million Film & Television Restart Scheme have offered a lifeline to organisations across the country.

Before the pandemic, the creative industries were a sector in which the UK was already leading the world. As one of the fastest growing parts of the UK economy, they contributed £115.9 billion per year and were growing at more than five times the rate of the overall economy.

They also accounted for almost 12% of UK services exports. There is now a practical urgency about gathering research and intelligence, not only to support re-opening but to secure the pathway to longer-term growth. The UK rightly prides itself on the range and quality of its live performance. Its artistic, cultural and creative sectors are also getting more digital savvy too. Looking ahead, how can we make the best of both worlds: the magic of live performance plus all of the learnings from lockdown? Somewhere in that symbiosis the future is to be secured. Drawing on the insights and experiences of many of the UK's leading cultural figures, creative industry experts and digital technology pioneers, our report makes nine key recommendations - for government, for funders of research, and for arts, cultural and creative organisations, and businesses. We believe that, if acted upon, these recommendations will make a powerful contribution to the recovery of UK culture and to the broader healing process of the country as we emerge from lockdown.

This report could not have been written without the input from our distinguished Expert Advisory Panel as well as the many contributors to the events we held. We are grateful for their contributions. What emerged from our conversations is the huge economic potential of the UK's powerhouse creative industries, alongside the intrinsic value of culture for our civic and community life. We know that in 2021 we still face many challenges. However, as we turn towards a future with fewer restrictions, let us be sure to put culture at the heart of the UK's national life.

Summary of recommendations

Taken together, our nine recommendations form a post-pandemic pathway to recovery and sustainable growth for the cultural and creative sectors. They capitalise on the new ways of working that have characterised cultural life during COVID-19 and the shared commitment of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to work more closely together for the benefit of cultural organisations and creative technology. Our recommendations will enable cultural organisations and creative businesses - whether relying on new technologies or on more traditional modes of delivery - to come back better and stronger.

1. Support New Cross-Sectoral Collaborative R&D: The creative industries are not usually regarded as a typical R&D sector. That is changing, however. Where creative meets 'tech' is the place where great cultural and economic value is going to be derived in the next twenty years. Hence our first and in many ways foundational recommendation is for the development of new Boundless Creativity funding calls, devised by AHRC in collaboration with DCMS, in order to support thinking on the UK creative and cultural sector's recovery from the pandemic and help to reap its benefits. These new funding calls would be launched, subject to the spending review, successively over the next 24 months to target the specified research fields highlighted in the recommendations below.

2. Reach New Global Audiences: A new collaboration between AHRC and DCMS to understand and unlock the potential of reaching new global audiences digitally, starting with a survey of the innovative ways the sector has engaged, and begun to monetise their engagement with, international audiences. This will be accompanied by a call to arts funding agencies for collaborative research to increase understanding of how digital content for international audiences can complement or support international touring once resumed.

3. Reshape the Policy Environment to invigorate Creative R&D: DCMS will work with the HMRC and the cultural sector to revisit the definition of R&D for the creative industries, supported by research produced by the AHRC Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre to understand how R&D can be bolstered within the cultural and creative industries, to quantify the value of creative R&D, and offer workable policy solutions. We will also seek to learn from Festival UK* 2022 to understand the effectiveness of R&D in fostering creativity and innovation between cross-sector organisations.

4. Broaden Digital Access for Producers and Consumers: AHRC will galvanise new research on the barriers to entry into the digital market faced by freelance artists and smaller creative organisations, and will work with DCMS to look into framing new policy interventions that level up commercial opportunities for streaming beyond larger institutions and beyond London. We will incentivise the bigger players to make their platforms open source and / or develop a shared platform to give smaller cultural practitioners more control over their content and how they profit from it.

5. Increase data sharing: New research will be initiated to increase our understanding of how innovative digital content can reduce barriers to audience participation, generate new income streams, support freelance artists and smaller organisations, and retain copyright for producers.

6. Support Future Live Performance: AHRC will distil the insights and intelligence from its rapid response COVID-19 research, identifying the gaps in our knowledge about COVID-secure environments for live cultural experiences. This research will inform future policy interventions to create a sustainable model for the sector, in tune with the new normal. 2022 as a year of celebration focused on culture and sport, with three showstopper events across the UK - Birmingham Commonwealth Games, The Queen's Platinum Jubilee, and Festival UK* 2022 - will be an opportunity to support jobs and provide a platform for the UK to shine on a global stage.

7. Build a Strong, Resilient and Diverse Digital Skills Base: Building on Arts Council England's digital maturity index and tech champions network, DCMS will continue to invest in schemes such as the National Skills Fund, Digital Skills Partnerships, and Digital Skills Bootcamps. This will ensure the whole cultural and creative sector can embrace digital transformation and build a workforce with the necessary skills. AHRC will work with DCMS and other arts funding agencies (such as Arts Council England) to look at the digital skills gaps in the UK cultural and creative sector, with a particular focus on regional growth and interconnectivity and the demands of specific and diverse demographics.

8. Cement the link between cultural access and health and well-being: AHRC and other partners, with the support of DCMS, will launch a new joint research programme focusing not just on mental health but health generally. It will work with other relevant networks (e.g. the National Academy of Social Prescribing) to identify the local assets partnerships and delivery mechanisms best suited to a national roll-out of arts-and-culture-based policy to redress the health inequalities that have been amplified by the pandemic.

9. Diversify and Nurture Talent: Arts funding agencies should undertake a collaborative project looking at the impact of COVID-19 on new entrants to the cultural and creative sectors' workforce, and at effective interventions to reverse the labour market scarring and to bring back talent recently lost.

The key insights gained from Boundless Creativity and which inform our recommendations

The pandemic has changed how we lead our lives. On its eve, transformative digital technologies were already turning producers into consumers with platforms like Instagram and YouTube. But the pandemic itself has accelerated these advances further. We have seen an unprecedented expansion of online offerings. The demographics of change merit particular attention. In the digital arena, youth and engagement are positively correlated. Twice as high a percentage of the under-45's have engaged in cultural activities online during the lockdown compared to the over-45's.

Not only an attractive consumer group, they are more likely to guide us towards future innovations given their higher levels of involvement in crowdsourcing, gaming, and co-creator endeavours. Understanding the demographics of new technology will be vital to providing satisfying digital cultural experiences.

Over the last year many cultural organisations expanded their digital offerings. The evidence we have gathered shows digital cultural consumption over lockdown increased for everyone, though problems remain of unequal access to broadband and unequal digital literacy. Traditional consumption has been among the beneficiaries. 'We have all gone box-set crazy'. Families in particular have come together around TV in a way they hadn't perhaps for a generation. The last twelve months have also ushered in other changes in audience preference and consumer behaviour. Watching filmed performances, looking at art online, Zoom readings of plays, pop stars turned avatars in video games - museums, galleries, theatres, and opera houses have all diversified what they offer, while artists have entered the 'metaverse' of gaming. People have gained access to things they never had before, and cultural organisations reached more niche audiences, sometimes in unexpected places.

The pandemic has, moreover, converted many casual and marginal users to more intensive use of digital technology. A recent report by The Economist revealed that 25 million people in the UK visited a cultural site online or attended a virtual event in the first eight months of the pandemic.

Two-thirds of Britons now think it is possible to have a meaningful cultural experience online. Premium films have been released direct to home audiences. Online multiplayer video games have mushroomed. Younger audiences have found new forms of digital culture that connect them socially, giving them greater agency as creators as well as consumers of content. The reach of Sky Arts, as a free to air proposition, has tripled. Cultural organisations have harnessed digital technology to reach audiences and visitors who did not previously feel culture and heritage had anything to offer them.

But alongside this digital acceleration there is the onset of digital fatigue. Not all forms of cultural production give satisfaction when translated online. Sometimes they are not felt to be worth paying for, or worth consuming at all. The digital is not a substitute for live performance. Rather the evidence we have gathered suggests the internet is serving to sharpen our appetite for physical cultural experiences. How will all of this play out? When restrictions relax, will digital offerings revert to being niche experiences? Will user-generated content continue to grow or simply subside? Many of the people we spoke to envisage a future hybrid model where digital and physical components complement each other and are mutually beneficial.

The creation of digital content demands more than migrating existing content online. Content often needs to be adapted, or entirely rethought, for digital platforms. During the pandemic many cultural organisations have developed a deeper understanding of the challenges of making their live performances truly accessible. Online experiences work best when they have intimacy and authenticity. Telling global stories to growing global digital audiences has to be balanced with offering local benefits as a cultural venue. Venues have proven themselves capable of responding creatively and with great agility. But a longer-term transition to a hybrid offer that speaks to global and local audiences will take time.

Finally, we turn to the link between cultural participation and well-being. The negative impacts on mental health of COVID-19 have been significant, as Lancet Psychiatry has recently shown.

At the same time the pandemic has affirmed that engagement with culture makes for healthy and flourishing lives. New evidence is emerging of the buffering effects of creative and cultural activity on loneliness, anxiety and depression, including for the most vulnerable parts of the population. How do we now make sure these vulnerable groups have digital access, so as to bring the benefits of cultural participation where they are arguably most needed? How do we improve digital offerings, so some of the pleasures of place-based, face-to-face contact can be recreated online?

We spoke to a wide range of representatives from the creative and cultural sectors. They ranged across the UK's regions from many of the UK's most recognised cultural institutions, through to dynamic, newly emerging creative and digital SMEs, and a rich tapestry of community-based arts groups. For many of those we spoke to, virtual reality and reality itself are expected to evolve alongside each other; performance to live audiences to be integrated with streaming to global ones; and online experimentation to accompany buildings-based experiences. It may not yet be possible to apprehend exactly what the UK's arts, cultural and creative sectors will look like in a decade's time. But amidst a quiet revolution in data science and digital technology, there is a widely shared view - conveyed by the case studies at the end of this report - that change is in the air and their future will not simply be an extrapolation from their past.

Boundless Creativity case studies

Broadening access to digital platforms

In the first twelve weeks of lockdown, more than 15,000 theatrical performances were cancelled with a loss of more than £303 million in box office revenue. The Association of British Orchestras estimates that over £6 million was being lost by its members each month because of cancelled performances. As a consequence, digital content production boomed during the pandemic as traditionally physical modes of production shifted in response to restrictions. Digital content production can broadly be categorised into three types:

Pre-recorded content being streamed, either through bespoke platforms or existing streaming services;

Live intra-media performances making use of new popular technology like Zoom and occasionally including interactive elements;

Live streaming entirely new content, either free to view or to paying audiences.

Initially, the biggest organisations who had already invested resources in digital content production had a considerable advantage because they had a library of pre-recorded content to fall back on. Smaller organisations by contrast needed to invest in both technology and skills, and rarely had established content libraries to rely on. Despite this challenge, many did adapt, in some cases incorporating platforms like Zoom into innovative new performances. Many festivals also successfully pivoted to an online offering, including the Hay Festival, Edinburgh Fringe and Notting Hill Carnival. New uses of platforms emerged, such as the video game Fortnite, which was used by the Manchester International Festival to reach over a million users at virtual events. Fortnite in particular has shown the potential of turning digital gaming worlds into free performance spaces, accessible to audiences in the millions. Luxury fashion brands like Balenciaga and Burberry unveiled new collections in video games or via Twitch. Hip hop artist Travis Scott streamed a ten-minute gig in Fortnite to 12 million viewers. Collaborations using these platforms have huge potential. Research funding for experimental engagement, including opportunities to bring in expert curators in residence with industrial experience, could dramatically accelerate digital innovation. Research also has a role to play here in understanding the barriers to entry and the ongoing challenges faced by artists and organisations of every size, and in spreading best practice and sharing understanding between artists, through toolkits and other resources.

Case study: The Tempest - live, interactive and in your living room

The Tempest was an intramedia performance produced by Creation Theatre. With funding support from AHRC, Pascale Aebischer and Rachael Nicholas from the University of Exeter developed a digital toolkit based on Creation Theatre's experiences to help other companies transition from physical performances to digital ones.

The Tempest was a sell-out performance. Adapting the show for Zoom, charging per-device for tickets, and significantly reducing overheads allowed Creation Theatre to pay freelancers Equity wages and even make a modest surplus during COVID-19.

The Zoom production reached an estimated audience of 2800 across 17 performances and attracted audiences from a wider geographical area than the 2019 live performance. Audiences reported paying £20 per device represented good value for money and many indicated a willingness to continue to engage with, and pay for, Zoom theatre experiences. Audiences also distinguished the experience from recorded theatre and placed extra value on the fact that the production was created specifically to be watched online, that it was live, and they were able to participate.

This collaboration highlights the value of partnership between academia and the live performance sector - the partnership with the University of Exeter enabled Creation Theatre's experiences to be captured and shared with other practitioners, ensuring best practice for live performance could be shared.

Case study: The Creative Passport

The Creative Passport is an identity database, established in response to the need for people operating in the music industry to have greater control over their metadata. The platform allows users to generate personalised creative passports, giving artists the autonomy to manage and organise their metadata. This metadata can be pushed out to all major music streaming platforms, offering artists a simple way to have greater control over their data.

From there, it combines a search engine for researching and networking with an opportunities portal where anyone from an independent filmmaker looking to commission a soundtrack to a regional festival looking for artists can connect and collaborate in a safe, fair and transparent ecosystem.

Reaching and understanding audiences anywhere

The shift to digital opens up the opportunity for content producers traditionally reliant on physical spaces to access new online audiences. The imposition of restrictions around the globe confined people to their homes and provided a new captive audience with a seemingly insatiable appetite for new content. To benefit from this shift the upfront costs can be high. Boundless Creativity participants reported mixed results about the impact streaming content had on their finances. The majority said it could not provide a sustainable alternative to live performance as the investment was significant and returns were not as high. Some, such as the Hay Festival, chose to make content free to view and to invite donations. At Hay, around 1 in 500 people watching donated, allowing the Festival to raise around $250,000.

Whilst significantly lower than the Festival's usual revenue, this was nonetheless welcome in a year when revenues were otherwise forecast to be virtually non-existent. By contrast, others such as the Old Vic chose to offer tiered tickets as an alternative to donations. For those that pivoted to digital over the last year, these revenue streams have been vital.

Case study: The Old Vic in Camera

The Old Vic in London chose to produce new content using socially distanced performances. Beginning with Duncan Macmillan's LUNGS with Claire Foy and Matt Smith and followed by a world premiere of Stephen Beresford's Three Kings, these shows were streamed live from the Old Vic stage with the empty auditorium as a backdrop. 'In Camera' productions were planned up to March 2021. They aimed to replicate their existing audience size of up to 1,000 people per night, with a ticket pricing system similar to physical tiered seating.

LUNGS and Three Kings generated 25,000 paid-for views and yielded £650,000 in total. But it is worth noting that this is around a third of what commercially viable shows at the Old Vic would expect to take. Viewers came from over 60 countries, and their age profile was broad with no particular skew towards younger or older age groups. This allowed Old Vic to continue to employ freelancers, maintain a connection with audiences, and generate an important revenue stream.

Many organisations spoke of a hybrid future where live performances include a digital offer, supplementing rather than replace physical performances. Indeed, some organisations like the Liverpool Philharmonic, and Wise Children theatre company, shifted to this model as a consequence of repeated lockdowns. There were some cases where digital adaptations exceeded expectations: notably the Maltings Theatre in St Albans, whose adaptation of Twelfth Night for Zoom was screened to an audience 40% larger than the theatre auditorium. There were also shows designed specifically for online media that proved that platforms like Zoom can be viable performance spaces in their own right. For instance, the Evidence Chamber is an interactive show in partnership with the Leverhulme Centre for Forensic Science. A small number of attendees act as jurors and pronounce a verdict on an actor's guilt or innocence. This had a limited run that secured critical acclaim.

More research is required around the financial viability of online performances and their revenue generating potential. Boundless Creativity has simply scratched the surface. Much of the data needed is held by individual content providers and is likely to be commercially sensitive. Nevertheless, there would be merit in commissioning research that seeks to identify the kind of content audiences are prepared to pay for, as well as research to help share the most commercially successful models. There is much that could be learned from cross-sector analysis here, given both TV and video game producers have been exploring the relationship between international audiences and paid digital content for some time.

In addition to the financial aspects of digitised performance, there is more work to be done to understand changes to audiences arising from new modes of engagement. It is not simply old audiences switching to access online content: early evidence suggests cultural providers are reaching a richer and more diverse audience than traditional physical performances. The COVID-19 Cultural Participation Monitor, led by the Centre for Cultural Value, undertook a survey of around 7,000 people in October 2020 and found that there are significant differences in cultural engagement across regions and ethnicities.

Critically, Black and Asian audiences are engaging with culture online more, whereas traditional audiences are engaging less. However, these findings merely scratch the surface. More work is needed to build a detailed understanding of how diverse audiences engage with new forms of content and draw meaning from them.

Whilst the UK cultural industries have long established audience segmentation models, our understanding of global audiences is not as sufficiently refined. There is therefore a substantial opportunity for new research in terms of building an understanding of where global audiences are, their preferences, and sharing best practice between cultural providers about how to reach them. Many providers throughout lockdown have kept track of the countries where their content has been viewed, but no work to date has been done to collate this information. Equally, more work is needed about how to reach global audiences through digital productions. Boundless Creativity participants: for some, their online audience had predominantly consisted of their loyal local following, whereas others like the National Theatre had secured a truly global audience. Understanding how cost, reputation and offer impacts on global audiences and the kind of content they consume (and are willing to pay for) would be a valuable research task that could enable more content producers to take advantage of 'anywhere audiences'.

Case study: National Theatre at Home

The National Theatre was one of the earliest to establish an online alternative through its NT at Home programme, launched in April 2020 in response to the closure of theatres due to COVID-19. Initially, this consisted of four productions released weekly over a four-week period. These were free to watch on YouTube. The team felt this was the optimum way to distribute content, ensuring it was freely available to audiences around the world, with the benefit of a straightforward rights clearance process.

By the end of the initial programme in July 2020, the National Theatre had released 17 productions over 16 weeks, showcasing the diversity of programming from the National and a host of other leading theatre companies such as the Donmar Warehouse, Nottingham Playhouse, the Bridge Theatre and the Young Vic. These productions received 15 million views and reached nine million households across 173 countries. The National Theatre notes it was in a privileged position because it had an existing catalogue of high-quality recorded material which cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to produce. Had they needed to cover the costs of these captures; the economics would have looked very different.

The National Theatre has now supplemented its at home offer with a bespoke streaming service for £9.99 a month or £99.99 a year, offering access to a library of pre-recorded content as well as new content uploaded monthly.

Case study: Sky Arts

TV has been one medium which has continued to perform strongly throughout the pandemic. Sky Arts launched on Freeview and Freesat as a free-to-air service, opening its content up to a huge new audience. Their reach has tripled, and they have shown their first ever series topping a million viewers.

Beyond the mainstream audience for arts and culture, Sky Arts has also started more proactive engagement online, speaking directly to online fan communities and exploring how to make content that moves people from spectators to participants in the arts. Portrait Artist of the Week was a hugely successful initiative on Facebook, which offered a 4-hour real time painting class livestreamed. This ended up reaching 4.6 million people and generating 20,000 new paintings and portraits in its first four weeks.[^7]

Re-invigorating creative research and development

R&D is the engine driving forward growth in the creative industries - yet one not exploited to its full potential. New immersive technologies of virtual, augmented and mixed reality are already changing the way audiences experience the world around them. The £39 million AHRC Audience of the Future Fund has brought together creative businesses, research, and technology experts to create striking new experiences that captivate the public imagination and deepen our understanding of these cutting-edge technologies.

Case study: The Audience of the Future Demonstrator Programme

The Audience of the Future Demonstrator projects are part of the UKRI Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. This programme supports UK storytellers to create engaging immersive experiences. The Demonstrators are industry-led consortia in the creative industries, testing these new experiences with audiences. All of them have been impacted by the pandemic and have had to pivot their projects in response.

1. Led by the Royal Shakespeare Company, a consortium of 15 specialist organisations, leading universities and immersive technology pioneers have pooled their expertise to discover the future of live performance. Combining virtual reality, mixed reality and augmented reality with live performance, they seek to uncover future opportunities of real-time immersive performance to change the way audiences both in-person and remotely experience live performance by making it more immersive.

2. Leading creative content studio Factory42 has partnered with the Natural History Museum, Science Museum Group, University of Exeter and others to create Dinosaurs and Robots. Combining mixed reality technology with immersive theatre, two separate adventure game visitor experiences create multi-sensory and interactive worlds for visitors to the Nature History Museum and Science Museum.

3. The WEAVR esports consortium has created a new technology platform which uses live and historic data to create personalised mixed-reality experiences for fans. It incorporates immersive experiences that stretch cross virtual and physical spaces, multiple displays, mobile devices, VR telepresence and augmented reality overlays to allow viewers to move seamlessly between the live arena, virtual game worlds and augmented living rooms.

4. The Big Fix Up is an augmented reality project led by Tiny Rebel Games, Potato, Sugar Creative and Aardman Animation. This new immersive experience brings classic characters Wallace & Gromit alive in a new way for audiences while also creating a new platform for storytelling.

Digital innovation has thrived in lockdown as performers have sought alternative means of reaching audiences. However, much of this experimentation has been small scale, additive work, usually funded by organisations or performers themselves (with philanthropic donations to supplement in rare cases). Whilst many of these interventions have been reactive and designed to respond specifically to lockdown circumstances, almost all of them could have longevity beyond the pandemic. Throughout Boundless Creativity, several participants argued that the current definitions of Research and Development used by governments worldwide have long excluded the arts, humanities and creative industries. Consequently, much of the R&D activity which happens within the creative industries does not qualify for targeted support that facilitates similar innovation in other industries. This challenge proved particularly significant during the pandemic, where organisations struggled to mobilise additional resource needed to innovate in response to COVID-19. Those organisations who successfully adapted to digital modes of transmission tended to fall into two categories: either they were large organisations with reserves that could be re-directed and existing philanthropic relationships that could be leveraged, or they were very small organisations who had the agility to innovate in ways that were not resource intensive. This is symptomatic of innovation within the sector in normal circumstances: too few creative R&D projects can progress because of a lack of funding. Emerging from Boundless Creativity is a clear need to re-assess how we measure, understand and assess value within the cultural sector, with a focus on the implications of this for R&D. This will support the development of more appropriate financial mechanisms that can drive forward growth.

Case study: Working Group on Creative R&D

Led by Dr Chris Michaels at the National Gallery, a new Working Group on Creative R&D has formed from a partnership between the National Gallery, the Serpentine, Royal Shakespeare Company, Watershed Bristol, Royal Opera House, Manchester International Festival, Young Vic and the National Theatre. The Working Group is seeking to build a new national network that supports the practice of and measurement of the value from digital innovation and R&D within the cultural and creative sector. Through research and collaboration, the Working Group is seeking to build a stronger understanding of R&D within the creative and cultural sectors and what changes might be required to drive forward growth.

Catalysing new collaborations

Prior to the pandemic, a number of collaborative partnerships were already in existence - including several major consortia supported by AHRC's Creative Clusters and Audience of the Future programmes - but the number and scale of these partnerships will need to increase considerably to ensure a sustainable future for the sector. We heard that many cultural content providers now envision a hybrid future for performance, which blends live and digital elements. This is a spectrum of activity, ranging from straightforward livestreaming to complex immersive experiences blending virtual and physical reality. To deliver the step change needed to ensure the cultural sector is resilient into the future, such partnerships will need to become the norm rather than the exception, bridging the gap between creative and technical expertise. This will require new funding mechanisms that are more agile and flexible to meet the needs of commercial partners and enable greater experimentation. It will be particularly important to ensure these are accessible to smaller cultural providers, whilst retaining scope for bigger opportunities for those projects with the largest potential.

Case study: Current, Rising

Current, Rising is a 15-minute hyper reality opera experience, combining virtual reality with a multisensory set and blending historic stagecraft with cutting-edge technology. Developed as part of the Audience of the Future Demonstrators, it invites audiences to step into an immersive, atmospheric virtual world and experience a dream-like journey carried musically by a poem layered in song. Guests wear a backpack and VR headset and navigate through the virtual space created by a collaboration between the Royal Opera House's Audience Labs, award-winning Figment Productions and Royal Holloway, University of London.

New collaborations bring benefits for both sides. As part of the Creative Industries Sector Deal, the government established a new Creative Industries Trade and Investment Board (CITIB) to increase creative exports in goods and services combined by 50% between 2018 and 2023, and to significantly increase the number of exporting creative businesses across the UK. International collaborations, including with academic partners who bring cross-cultural understanding and expertise, can help drive growth in exports and create new opportunities for collaboration. For some productions that pivoted to digital, this was a chance to re-imagine their offer completely. The Sydney Global Fringe, for instance, showed some online productions in partnership with the Stockholm Fringe, offering access to both audiences. As creative services and cultural assets can be exported without any physical movement, the industries are in a strong position to use new digital services and content created in the pandemic as an export opportunity. New live streaming platforms for theatres, for instance, open up global audiences and cultural content creators are likely to need support to access these in the most effective way possible. CITIB should consider the implications of this development and how to best capitalise on this.

Case study: Shaun the Sheep in Shanghai

In collaboration with the University of Liverpool and the Shanghai Theatre Academy, Aardman Animation are adapting Shaun the Sheep for a global audience in Shanghai. The project is transforming Aardman's high-end animation work from a linear and pre-rendered end-user product into a non-linear, real-time, responsive and spatially immersive experience. By linking audience understanding, animation and games technology, the project will deliver a new audience-focussed, spatially immersive and responsive approach to storytelling. This would be the first 'mixed reality' experience designed specifically for families with no headsets, no gloves and no mobile phones. This new 'responsive cinema' approach is a scalable concept that is relevant to a wide range of companies and audiences, whilst the stories being told require the translation of British humour and Aardman's distinctive style for a Chinese audience.

Supporting future live performance and experience

Whilst digital collaborations will be crucial to the cultural sector's long-term growth, live performance will nevertheless remain a core component - particularly for those who rely most on physical experience, such as festivals, museums and galleries. We heard numerous examples during Boundless Creativity of remarkable efforts to re-open safely between lockdowns. From socially distanced performances and audiences to temperature testing and health questionnaires, live performance adapted to allow the show to go on. However, the numbers attending were not sustainable in the long term. Occupancy was generally between 20-50% in theatres which meant most performances barely broke even, and some were loss-making. In museums and galleries, the visitor numbers were at 10-25% of pre-pandemic levels in some cases. The impact of this has been devastating for a sector so reliant on physical footfall and visitor secondary spend. The complete cessation of international tourism has also been challenging for the cultural sector, particularly as international visitors represent 9% of cultural visitors overall but over 50% for our national institutions.

Case study: National Museums Liverpool

National Museums Liverpool is one of the largest collections of museums and galleries in the UK, consisting of a portfolio of eight wide ranging museums and galleries. National Museums Liverpool is a nationally funded museum that usually generates up to 40% of its revenue from secondary spend in cafes, shops, events, venue hire and donations. The museums and galleries collectively would usually expect around four million visitors per year, but this year are likely to see just 400,000. They anticipate it will take 3-4 years to return to their pre-pandemic visitor figure, particularly as it will take time for international tourism to resume.

Case study: Nimax Theatre

Nimax Theatre operates six venues in the heart of London's West End. They took the decision to re-open as soon as possible, even though this would be economically unviable, to make a contribution to cost recovery and help support the employment of staff. They invested in a seating algorithm to maximise ticket allocations within social distancing guidelines, which boosted capacity from 30% to 50%. 48 hours before arrival, guests completed a health questionnaire before tickets were issued. All ticketing was contactless with controlled entrance times to ensure no queueing. Audience demand was high, with most Nimax shows selling out within hours of tickets becoming available.

Most organisations told us it was only possible to re-open because of the support of the Culture Recovery Fund. Nevertheless, only a very small number of performances were able to go ahead between lockdowns - the scale of most major productions and the number of people involved meant it was impossible to comply with social distancing guidelines and open safely.

In 2021, the anticipated roll out of vaccination, advances in testing and the impact of new treatments which change the risk associated with COVID-19 are making live performances once again potentially viable. Many Boundless Creativity attendees anticipate there will be a surge in demand for live performance and festivals once restrictions start to lift. At the time of writing it is still impossible to predict when exactly this will be. There is a desire for a large-scale communications campaign, led by the sector and supported by government, to increase public confidence in venues once they are safe.

Case study: The Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera House faced considerable challenges without live performance: it normally runs on a break even rate of 96% occupancy and is the largest employer of artists in Europe with 350 on the payroll. Opera is the antithesis of an art form that works with social distancing, with 100 people in the orchestra pit, 100 on stage and 100 people front and back of house. Their digital capabilities developed very rapidly in the early months of the pandemic as they accelerated two years of planned work into the space of three weeks to bring a pay per view capability online.

This started as informal activity but grew into digital performances live streamed from the House stage to audiences at home. They have experimented with a number of pricing models, ranging from free to view to ticketed performances and a subscription for access to a content library. Once it was possible to reopen, the Royal Opera House planned to welcome physical audiences back whilst continuing to stream shows online simultaneously. When the re-imposition of restrictions made it impossible to continue with physical performances, the Royal Opera House pivoted and offered streams of different pre-recorded shows for limited time periods.

Building a strong, diverse and resilient sector

The cultural sector has had to digitally upskill at a rapid pace in recent months, and there is much that both sectors can learn from each other. Broadening and diversifying audiences relies on stories and content that are conceived by diverse creators. Digital platforms and new collaborations should bring exposure to new global audiences- but this requires ongoing investment in a diverse creative workforce. Boundless Creativity participants, particularly in film and TV, report that hybrid working has allowed many more people access to the gatekeepers of programming and in turn allowed those people to meet many more cultural practitioners than would be possible face to face, which has opened up a more diverse pool of participants for conversations. It is important these benefits are not lost.

Case study: The Notting Hill Carnival

The Notting Hill Carnival is ordinarily the world's second-biggest street festival, with 40,000 volunteers and more than a million visitors each year. It includes more than 25,000 performers. When it became apparent it would be impossible to host Carnival as normal, the team took the decision to take it online, with a greater focus on showing people around the world what Carnival is about and what it has to offer, in greater detail than would be possible in person. Carnival offered pre-recorded and live content across four channels over the August bank holiday weekend, including performances but also films celebrating culture, music, dance and food. These were all live streamed free to audiences. Spotify partnered with Carnival, offering playlists curated by organisers and podcasts about Carnival history and issues facing the black British community.

The creative sector was among the most resilient during the pandemic because many had already adopted digital working practices. The world of work across all sectors will undoubtedly look different when lockdown is lifted. Business models have adapted in response to the need for online collaboration and this has facilitated greater remote working. Creative companies who attended Boundless Creativity reported a greater willingness to hire new staff based remotely, given the majority of time in the future would likely be spent online. There is much to learn, for instance, from the gaming industry due to earlier substantial investment in cloud-based development tools and asynchronous development processes. Some of these learnings may be relevant for other industries, but there is currently no central hub that is accessible to cultural and creative companies with collated learning and best practice examples. This is something the research community should look to address.

Access, health and well-being

Whilst the restorative effects of culture have long been anecdotally discussed, it is only in recent years that the academic community has started to robustly analyse the connection and seek to demonstrate the value of creativity beyond the economic. According to a recent report produced for the World Health Organisation, access to culture can both prevent ill health, promote good health and assist with the management and treatment of ongoing illness.

Boundless Creativity participants reported that the pandemic has disproportionately impacted the most vulnerable members of society, with the worst impacts felt by economically disadvantaged communities in culturally asset-poor areas. Academic research has sought to monitor these trends and draw lessons from effective interventions to inform future service design. Cultural and creative interventions seeking to improve health and wellbeing fall into two broad categories. The first is wellbeing interventions which have been adapted from existing programmes ordinarily carried out in a face-to-face context. The second is wellbeing interventions designed to specifically respond to the pandemic, often targeting isolation and mild to moderate mental health conditions like depression or anxiety. Data from multiple sources show that people were participating more than ever in arts and cultural activities: for instance, the COVID-19 social study collected nearly one million surveys from over 72,000 participants and found one in five reported engaging more with the arts. Research carried out throughout the pandemic suggests that the most successful initiatives created an online community and offered opportunities for sharing creativity.

Moreover, new and unexpected partnerships emerged during the pandemic. Creative health partnerships leveraged the power of the arts, natural and community assets in collaboration with health, social and care and third sector services. Boundless Creativity participants expressed concern about the continuing financial viability of many small arts organisations and charities, who are operating on small, insecure budgets but have deep knowledge of the communities they are embedded within. They form a vital part of the research infrastructure in this space and sustainable funding streams are critical to their continuing operations.

Case study: Entelechy Arts

Entelechy Arts is a charity based in Lewisham, South East London which produces projects which powerfully test the boundaries between art, creativity, care, wellbeing and community. We believe in the creative power of the individual, and that everyone should have the opportunity to contribute to the cultural life of their local community. This richness in sharing stories and experiences of those who can often feel underrepresented, encourages stronger communities, changes perceptions, and ultimately helps people live healthier, happier and more connected lives.

During the pandemic, Entelechy Arts shifted its provision for its communities including the elderly, those living with complex disabilities, and residents of care homes, to phone, post and some digital. This required staff to provide vital additional access support and help their communities with the right technology so they could participate. The programme was done in consultation with and co-owned by their communities, ensuring it was impactful and enjoyable. They started a weekly radio show with the Albany Theatre in Deptford, hosted by some of their members, who also produce the content for it. They also worked with artists to produce regular creative phone call clusters including poetry, singing and making, delivered workshops via zoom, plus sending out written and sonic letters and 250 creative boxes for people in isolation. They recently sent out a new box based around sound and vibration for people living with dementia, visual impairments or complex disabilities. Maximising the confidence and agency of their participants was critical, as some had not left home for six months and this was one of their few opportunities to engage with the outside world.

In the future, Entelechy Arts will be learning from these experiences and considering hybrid ways of working which incorporate some of the remote programmes developed in lockdown to reach communities who struggle to attend in-person creative activities.

Case study: Eno Breathe

A partnership between the ENO and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, ENO Breathe is an integrated social prescribing programme of singing, breathing and wellbeing, breaking new ground as the first of its kind created to provide crucial support for people recovering from COVID-19.

The programme's combined approach brings together musical and medical expertise to combat the increasing need for support for those experiencing post-COVID symptoms. Building on techniques used by opera singers, the holistic online programme provides patients with tools for the self-management of breathlessness and associated anxiety. ENO Breathe uses weekly group online sessions and digital resources to empower participants with tools and techniques to help them focus constructively on their breathing. The programme focuses on breathing retraining through singing, and uses lullabies as its musical starting point.

Following a successful six-week trial in autumn 2020, the programme was rolled out nationally with NHS Trusts across the country at the end of January 2021. Following its national rollout, the programme received national and international press and media coverage, including ITV News at 10, BBC News, CBS (USA), NBC (USA), the New York Times, The Telegraph and many more. Currently the ENO Breathe programme works with over 30 NHS Trust partners across England and continues to expand, aiming to reach 1,000 patients by the autumn. The ENO and Imperial are continuing to build the evidence base for the programme, with a randomised control trial commencing in May, in partnership with the research team at Imperial College.

Beyond the pandemic, culture will continue to have a critical role to play in our national recovery. There is no greater unifying force. The value and power of many innovations seen during the pandemic lie in their potential to transform access - particularly through partnerships. Many of this year's Edinburgh Fringe online performances aired on a 'pay what you feel' or donation basis. English Heritage has gone viral on TikTok and livestreamed the summer solstice to five million people. Sadler's Wells has launched free, daily dance classes and workshops online for all ages, taught by some of the best artists in the industry. As cultural and creative organisations emerge from the pandemic, thanks to the resilience, creativity and hard graft of the thousands of individuals that make up this sector, as well as significant government investment through the Culture Recovery Fund, these new ways of engaging audiences and inspiring everyone's creativity point to a brave new future.

Overview of Boundless Creativity roundtables

First Symposium: Thinking Different Digitally - 9 September 2020

Second Symposium: Live Events and Lockdown - 17 November 2020

Third Symposium: Business Models Old and New - 1 December 2020

Fourth Symposium: Culture, Health and Wellbeing - 25 January 2021

Fifth Symposium: Future Research Priorities - 17 February 2021

Further detail on our recommendations

Recommendation 1: Support New Cross-Sectoral Collaborative R&D.

The pandemic has accelerated cultural content providers' reliance on digital technologies and brokered new partnerships between digital tech firms and the cultural sector. However, these partnerships are still more the exception than the rule. We note the innovative collaborations of cultural, STEM, educational and corporate partners in the planning for Festival UK* 2022. There is however scope to do more to ensure smaller providers - creative-tech SMEs companies, and smaller arts and cultural organizations - are not left out in the cold. Since many creative-tech companies exist outside London and the South East and smaller arts and cultural organisations are, by definition, geographically spread throughout the country, addressing this challenge would not only benefit the national economy overall but contribute significantly to levelling it up. Future research funding should build on the success of AHRC's Audience of the Future and Creative Clusters programmes, supporting innovative collaborations between digital tech providers and the cultural sector and more actively involving creative practitioners in the very process of research.

Recommendation 2: Reach New Global Audiences.

The pivot towards digital modes of presentation is opening up opportunities to reach new global audiences, as well as new hyper-local ones. This extended reach is beginning to provide financial benefit to some organisations. By taking advantage of these new digital audiences the UK will benefit by promoting its rich cultural content internationally in a period when physical participation is restricted. More needs to be done, however, to open up this export opportunity to all. To take the next steps on this journey of online cultural consumption, further research is required to understand new audiences and their preferences. How does content - in form as well as duration - need to be adapted and tailored for an online world? And how can free access to one form of content pave the way towards paying for access to another? But a nuanced understanding of audiences - qualitative as well as quantitative - is difficult for institutions to achieve alone: support is needed to engage the arts and cultural sector collectively on these research questions, to help practitioners to access 'everywhere audiences', and to generate sustainable new revenue streams by doing so.

Recommendation 3: Reshape the Policy Environment to Invigorate Creative R&D.

Research funding at the interface of arts and AI/data science needs to be significantly increased Culturally rich collection organisations such as museums and galleries have huge potential to unlock their holdings through innovative R&D projects that can dissolve barriers between different collections, and open them up to new audiences and new cross-collection lines of research. The AHRC-funded research programme Towards a National Collection is taking the first step towards unlocking holdings through innovative R&D projects. Funding is needed for a second phase to move towards dissolving the barriers identified.

There is a vital levelling-up aspect to this challenge. Many of the creative-tech companies exist outside of London and the South East (for example, Dundee-Abertay and gaming) and smaller arts and cultural organisations are geographically spread throughout the country. Re-invigorating creative R&D could help bring the economic as well as societal benefits of cutting-edge research to a much wider range of places, including those not traditionally touched by increasing investment in science. More specifically, the government's chosen definition of research and development does not fully recognise or reward risk-taking in creative endeavours - particularly those making use of innovative technology.

Action: DCMS working with HMRC and the sector will explore the definition of R&D for the creative industries - initially feeding into the recently announced HMT consultation on R&D in the Spring Budget. Targeted research by the AHRC Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre, in conjunction with DCMS, will help to understand how R&D can be bolstered within the cultural and creative industries, to quantify the value of creative R&D, and offer workable policy solutions. Learning from Festival UK* 2022 will enhance the effectiveness of R&D in fostering creativity and innovation between cross-sector organisations, demonstrated through their STEAM (science, tech, engineering, arts, maths) events.

AHRC and DCMS to work together to develop the evidence base on how technology is used within the creative industries, otherwise known as 'CreaTech'. DCMS to consider how we can support innovation, including adoption and diffusion, across sectoral teams in DCMS, across government departments and with industry partners.

Recommendation 4: Broaden access to digital for producers and consumers.

Digital content platforms have proliferated with many different options currently available. But when huge content aggregators are the main channels to market and control product placement and search results, it is challenging for smaller creators to get to market, to navigate the available options, and to achieve viable audience sizes. Some organisations have developed their own bespoke streaming options, but not every organisation has the capacity to invest in them. Could the bigger players be incentivized to make their platforms open source, not just an asset for themselves? Is there room for a platform that gives smaller cultural practitioners control over their content and how they profit from it, allowing for experimentation, content aggregation, and making content more accessible to new audiences?

Recommendation 5: Increase data sharing.

It is imperative to open up access to data, in particular audience data, to create a shared understanding of consumer and audience behaviour arising from new modes of engagement. As noted in the National Data Strategy,[footnote 10] aggregation of data from different sources can lead to new insights, and data sharing can fuel growth and innovation. Data sharing in the cultural sector is a key issue: the majority of data is either behind a paywall, not collected, or not shared. This is a significant obstacle for medium and small organizations.

Recommendation 6: Support future live performance.

Socially distanced performances between lockdowns were a triumph. While demand for future live performance has remained strong throughout the pandemic, the pandemic has hit the live performance sector hard. Financial pressures have intensified across the sector from producers to freelancers. The sector will need strong support to build back better. What can we understand about changes in audience demand for future live performances? The Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, The Queen's Platinum Jubilee, and Festival UK* 2022 will bring people together and be a moment of renewal for this country as we emerge from COVID-19. These events should be harnessed to restore confidence to the sector and to provide a platform for the UK to shine on a global stage as we emerge from the pandemic.

Recommendation 7: Build a strong, resilient and diverse digital skills base.

The pandemic highlights the need to strengthen and diversify the UK's digital cultural skills base if new ways of working witnessed over the last year are to survive. The report identifies a number of skills gaps and regional 'skills deserts'. National investment in digital upskilling is required, with a strong emphasis on digital skills sharing, both across the private and public spheres, and between larger and smaller organisations. DCMS and the wider government are currently looking to address these needs through programmes such as National Skills Fund, Digital Skills Partnership, Digital Skills Bootcamps, and Culture is Digital. There is an opportunity post-pandemic to promote such programmes and look at new ways to diversify and upskill the cultural workforce. This should include careful consideration of digital poverty, in particular for those who during the pandemic have experienced barriers to engaging with cultural life.

The positive link between cultural participation and mental health and well-being was confirmed by many of the contributors to Boundless Creativity. During the pandemic cultural organisations have demonstrated community and social engagement by delivering food, providing educational resources and tackling loneliness. Research supported by AHRC during the pandemic reaffirms the value of harnessing the power of cultural access, digital and physical, to mitigate the burdens of mental ill-health - burdens which, as we know, have fallen very unevenly under COVID-19. Looking beyond the pandemic, there is an opportunity to develop on the existing research base to look specifically at the role of culture and creative sectors in national renewal.

Recommendation 9: Diversify and nurture talent.

There is an opportunity post-pandemic to improve cultural access for all. As theatres, museums and heritage sites closed, new and more flexible ways of remote working emerged. In a sector that sometimes struggles to diversify its workforce, this opportunity must be seized. Ideas are the currency of the arts and cultural sector, so the more diverse their workforces, the richer their output is likely to be. Due to repeated lockdowns, the sector has also seen a steeper reduction in its workforce compared to other sectors. The existing, largely freelance creative workforce has been especially hard hit by the restrictions leaving its needs to be urgently addressed.

The report's recommendations by target agency

For the AHRC:

Targeted research by the AHRC Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre to understand how R&D can be bolstered within the cultural and creative industries, to quantify the value of creative R&D, and to offer workable policy solutions.

Distillation of the insights and intelligence from AHRC's rapid response COVID-19 research on live performance with a view to presenting this in a timely fashion to DCMS, identifying gaps in knowledge regarding COVID-secure live cultural environments.

For DCMS:

DCMS to work with HMRC and the cultural sector to explore the definition of R&D for the creative industries - initially feeding into the recently-announced HMT consultation on R&D in the Spring Budget.

Learn from Festival UK* 2022 to understand the effectiveness of R&D in fostering creativity and innovation between cross-sector organisations.

Promote the safe return of the sector through a reopening campaign to help restore confidence and demand.

Invest in government schemes such as the National Skills Fund, Digital Skills Partnership and Digital Skills Bootcamps to ensure the whole cultural and creative sector can embrace the digital transformation and build a workforce with the necessary skills.

Promote opportunities for young people from diverse backgrounds, such as through the Creative Careers Programme, to overcome informational and aspirational barriers to entry, with a particular focus on Schools in Opportunity Areas.

Jointly for AHRC and DCMS:

New Boundless Creativity funding calls, subject to the spending review, designed to achieve size, ambition and scale, devised by AHRC in collaboration with DCMS, and launched successively over the next 24 months to target the following research fields:

Understand and unlock the potential of reaching new global audiences digitally, by surveying the innovative ways the sector has monetised their engagement with international audiences. This research should also seek to identify the barriers that are preventing a wider set of cultural organisations from engaging international audiences.

Increase our understanding of how innovative digital content platforms can reduce barriers to audience participation, support freelance artists and smaller organisations, and retain copyright for producers.

Grow the evidence base linking cultural assets and creative activity post-COVID to mental health and health generally, and to identify the local assets, partnerships and delivery mechanisms best suited to a national roll-out of arts- and culture-based policy to redress the inequalities in health outcomes amplified by the pandemic.

AHRC and DCMS to work together to develop the evidence base on how technology is used within the creative industries, otherwise known as 'CreaTech'. DCMS to consider how we can support innovation, including adoption and diffusion, across sectoral teams in DCMS, across government departments and with industry partners.

For arts funding agencies more broadly:

A call for collaborative research to increase understanding of how digital content for international audiences can support international touring, once international touring resumes.

AHRC to work with DCMS and other funding agencies to look at the digital skills gaps in the UK cultural and creative sector, with a focus on regional growth and interconnectivity.

Arts funding agencies to work with DCMS to demonstrate the health and wellbeing benefits of the cultural sector through the Cultural Heritage Capital programme, seeking to align cultural capital with HMT Green Book.

A call to arts funding agencies to undertake collaborative research looking at the impact of COVID-19 on new entrants to the cultural and creative sectors' workforce, looking specifically at the entry and exit flows of young people and freelancers.

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Boundless Creativity was set up as a joint research project by UK Research and Innovation's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), in partnership with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS).

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revenue problem of Met Opera

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The Metropolitan Opera's operating revenue dropped by $25 million to $120 million in the fiscal year ending July 31

NEW YORK -- The Metropolitan Opera's operating revenue dropped by $25 million to $120 million in the fiscal year ending July 31, a season shortened due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, but the company avoided an operating loss through fundraising and borrowing.

The Met said Thursday that it had a $130 million loss from operations - down from a $154 million loss during the fiscal year that ended July 31, 2019.

Contributions and bequests, including assets released from restrictions less fundraising expenses, totaled $130 million to enable the break-even. The fundraising figure after expenses was down from $153 million in the previous season, when the Met finished with a $1.1 million operating loss.

"Our cash position was about $10 million worse than it had been when we started the fiscal year. We went from a $46 million line of credit to a $57 million line of credit, so that's a concern to us," Met general manager Peter Gelb said Thursday. "The good news is that we've managed to maintain the best relationship with our donors and our audiences through our nightly streams to our pay-per-view concerts for a period of almost a year now without performances."

Gelb said there have been 33,000 new donors since the start of the pandemic.

The pandemic caused the Met to halt its 2019-20 season on March 12, forcing cancellation of the final 58 of 217 originally scheduled performances, and its entire 2020-21 season, wiping out 218 performances of 23 operas that raised total cancellations to 276. The orchestra's international tour for June 2021 also was called off.

The Met cut some administrative employees and stopped paying its union employees during the pandemic, though it continued health benefits for the orchestra and chorus.

It has used nonunion musicians for its streamed concerts from Europe, angering the union of its orchestra, local 802 of American Federation of Musicians. The Met last month locked out its stagehands in Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees because it has been unable to negotiate wage cuts during the pandemic. Gelb said the Met is exploring the use of outside workers to start construction of sets for next season's new productions.

Gelb also wants to reopen contracts with Local 802 and with the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents its singers and chorus, deals that expire in the summer of 2022.

"That is manifestation of the understandable frustration, fear and anger that our musicians have over not having been paid for so many months but I don't think it's justified," Gelb said. "You would think in reading these kind of criticisms from people that we get the wrong impression, that we have hired some perhaps replacement or scab orchestra, which is certainly not the case. We've hired a couple of musicians for these pay-per-view events in Europe to enhance the experience for the audience of what are basically vocal recitals, they're not orchestral concerts. And from a practical point of view and the other union aspects, there's no way we could have used Met musicians."

The Met hopes to get federal aid. Gelb said the money would be used to help fund bridge payments to union employees until performances resume. He does not intend cuts to future repertoire, saying the breath of offerings is needed to spark attendance and income.

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Met Opera's revenue drops, breaks even with gifts, borrowing

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The Metropolitan Opera's operating revenue dropped by $25 million to $120 million in the fiscal year ending July 31 NEW YORK -- The Metropolitan Opera's operating revenue dropped by $25 million to $120 million in the fiscal year ending July 31, a season shortened due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, but the company avoided an operating loss through fundraising and borrowing.

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News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

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Met Opera on Demand

From old-school legends to today's great stars, experience more than 700 full-length Met performances with our online streaming service. Free apps available for Amazon Fire TV and Tablet, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, Android, Roku, and Samsung Smart TV.

Download the free apps

Discover the ultimate opera streaming collection, and watch on your computer, tablet, mobile phone, or TV for $14.99/month or $149.99/year with our unlimited subscription plan. Met Members save 33% off annual subscription price.

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From old-school legends to today's great stars, experience more than 700 full-length Met performances with our online streaming service. Free apps available for Amazon Fire TV and Tablet, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, Android, Roku, and Samsung Smart TV.

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Live-to-Digital in the Arts Final Report

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Live-to-Digital in the Arts Final Report

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Live-to-Digital in the Arts Final Report  25 05 18

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Sustainability of the Performing Arts Explored
in the 2020s with an Outlook for the 2040s
_Focused on the IETM Report

Jeon KangHee(performing arts critic and dramaturg)

In 2020, we suddenly faced a world we thought we would face only in 2040. Before 2020, a few performing arts companies, which were greatly interested in artistic experiments of radical forms and content, attempted certain new things. But those things became challenges for everyone to reflect on and to meet. For example, even in 2020, some artists seriously considered the accessibility and inclusiveness (e.g. barrier-free performance and relationship with the community) by asking this question: "Are theaters open to all?" Others questioned the gender ratio of the artists at festivals and public theaters every year. Others actively adopted technology as an artistic language. Others shared their ideas about addressing climate change. Others actively raised their voices to suggest the policy direction of public institutions. There were only a few artists making such attempts so they were often considered radical artists in the Korean performing arts scene. But as the coronavirus began to overwhelm the world in 2020, the challenges that only a few radical artists had explored became the ones for all artists.

Throughout the year 2020, different Korean and international forums took place online and residencies also focused on current challenges. Some performing arts companies shared performance videos on their social networking sites for a limited period of time, thus attempting paid online videos. Other companies shared their plays with a few sponsors in order to form a basis for sustainable creation and to maintain their relationship with the audience. Some of the Korean artists have always sought the sustainability of the performing arts since the period before the pandemic, thus trying to find their paths. What is regrettable is the fact that there is no space where they voices meet and that there is no channel where their voices resonate strategically.

At first, IETM highlighted the following factors for their goals:

- International mobility throughout Europe
- More and larger productions (production capacity)
- Sustainable career development for artists
- Creating public support
- Democratization of contemporary arts

Throughout the year 2020, these goals developed into five challenges. How to meet these challenges also concerns Korean artists today.

- Hypermobility and ecological impact vs. isolation
- Inflation of coproductions and fragmentation
- More artists living in precarious situation
- Budget cuts and instrumentalisation
- Creation of meaningful relationships with the local audience and arts scene

About 140 members of IETM participated in the online workshops and meetings. They concluded that the sustainability of the preforming arts ecosystem requires them to consider "human, social, economic, ecological and artistic values." The members of the network came up with these five values in an attempt to transform the changes of the year 2020 into meaningful ones. Then they divided each of these values into four subcategories which are more specific, resulting in 20 "building blocks." If artists make effort to transform the changes of the year 2020 into meaningful ones, they will be able to carry out a sustainable arts practice while applying the 20 building blocks in a new performing arts ecosystem by 2040. The 20 building blocks, which belong to the five values, are as follows:.

- The Human Value
1. Fair practice
2. A shared leadership that allows everyone to thrive
3. A better work-life balance
4. Fostering learning, growth and development for each
- The Social Value
5. Equal access and inclusion for diverse audiences
6. Demonstrable impact of the arts on society (and systems enabling this)
7. Collaboration is key. It requires inclusive practices and education.
8. Synergies beyond the arts to reach different sectors in society
- The Economic Value
9. New, alternative and sustainable business models
10. Fair pay and security as workers
11. Sharing spaces and resources
12. Diverse revenue streams for artists through broader local, regional and national funding schemes
- The Ecological Value
13. Reciprocity of humans and nature through ecological awareness
14. Ecological artistic production practices by slowing down the cycle of creation
15. Meaningful and green mobility
16. Rethinking internationalization. 'Working internationally' will mean not only artists' traveling abroad but also the mobility of ideas.
- The Artistic Value
17. The artistic value is center stage. What is essential isn't an artwork itself but the impact of art on someone's life including society and economy.
18. Artists will have a major role not only in the studio but also in artistic institutions and policy processes.
19. An environment of concentrating on a long-term process rather than producing visible results rapidly
20. Create space for transformation while influencing other practices and domains

The report has led me to rethink international exchange. IETM elaborates not only on today's world facing the pandemic but also on the international exchange that will continue to be valid in 2040. First and foremost, what caught my attention in the report was this: "When increasingly forced to work internationally at high speed, many artists find it difficult to come out of their international performing arts bubble..." It makes clear how artists are exposed to an environment where they cannot work slowly. As collaboration becomes important and as the production of a work is sponsored by multiple institutions and even multiple countries, the production process becomes fragmented. The report says that we need to question if such a process is helpful for a work-life balance in artists' lives. Ultimately, this is also about questioning if the social system operates in a way that gives artists a sufficient amount of time to work. Korea is also making more and more attempts to create a work environment where artists have sufficient time to think. Examples of this would be and which were planned as a new artistic director came to the National Theater Company of Korea in 2020. Starting from artists' real concerns, these projects provide them with concrete support so that they can experience different phases of production (i.e. research, workshops, showcases and production of the main performance) for an extended period of time.

Moreover, the report associates international exchange with "environmental issues." It elaborates on the pollution that is generated by artists' air travel when they go to overseas performance venues and come back after performing there. In this regard, it explains the need to reframe international exchange. That is, not only physical mobility but also the channel of moving, sharing and developing information (i.e. ideas) will also be an essential part of international exchange in the future. There is a great example of such international exchange that doesn't involve the artist's physical mobility. That's Coldplay's performance of their new song "Higher Power" at the BRIT Awards on May 11. On a floating stage on the River Thames in London, Korea's Ambiguous Dance Company appeared as neon-colored holograms. The performance, which was broadcast live around the world, showed that artists could engage in international exchange without meeting each other in person.

The report says, "Create the urgency to stop doing unsustainable things". This seems to summarize the pandemic year of 2020 we experienced. If we need to find a new path, we should keep it valuable by 2040. I thus look forward to having an occasion to discuss such a new path with many different performing artists and companies.

About the Author
Jeon KangHee
Having studied English literature and the theater, Jeon KangHee works as a performing arts critic, dramaturg and a festival programmer. She is greatly interested in exploring new dramatic languages and producing performances that actively blur the boundaries of genres and seek collaboration between different genres. From 2013 to 2018, she served as an editor of the independent arts webzine, thus writing about and introducing works by new artists of diverse genres. From 2016 to 2020, she organized the Seoul Marginal Theatre Festival as its president and programming director. She was also a resident writer at residencies offered by Incheon Art Platform, Wooran Foundation and Asia Culture Center in Gwangju. She is currently a steering committee member of the creative project run by the National Theater Company of Korea.

1) Coldplay BRIT Awards, Coldplay - Higher Power (Live at The BRIT Awards, London 2021), Youtube, 2021.5.12.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiqEEr7CK2g

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Sustainability of the Performing Arts Explored in the 2020s with an Outlook for the 2040s

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Jeon KangHee(performing arts critic and dramaturg) In 2020, we suddenly faced a world we thought we would face only in 2040. Before 2020, a few performing arts companies, which were greatly interested in artistic experiments of radical forms and content, attempted certain new things.

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Laura recommended the book: Handbook on the Digital Creative Economy

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Laura recommended the book: Handbook on the Digital Creative Economy

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ABSTRACT
How do artists use copyright to further their creative ends? To approach this question, this article focuses on the relationship between artists' appropriation of digital technology and exertion of their rights. In particular, it relates the evolving range of production tools and distribution services to the ways in which artists currently create musical works and seek to exploit their economic as well as moral rights. Interviews with eighteen artists in Norway reveal a series of technology-mediated challenges to the ownership of one's work, the recognition of one's authorship, and one's remuneration that demonstrate the need for open discussion of the ethical aspects of copyright in music.

Lawmakers, politicians, and other authorities regularly underscore the importance of copyright law to support artists and their creative work. It is unclear to what extent copyright actually benefits artists in the digital age, however, given the copyright-averse operations of global industry players and the popularity of copyright-ignorant (or copyright-hostile) practices of sampling and file-sharing ( Klein, Moss, and Edwards). To ascertain something about the usefulness of copyright, I decided to ask artists themselves how they go about exercising their copyright, and to unpack the impact of digital technology upon those processes and practices.

I begin by discussing the basic elements of copyright and the ways in which we can conceptualize its usage, associating the exertion of these rights with the artist's literacy and ability to negotiate face-to-face with various partners. I then link these capacities to the possibilities of digital technology and its evolving opportunities to produce and distribute music. I present findings from an interview study of eighteen popular music artists in Norway who are active within the rock, blues, and country genres, delving into how technology and copyright are integrated into their practices as composers, performers, and recording artists. I carried out this study alongside an official revision of copyright law in Norway, providing an opportunity to relate contemporary developments within the legal framework to the ways in which artists currently perceive and exercise their rights.

Rights and their Use

The notion of copyright law as something that is used is reflected in its history, which extends from publishers' early attempts to control the printing press to the efforts of composers and performers to establish conventions that enabled them to control their work, most notably through the Berne convention of 1886 and the Rome convention of 1961 ( Ricketson and Ginsburg). Copyright law is also used by international and national lawmakers as a means of achieving various cultural, economic, and social goals. It is a law continuously in the making, in Norway, at least: since its initial formulation there in 1961, it has been adjusted numerous times in response to international conventions, EU directives, and the lobbying of interested national parties. In the 2000s, developments in digital technology have challenged the viability of the law anew and triggered a series of adjustments - for example, to address on-demand distribution of copyrighted works. When the Norwegian government issued a proposition in 2017 to revise its copyright law yet again, a key motivation was, in fact, to synthesize the accumulated adjustments into a whole "which would make it [the law] a more effective and easily applicable tool for all its users" ( Proposition 9).

The proposition's ambitions extended beyond a more comprehensible law, and paragraph 1 made clear its threefold purpose: first, "to give rights to those who create, perform and invest in intellectual work"; second, "to maintain a fair balance between the interests of the rights holders, on the one hand, and the interests of the users and the public, on the other"; and third, "to facilitate agreements for the use of intellectual work" ([Norwegian] Copyright; all numbered paragraphs refer to this document). Paragraph 2 went on to define intellectual work as "expressions of original and individual creative intellectual effort." Paragraph 3 presented the exclusive right to "make copies of the work" and to "make the work available to the public," both of which apply to the creator's ability to capitalize upon their efforts; they are considered key economic rights. Paragraph 4 clarifies an exception to the use of these core rights, which is the production of temporary copies as part of the technical process of making works available for use, which applies to contemporary on-demand streaming, for example. Paragraph 5 introduces the creator's moral rights, including the "right of the creator to be named in accordance with good practice" and the requirement that "works must not be altered or made available to the public in a way or in a context which is offensive to the creator's or the work's repute or distinctiveness." All of these paragraphs were eventually passed into law.

While the Norwegian lawmakers clearly sought a pedagogical presentation of key purposes and rights, it can still be hard to grasp what a fair balance between creators and users looks like, what might constitute a creative effort, or when a presentational context is offensive. Furthermore, the law contains little information about how to exercise one's rights through, for example, forging agreements with parties that "make the work available to the public" and ensuring that one is "named in accordance with good practice." Using the law requires not only a kind of legal literacy to interpret the terms of the rights but also an ability to articulate effective claims to others. Describing the first of these competencies as "literacy" highlights the effort it takes to master; the fact that this competency develops over time; and the possibility of substantial sociocultural gains ( Prinsloo and Baynham). Some form of legal literacy is, in fact, relevant to the use of most rights, such as the consumer's right to return a purchase or report misleading advertising. A lack of awareness of the laws and procedures likely limits the use of many rights, which, in the case of copyright, can have substantial implications for the success of songwriters and performers.

One intuitive way to use copyright is to set certain demands for the use of works, such as a fee to copy it and a set of requirements concerning artist identification. If such demands are too complicated or difficult, however, the interested party might look elsewhere, defeating the purpose of creating work to be shared in the first place. Another intuitive form of copyright use is to go to court and claim reparations if one's rights have been ignored. Yet this can be costly in terms of time, reputation, and money, so artists seldom bring conflicts to a court of law. Rather than offering an easy fix, then, copyright law simply provides a framework for negotiations between competing interests, the effective use of which depends on both knowing the framework and realistically assessing one's bargaining power within it. The law's definition of "intellectual works" as "original and individual" and its orientation toward control and terms of exchange seem suited to what is called distributive negotiations, in which a certain set of goods is up for discussion and each party aims to get as much as possible in return for what it can offer (; see also ). Legal rights could also be used in so-called integrative negotiations - a form of bargaining where people offer to pool their resources to accomplish something bigger than they would have achieved on their own, and then they share in the benefits of the arrangement. In both cases, one's bargaining power depends on having something one's counterpart wants, and on knowing what to expect from that counterpart ().

The use of one's copyright usually entails some form of specialized cooperation with others, whether in the process of creation, circulation, or collection of remuneration. First of all, artists must strike deals with various commercial partners, such as studio producers, record labels, publishers, distributors, music services, and media enterprises, and signing such agreements can have substantial consequences for their income and work conditions (). For assistance, artists can seek negotiation advice from organizations that represent their interests, such as composers' unions or collecting societies, the latter of which claim compensation for the use of copyright-protected works. Little is known, however, about the "nature of different kinds of bargaining power in the complex variety of music industry contexts," which, contends, "would be a good topic for highly interesting and useful research" (235).

The deals made, as well as the advice given, are, however, usually known only to the specific parties involved. For the artists, then, as well as other interested parties (including academics), it is particularly hard to evaluate the quality or efficacy of these deals through comparison to others, for example. If an artist thinks a partner is disrespecting her rights, she can try to convince her organization to try the case in a court of law, given its potential relevance to the greater member group. If the artist thinks that current copyright law fails to adequately protect her interests, she might also encourage her organization to lobby for a change in the law. These means of exercising legal prerogatives are, however, at once very ambitious and very demanding for the petitioner to pursue.

It is rather paradoxical that the starting point of copyright use is the individual creative act, when it is so challenging for the individual to protect that act by exercising these rights. Companies can seek alternative paths, including government-sanctioned copyright tribunals that can settle licensing disputes in terms of adequate rates. There are also examples of companies developing a code of conduct, such as the independent labels' "Fair Digital Deals Declaration," dedicated to just and transparent payments to artists (see ). For artists, however, there are also other ways of using one's copyright, which I will illustrate by briefly presenting a form of rights use that is actively employed in the neighboring cultural sector of journalistic media. Here, numerous organizations and companies from different parts of the sector have united as the Norwegian Press Association ( Norsk Presseforbund), through which they have formulated a code of conduct ( vær varsom-plakaten) for journalistic work, including, for example, ways to interact with sources in daily practice - see the Norsk Presseforbund website. (Most European countries have a similar arrangement). This code is one way to manage the key right upon which journalism is based, freedom of speech (paragraph 100 of the Norwegian constitution), and to interpret how this right should be balanced with other rights, such as the right to privacy. Furthermore, the association has established a tribunal to which individuals as well as organizations can report (without fees) what they argue to be breaches of the code. Such complaints are handled by an independent committee with representatives from different parts of the sector, as well as competent members of the public, and its assessment is made known publicly. The tribunal handles more than four hundred claims annually; for comparison, the number of press-related cases that are actually brought to court number around thirteen per year on average ( Hovlid and Bjerke 6). The decision of the tribunal does not have legal status, and its sanction is primarily censure - an act, that is, can be deemed to transgress the professional standards of the sector. This tribunal is one means of exercising a legal right in a manner that is available to the individual and that contributes to the cultivation and circulation of reasonable interpretations of the right in question. This model has not yet been tested in the field of music and copyright, the significance of which I will return to later.

Has the use of digital technology altered the horizon of opportunities for the use of copyright? Digitization has essentially introduced entirely new interfaces for producing, distributing, and supervising the movements of creative works, now rendered as digital data. The implications of these interfaces have largely been perceived as negative for the viability of copyright use, thanks to practices such as sampling and file-sharing ( Klein, Moss, and Edwards; ). In both of these situations, however, copyright law enforcement has been revised over time to address the transgression. Furthermore, the use of digital tools has enabled more detailed supervision of the ways in which artists, inspired by one another, use each other's creative content, and of how music in general is shared within networks of private individuals. Such digital interventions might not always be to the benefit of an artist's creativity or engagement with listeners (see, for example, McLeod and Dicola; ), revealing the unpredictable and sometimes ambivalent connections between the use of technology and copyright.

New technology also presents new opportunities to create musical works and to reach out to consumers. The acquisition and mastery of new tools of production and distribution are prerequisites for the use of those tools to exercise copyright over one's works in new ways, demonstrating the relationship between legal literacy and new-media literacy ( Livingstone). We know little, however, about what the harnessing of such competencies might contribute to the capacity for negotiation of artists faced with various potential partners. According to , copyright "has favoured big corporations over the supposed beneficiaries of the system, music makers" (124). Over the course of the twentieth century, that is, publishers and record companies have been able to acquire musical works and wield the resources needed to produce, distribute, and monetize music. The 2000s, however, have seen the rise of a host of new production tools and online distribution platforms that can supply artists with new bargaining chips and commercial conditions for exercising their rights. Digital tools, including digital audio workstations such as Logic and streaming services such as Spotify, have been portrayed as offering high quality experiences while also being easy and affordable to use (). Research has indicated that such optimism needs nuance, however; Spilker, for example, found that aspiring artists still lacked the recording resources of established companies and professionals. The ways in which individual artists appropriate new tools and competencies should also be seen in light of technology-related changes to the contexts of copyright use. The 2000s has seen a pervasive shift from CD sales to online distribution but also a marked growth in enterprises in need of music, including television series, advertisers, and computer games (), representing a whole new environment for creative work.

Approaching Practices

Livingstone defines literacy broadly as the ability to "access, analyze, evaluate and create messages across a variety of contexts" (5) but underscores the fact that its realization is rooted in social practice and cultural context. This condition implies that the appropriation of new communication technologies is somehow locally conditioned, which is certainly the case for music. For example, the application of digital tools to recording and processing sound has varied across genres, so that indie rock represents a particularly puritan, "anti-technological stance" ( 46), as opposed to other, more receptive genres. The application of digital tools is also linked to notions of ownership, as reflected in hip-hop's attitude toward collaboration and borrowing ( McLeod and Dicola 23-25). According to Phillips and Street, artists' attitudes toward copyright are "mediated by the identities that artists adopt" and "depend on their creative practice" (356). They also argue that musicians' views on copyright rely on their "relationship to a profession, to band members, to their audience, and to a wider society" ( Street and Phillips 431-32). This web of connections suggests the rights-related significance of aspects such as age, gender, and degree of affiliation with music companies or labels. It also draws attention to the specific role taken by the given artist with regard to writing, performing, and recording the music in question.

Existing research has not attempted to examine the individual artists' level of knowledge about copyright law but rather to understand their attitudes toward copyright and the extent to which it is an incentive for artistic creation, by offering economic and moral rights (e.g., Schlesinger and Waelde). While measuring artists' levels of legal knowledge would be an interesting research challenge, the ambition of the current study is instead to unpack the various technology-based practices through which artists exercise their rights. These practices might derive from artists' legal knowledge or general strategic awareness of copyright but might also be the tacit product of accumulated experience and genre-related conventions.

A shared feature of the artists selected for this study is that they all write and perform their own songs, though the level of their engagement in record production varies. Furthermore, all are active in well-established genres, including rock, blues, and country, sometimes operating as individual singer-songwriters and sometimes in band constellations. Overall, they work according to the traditional model of first composing the key elements of a song (melody and text) and then making an optimal recording of it. This model distinguishes them from artists in improvisational genres such as jazz or the growing body of genres in which the composition of sounds is integrated into the creation of recordings, as is (often) the case with electronica and electronic dance music, or EDM. The alignment of this article's informant group enables me to look at how artists within a traditional form of music-making have developed in the digital environment. Hopefully, the results will provide a basis for comparison with other genres of music as well.

The analysis to follow is based on interviews with eighteen artists in Norway, all of whom have experienced success within their respective genres. There was an even split between male and female artists, with ages ranging from 27 to 42, meaning that their level of professional experience obviously varied. While music was their main vocation, some complemented their creative work with related engagements within music education. The younger artists (ages 27 to 34) had on average released two to four solo albums, while the older artists (ages 35 to 42) had released four to six solo albums. For at least some of these projects, each had collaborated with established studios and record companies. In order to encompass diverse experiences with contemporary production and distribution, I included some artists who had also invested in their own studio facility (ten of them) and record label (fifteen of them). The selection, therefore, also reflects the growing trend of artists working as self-employed entrepreneurs ( Haynes and Marshall). A recent survey in Norway found a marked increase in artists releasing records through their own labels - from 23% in 2007 to 33% in 2017 - that was paralleled by an increase in the number of active members in the copyright societies of performers and composers, Gramo and TONO ( 72, 82, 110). In the same period, the number of artists signing traditional record contracts decreased from 28% to 17%, while those using distribution contracts increased from 10% to 15%, indicating broad shifts in the way works under copyright are managed. The survey also found that the total income based on artists' rights to compositions had increased, particularly from concerts, television, and online media. From 2007 to 2017, TONO's income from online distribution went from less than a million to 14 million Euro, placing it among the collection societies with the highest growth rates in Europe (see Street, Laing, and Schroff for a comparison). However, the funds had gone to a smaller group of people, and one that was predominantly male. The top 10% received 70% of the revenues in 2017, and of the top 1%, only 10% were women (BI 112, 3). These overall patterns are mirrored by statistics in other countries ().

Of course, the Norwegian context has special characteristics. For one thing, there is substantial state funding for art, culture, and media that is part of its social democratic legacy and the so-called Nordic model of public-private cooperation (see Mangset et al.). Arts Council Norway, for example, supported the music sector with 39.6 million Euro in 2018, offering an alternative to the exploitation of copyright in music on the market ( Arts Council Norway). It should also be noted that Norway is not part of the EU but has access to its internal market via the Agreement of the European Economic Area (EEA) and thereby also adopts EU directives. This means that the recent Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market of 17 April 2019 () will be implemented in Norway in the years to come, underscoring the relevance of understanding the relationship between law and practice. As mentioned above, this study took place alongside a revision of copyright law in Norway finalized in 2018, allowing me to relate the practices, experiences, ambitions, and frustrations of the interviewed artists to the latest developments in the oversight of their copyright.

A bird's-eye view of statistics and regulations arguably has limitations in terms of identifying the practices and interactions that underpin them, which can be revealed via the worm's-eye view enabled by qualitative interviews (). Furthermore, as pointed out by Street and Philips, artists "rarely talk about the law, or at least they rarely talk about the law as either a lawyer or a policymaker would" (431). My investigative strategy in the interviews was therefore not to rely entirely on direct questions about copyright management but also to ask a range of questions about the artists' ways of creating music (who is involved, what they contribute, what they are entitled to) and of conveying it (release strategies, cooperation with distribution partners, what the artists expect in return). These key themes also structure the account that follow, pursuing the role of technology in the creation of intellectual work before turning to how the music is made available. By taking their current project as a starting point, I was further able to establish a context for exploring issues of ownership and rights, and the exertion of such entitlements. I carried out the interviews over a period of one year, ending in the fall of 2018.

Creating Intellectual Works

My first impression of the interviewed artists was that they shared a very professional approach to their rights and the value of their musical work. All were members of the relevant organizations and collection societies for composers and performers, and all depended on the remuneration received through those arrangements. While some described their memberships and the registration of their works as a matter of routine, others were more actively engaged in the agenda, policies, and campaigns of their artist organizations, to which I will return. Some expressed a deliberate cultivation of their ownership rights concerning their works: "When my father, who was also a songwriter, heard that I was starting a band, he encouraged me to write the songs and register them." Others indicated only a more fragmented understanding of the extent of their rights, acknowledging, for example, that they had only recently realized that they were entitled to remuneration when they performed their own songs at concerts.

Creating with Technology

Substantial variation also emerged in the ways in which they created their songs - that is, those "expressions of original and individual creative intellectual effort" that copyright law protects. All of the artists used a smartphone to capture musical ideas as they were conceived, and most used tablets and laptops (powered by basic recording tools, like GarageBand) to make sketches and demos of songs. Half of them, however, had also invested substantial amounts of time and money in developing their own personal studio facilities. Attics, basements, and garages were all used to accommodate a setup that usually included a microphone, amplifier, and laptop powered by a sound card and recording software, amounting to a basic investment of about 6,000 to 12,000 Euro. One artist vividly remembered how that spark was lit: "I was allowed to hang around in a studio with a producer who showed me the ropes, and I realized, I can do this!" The skillful application of these tools allowed for a professional level of recording of vocals and key instruments, meaning that these artists could transform their musical ideas into almost finished tracks for singles and albums. Some projects, however, required a larger studio to capture drums and wind instruments, for example, and external competency was often sought for the final mixing and mastering as well. Still, the technical proficiency of these artists enabled them to control the entire process from writing a song to capturing an optimal performance of it, leaving them as the sole owner of the copyright: "I have made everything, which means I don't have to share 20 percent here and there," one artist proudly summarized. The same artist also knew that they were the only one responsible for registering the work with the collection societies, where they could claim 100% authorship. For several of the artists, their appropriation of production tools was clearly linked to the cultivation of a sense of ownership and control over their work.

Creating with Studio Producers

In contrast, the rest of the artists followed the traditional model of approaching a studio and producer to make records. They did not have the knowhow or the tools to do it themselves, and most of them also sought an "artistic sparring partner" and "a professional to confirm quality," as some put it. As the producers often had started out as musicians themselves, they would at times contribute to the recording by playing some of the instruments, for which they would be registered as performers and entitled to compensation for use (via Gramo). The interviews revealed that most of the artists had also experienced projects in which the producer was registered for a percentage of the rights to the composition (in ). This stake was usually noted as an "arranger share" and ranged from a "a few percent" to 30%, a percentage arrived at during the recording-studio work. Upon the initial registration of these works, the producer would also secure economic and moral rights for all later uses of the work, in recordings and concerts and for publishing purposes.

When asked what merited the ceding of one's rights to a song, the artists had a number of answers, including "making suggestions to the melody," "reordering parts of the song," "adding instrumentation," and "editing and processing the recorded sounds so that they fit together." In general, the producer was associated with the realization of the song's sound, which was developed in the studio.

Some of the artists found it difficult to recall how they had arrived at the allocation of rights, and others appeared uncomfortable talking about it, at least in specific terms. "It is a small price to pay for his [the producer's] invaluable contribution," said one, adding that "the record isn't going to make much money anyway." She appeared grateful for the opportunity to work with her preferred producer, and she planned to work with him again. Several of the artists even expressed a sense of pride that an esteemed producer would stand as coauthor of their work, the creative share of which was happily registered.

Furthermore, because these artists relied on renting the studio and producer (through their personal label), the production of a record represented an expense, and many of the artists were fully aware that there might not be a "next record." Many of them had received support from cultural policy bodies for their record projects, and Arts Council Norway, for example, primarily based its grants on artistic quality assessments. This context sheds light on the artists' ambitions for an alliance with a good producer. One explained: "I don't have much money to pay the producer, and I think he becomes more dedicated to the recording when he also gets creator credits." For several of the artists, then, sharing copyright was a way to stimulate team spirit and a sense of joint ownership that would make the producer go the extra mile for the sake of artistic achievement (on which the funding of a next project relied).

In most cases, the studio producer enjoyed their bargaining power based upon offering something the artist needed (recording technology and competency) and having more knowledge about what to expect from the artist (including a share of the copyright). The producer would say, as one artist mentioned, "this is the standard way of doing things, which was also the case for X and Y [other established artists]." Claims like these, of course, were difficult for the artist to verify. On the other hand, the interviewed artists also played active parts in this integrative negotiation with the producer by attempting to exploit their roles as songwriter and copyright holder. Sharing rights was a way to foreground what they might be able to achieve together, whereas the eventual revenue split was kept in the background.

Creating with Informal Networks

The artists with their own production facility also needed production support from time to time, "but the song is still mine," one insisted. A personal studio provided an alternative to close collaboration, except for the more limited arrangements involving a studio to record drums or have someone mix a track. "When I need a helping hand," one said, "I give one back, such as adding an instrumental track to a song or mixing a single." These artists, again, had mastered the production tools required for this kind of arrangement, and exchanging files in need of something was commonplace. These integrative negotiations implied that the parties involved were very aware of what the other might contribute to the creative product, and both sides sought a long-term balance of exchange rather than exact pie-slicing.

Several of the artists participated in so many exchanges that they sometimes did not bother to specify their particular contributions or even have them registered. One recalled, "Once, I visited a friend, and just before I was leaving for the plane, he asked me to add a guitar line on a track he was making. It actually became a huge hit, making millions, but no one knows about my contribution." Another very experienced artist said with a sigh, "Rights registration is actually part of the history of a song and should be able to carry the burden of success," implying that truthful registration prevents conflicts down the road. It remained a challenge, however, to balance congenial participation in the ongoing exchanges of informal creative networks with rights use - that is, specifying and claiming ownership for one's part in every work one made.

Creating for the Media

The interviewed artists not only made music for the consumer market of listeners but also for the growing media market of film, television, advertising, and computer games ( Havens and Lotz). Almost everyone had been contacted by a television producer wanting to use one of their songs, and almost all of them had found it hard to exercise their rights in these contexts. "They wanted my music for free, in exchange for the marketing effect," concluded one who had bit the bullet and accepted the offer anyway, assuming that the producer would otherwise have simply called another artist. It was only when highly popular songs were sought that artists experienced real bargaining power.

Media producers not only wanted to use existing records, however, but also to commission soundtracks tailored to their specific films or computer games. As there was typically no ready recorded alternative for the producers in these situations, the artists had more bargaining chips and could ask as much as twenty to thirty thousand Euro to write and produce the music of a television series. The majority of the artists had experience with such engagements, and all of those with a personal studio facility did this work repeatedly. One explained, "The sound quality required for most media productions is lower than for a record release, as the focus is on the visual storytelling, so I can do the entire production in my own studio." In fact, some of the artists who did not have a personal studio said that the primary motivation for acquiring one was to take on such commissions without having to rent expensive professional studio time.

Though media commissions were considered both lucrative and creatively engaging, they entailed their own set of challenges for the use of copyright. One artist who was engaged to make the music for a television series found that "the producer interfered and pushed the music in a direction I didn't want to be associated with, then engaged another artist without even letting me know." Another realized partway along that "they [the production company] didn't want the rights for a specific film release but for all future on-demand viewing across the world, as well as spin-off products. They wanted to own the music, but that wasn't clear to begin with." Some were taken by surprise by the extent of the rights that media producers sought and acknowledged a growing interest in "what's written in the small print or between the lines." One artist who had recently signed a contract for a computer game soundtrack was proud of having secured the right to release a soundtrack album and to use parts of the content in other projects.

In such media engagements, then, artists faced negotiating counterparts with specific demands regarding the creation of the music, as well as how it would made available to the audience, which leads me to the next part of the analysis.

Making Works Available

The creator of a work has the inherent right to "make the work available to the general public" (paragraph 3), as well as the right "to be named in accordance with good practice" (paragraph 5). Economically speaking, concerts clearly represented the most profitable avenue of exploitation for the interviewed artists. Two of them were not aware of their right to remuneration for the live performance of their work, as mentioned, and had therefore already missed out on tens of thousands of Euro. This indicates one's vulnerability if one does not know one's rights; in these cases, happily, they hurriedly learned the system and have since registered every concert with the collection society.

For most of the artists, income from record sales and online distribution was minute in comparison to concerts (on average, up to ten times less, recent research confirms; BI 95). Nevertheless, the interviewed artists invested a lot of time and energy in making records - some of them more than in playing concerts - for the following reasons: "I need to have good records to get people to my concerts"; "records are what people listen to a lot, while concerts are occasional"; "records are what gets reviews and critical acclaim"; "it is in the recording studio that my music finds it best artistic form." This indicates the corresponding significance of their moral rights in addition to their economic rights - it was important to be heard and recognized as a creator of music.

All of the interviewed artists used social media, particularly Facebook, to spread information and links to their music, which they made available for on-demand distribution, particularly via Spotify. At the time of the study, streaming services like Spotify had already become immensely popular, offering users access to millions of tracks and giving artists access to millions of potential listeners. (These subscription-based services accounted for 88.6% of the income from recorded music in Norway in 2018, according to .) "With these media I can control my own releases and tours," said one, "and not be worried about the label suddenly postponing my release date and cutting my marketing budget to the benefit of a hotter artist." Several of the artists who were working through their own label had not transferred the right to "make the work available," the independent exertion of which was clearly enhanced by new media.

Most of the artists used their control over distribution to press vinyl editions of new albums, even though they were not likely to be profitable: "I love receiving the first vinyl in the mail; it is the finest version of my artistic vision, with plenty of space for artwork, as well as full contributor credits," explained one. In terms of reaching out to listeners, however, the streaming service of Spotify was considered unavoidable. (In 2018, 58% of the Norwegian population used Spotify, and it was the music service to which people in the Nordic countries devoted the most time, according to Jensen and Krøyer.) All of the interviewed artists had chosen to license to Spotify the right to make their music available, though they were often deeply ambivalent about this. "First of all," said one, "after releasing an album, the revenues from streaming will cover only a fraction of the production costs." For others, it felt a bit like giving the music away for free, recalling the arrangements with television series producers involving music for marketing. This took a toll on their sense of professional dignity. "Second," continued the artist quoted above, "I have no idea how my meager payouts are estimated, but I am pretty sure some big fish are getting a better deal," thus articulating the commonly held suspicion that independent artists were somehow being treated unfairly.

Spotify, interestingly, did not make deals directly with independent labels but instead required an intermediary distribution partner, such as the Orchard or Ingrooves, to handle the interaction. Several of the artists lamented the opacity of the terms of remuneration, and of their actual prospects for visibility through the service. "I want to be featured in curated playlists on Spotify, but I have no idea how those are made or what kinds of lists I might pop up in," one admitted. In 2018, Spotify announced that its curated and machine-generated playlists represented 31% of all of the listening that happened on the platform, and that this percentage was growing quickly (Spotify's DPO 4). While several of the artists knew that being featured on lists such as "Discovery Weekly," "Morning Coffee," and "Dinner with Friends" could trigger millions of streams, they were not sure how much good this did in terms of their musical reputations or popularity. "I think most playlist streamers just press play and go with the flow, without even noticing the name of the artists or the song," one observed. In order to notice those things, of course, listeners had to pick up their devices and click through to the credits overview, which was often lacking in terms of specifying composers, lyricists, performers, producer, and other information about the recording. This sloppy crediting had long been an issue with Spotify, complained one artist, who found it challenging to figure out how to adjust this information (also noted by Eriksson et al. 74-75; see also on the opacity of the playlist flow). Furthermore, the most popular Spotify lists were seen to be tailored to accompany activities such as traveling, studying, or partying, which favored genres such as ambient and EDM over others. "But I have written my songs for focused listening, mixing my vocal loudly and centrally," one critically acclaimed artist noted. He was therefore concerned that some of his songs might end up on inappropriate lists, representing a poor context for his work for new listeners and old fans. While several of the artists expressed related misgivings, none of them explicitly referred to their right "to be named in accordance with good practice" or their right to ensure that their works were not "made available to the public in a way or in a context which is offensive to the creator's or the work's repute or distinctiveness" (paragraph 5).

As mentioned, they righted the balance in such cases by pressing vinyl. Ordering a vinyl edition also offered them control over the economic exploitation of a record as such, and one artist eagerly showed me his spreadsheet tracking when sales would surpass the vinyl press costs, which usually happened. He found streaming to be opaquer in terms of revenue calculation, but he joined a few of the other artists in expressing a sense of optimism over how the streaming of tracks could accumulate over time and produce sudden popularity for one song or another. "I have more than one hundred songs on Spotify now," another said, "where all my work is available for everyone, always." He then proudly added that he was the sole copyright holder of this material. In general, the artists who were able to produce many works using their own recording facilities considered ownership in their songs to be an investment in a future dominated by streaming.

Discussing Rights

The artist interviews point to several links between technology use and the use of rights. First of all, new production tools clearly helped artists manage the whole creative process and retain (and cultivate their sense of) ownership of their compositions, as well as the recorded performances of them. Developments in the technological literacy of "creat[ing] messages across a variety of contexts" ( Livingstone 5) appeared to be paralleled by developments in the literacy of copyright practices, including registering works and participating in rights organizations. Mastering new production tools made artists less dependent on other partners, which represented a bargaining chip when they did want or need to cooperate (). It enabled artists to exchange new services within informal networks, as well as take on commissions for external media projects, both of which requiring the strategic balancing of their creative efforts with what they received back for those efforts. Several of the artists also expressed the ambition of working as a producer for other artists, which their growing production competency supported.

About half of the artists had not developed this production competency, on the other hand, and still depended on a studio producer (who often had an artist background as well). As the analysis found, these interactions typically resulted in the producer obtaining a share of the rights to the composition and performance. Diverse accounts were given of the kinds of contributions that ought to merit ownership and copyright of what the law defines as "expressions of original and individual creative intellectual effort" (paragraph 2). The producer's rights to a composition were usually referred to as an "arranger share," even though copyright law never mentions arrangers or arrangements as such. The notion of arranger entitlements is, however, longstanding and part of a practice sanctioned by the collection society for composers in Norway, called TONO. TONO was established by the Norwegian Society of Composers in 1928 to manage copyright on behalf of its members. In its registration form for new works, arranger share is a standard category. TONO's statutes do not actually define what "arranging" is but rather what it is not: "a) to alter dynamics, phrases, ornamentation, b) simplify, shorten or edit, c) transpose or transcribe), d) add non-innovative instrumentation, or e) similar alterations" (). These rules seem applicable to the reorganization of a musical score but less helpful for distinguishing among the kinds of technology-mediated contributions that the interviewed artists pointed out, such as the editing and processing of a sonic style. The partial and hesitant accounts of these artists indicated a lack of clear guidelines regarding when a producer would be entitled to a share of copyright in a work, and what share it should be.

In general, neither lawmakers nor the collection society currently addresses the creative intellectual efforts that take place in recording studios, which reflects the tendency of copyright regulation and practices to lag rather than lead ( 16). Such considerations are therefore left to the practitioners, and the resulting situation is more pragmatic and strategic than principled. It may be that the types of exchange logic that develop within informal artist networks are perpetuated by those artists who later sit in the producer's chair. Likewise, informal rights agreements can be just, and justifiable, as part of a long-term collaboration among peers, but they can also be unfair when the parties have unequal bargaining power at the outset.

In terms of the rights to "make copies of the work" and to "make the work available to the public" (paragraph 3), it is well known that the transition to online distribution has made them hard to exploit economically. One response to unlicensed file-sharing was the streaming service, though, as already discussed, the prospects of streaming for different artists and genres are still unclear. Rather than a means of controlling the number of copies of a work that are available, streaming, to most of the interviewed artists, represented a marketing opportunity to reach listeners who might supply the artist with income in other ways (such as via concert attendance). This analysis pointed to some growing concerns with the marketing effects of streaming, in terms of adequately representing creator credits and of being featured in the constant flow of popular playlists. As mentioned above, creators do have the right "to be named in accordance with good practice" (paragraph 5), but what is "good practice" in the context of online streaming, and how might a demand for it be made? In general, the use of new technologies has introduced new debates about what is fair in terms of sharing ownership or licensing work for distribution.

Lawmakers are in fact interested in the challenges faced by creators in digital times, and the recent revision of copyright law proposed a "right to fair remuneration" (paragraph 69), based on the insight that creators tend to be the weaker party in negotiations with large industry players ( Proposition 233). In the hearing, artist organizations supported this new paragraph but also "proposed a dispute resolution scheme, as going to court would demand so much resources that the right to fair remuneration would be hollowed-out" (237). The paragraph eventually passed, but the establishment of a resolution scheme for potential claimants was considered to be too "comprehensive" and left to be evaluated at a later date (243).

Another proposal that raised issues of fairness and utility stated that the employer or commissioner who financed the musical work was to own the copyright, unless otherwise agreed (paragraph 71). The lawmaker underscored that the purpose of this proposal was to clarify existing legal practice and to force work contracts to deal more explicitly with copyright ( Proposition 251). This goal was in keeping with the revision's overall ambition to make the law "a more effective and easily applicable tool" (9). However, artist organizations strongly opposed the proposal, arguing that it favored the commissioners and weakened the creators' negotiation position (254). From the perspective of the creators, such a proposal would have dire consequences for the promising field of music-making for digital media projects, from films to computer games. To impact the lawmaking process, composer and performer organizations (NOPA and GramArt) launched a campaign encouraging their members to use social media to protest the proposal. Several of the interviewed artists participated in the effort, muting the sound on their music videos on YouTube and posting statements on Facebook about how important it was to own their own music in the interests of producing new music. The campaign, called #withoutmusic, reached beyond fans to catch the public eye and ultimately swayed the cultural politicians in Parliament to eliminate the paragraph in question - see #utenmusikk, the campaign's main website.

The artist organizations hailed the removal of paragraph 71 as a major victory for creators, one that demonstrated the potential use of new media technologies to influence the interpretation and formulation of copyright law. The value of the removal for artists' everyday interactions with their commissioners remains unclear, however. A key ambition of the revision was to mitigate ambiguity and conflict in collaborative arrangements, the challenges of which the present study reflects. As stated above, copyright law is continuously in the making, and new EU legislation also aims for fairness in the relationship between creators and users of copyright ().

There may well be other ways to foster concord, of course, that might also bridge the gap between legal terms and daily industry practices, which evolve rapidly in the digital environment. Inspired by the Norwegian Press Association, introduced above, the music sector could consider the establishment of a code of conduct, including ethical guidelines for the relationship between creators and producers (including details around when arranging should trigger a share of ownership of recording projects) and creators and distributors (including details around what constitutes naming "in accordance with good practice"). Rather than await the intervention of lawmakers, representatives of creators, producers, and distributors could form a "copyright council" that could develop the code of conduct and also receive complaints regarding breaches of the code. Its decisions would not have legal status (the Norwegian Press Association, for example, does not assess cases that are tried in court) but could deem conduct to be within or outside of the professional standard of the sector. By being both accessible and transparent, the council could be a timely forum for the discussion of copyright (ab)use and enable insights into interactions and understandings that otherwise remain behind the closed doors of studios and distributors. This could represent a powerful vehicle through which the music sector could interpret and formulate the contents (and boundaries) of copyright law, thus becoming a resource for developing legal literacy among its less-experienced aspirants. The formation of such a body would benefit from a theoretical evaluation of the ways in which the rights granted by copyright relate to the rights of contract law and privacy law, as well as further practical assessments regarding how different parts of the music sector should be represented, both of which are beyond the scope of the current study.

Final Perspectives

This paper has sought to contribute to the understanding of copyright by beginning to unpack the relations between the appropriation of new technology, including the literacy involved in creating music across various media, and the exertion of copyright, including the allocation and registration of rights. The title of this essay alludes to a widespread perception of copyright as having limited value to artists in the 2000s, a perception it set out to test by examining the various ways in which it is put to use. Rather than focusing on artists' attitudes about copyright, the study zoomed in on copyright's role in their everyday creative practices and interactions, including the integrative negotiations that are required to realize the best possible work of art. The analysis confirms that artists' relationship to copyright is mediated by their identities and milieus ( Phillips and Street 356), and that the appropriation of technology is a big part of this mediation. Interestingly, most of the artists who had developed their own recording facilities were male, though a few were female, raising the question of the impact of gender upon not only the appropriation of new technology but also the ownership of one's works. It might be, for instance, that gender-related resources other than technology also influence the creation of works and allocation of rights, though this also is beyond the scope of the present paper.

In terms of its generalizability, the present study comprises eighteen artists and only examines practices within traditional genres, including rock, blues, and country. The appropriation of new technology in these cases is likely to differ from that of other genres, including electronica, hip hop, and sample-based music, where new technology might have different ramifications for the creation of works, as well as creator credits. The present study has contributed to the raising of these questions and provides a basis for further comparison.

Acknowledgments

This article is produced in association with the University of Oslo research project titled "Music on Demand: Economy and Copyright in a Digitized Cultural Sector" and is funded by the Research Council of Norway [grant number 271962]. I thank the members of the research team, Professor Anne Danielsen, and the reviewers of Popular Music and Society for their valuable contributions. I also thank the interviewed artists that this study is based on.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yngvar Kjus (PhD) is Associate Professor of Music and Contemporary Media in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo, Norway. Kjus is the author of Live and Recorded: Music Experience in the Digital Millennium (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018).

1. All translations from Norwegian to English are the author's.

2. The artists include Amund Maarud, Bendik Brænne, Christine Sandtorv, Egil Olsen, Heidi Marie Vestrheim, Henrik Maarud, Ida Jenshus, Ingrid Olava, Jarle Bernhoft, Kaja Gunnufsen, Marte Wulff, Merete Pascual (Billie Van), Petter Carlsen, Pål Moddi Knutsen, Sandra Kolstad, Shaun Bartlett, Silja Sol, and Thomas Helland (Thom Hell).

Works cited

Aguilar, Ananay. "'We Want Artists to Be Fully and Fairly Paid for Their Work': Discourses on Fairness in the Neoliberal European Copyright Reform." JIPITEC-Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce Law, vol. 9, no. 2, 2018, pp. 160-78.

Gripsrud, Jostein. "Creativity and the Sense of Collective Ownership in Theatre and Popular Music." The Work of Authorship, edited by Mireille van Eechoud, Amsterdam UP, 2014, pp. 215-36.

Jensen, Simon Bugge , and Marie Christiansen Krøyer. "Polaris Nordic: Digital Music in the Nordics." YouGov, Oct. 2018, www.tono.no/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Digital-Music-in-the-Nordics-2018.pdf. .

Livingstone, Sonia. "Media Literacy and the Challenge of New Information and Communication Technologies." Communication Review, vol. 7, no. 1, 2004, pp. 3-14. doi:10.1080/10714420490280152.

Mangset, Per , Anita Kangas, Dorte Skot-Hansen, and Geir Vestheim. "Nordic Cultural Policy." International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 14, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1-5. doi:10.1080/10286630701856435.

McLeod, Kembrew , and Peter Dicola. Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling, Duke UP, 2011.

Norsk Presseforbund (Norwegian Press Association). www.presse.no. .

[Norwegian] Copyright Act for Intellectual Property, etc. (Copyright Act). "Lov Om Opphavsrett Til Åndsverk Mv. (Åndsverkloven)." https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/2018-06-15-40. .

"Streambait Pop: The Emergence of a Total Spotify Genre." The Baffler. 10 Dec. 2018, https://thebaffler.com/downstream/streambait-pop-pelly. .

Ricketson, Sam , and Jane C. Ginsburg. International Copyright and Neighbouring Rights: The Berne Convention and Beyond. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2006.

Schlesinger, Philip , and Charlotte Waelde. "Copyright and Cultural Work: An Exploration." Innovation: the European Journal of Social Science Research, vol. 25, no. 1, 2012, pp. 11-28.

Street, John , , and Simone Schroff. "Regulating for Creativity and Cultural Diversity: The Case of Collective Management Organisations and the Music Industry." International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 24, no. 3, 2018, pp. 368-86. doi:10.1080/10286632.2016.1178733.

TONO. "Bestemmelser [Statutes]." www.tono.no/om-tono/tono-i-tall/fordelingsplan/. .

. "Economics of Music Publishing: Copyright and the Market." Journal of Cultural Economics, vol. 41, no. 4, 2017, pp. 403-20.

#utenmusikk. www.utenmusikk.no. .

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The Use of Copyright in Digital Times: A Study of How Artists Exercise Their Rights in Norway

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ABSTRACT How do artists use copyright to further their creative ends? To approach this question, this article focuses on the relationship between artists' appropriation of digital technology and exertion of their rights. In particular, it relates the evolving range of production tools and distribution services to the ways in which artists currently create musical works and seek to exploit their economic as well as moral rights.

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Logistic:

- Sharing findings (case studies and reference resources)

- Decided to compare Royal Opera and Met Opera in terms of region and different funding systems and Royal Opera and another small performing arts organisation in terms of size.

For next week:

- Writing down what we have shared on the shared Word doc.
- Further research on the case studies - Royal Opera(UK), Met Opera(USA), and another small performing arts organisation(UK)

- Start searching for PowerPoint templates

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Photography Project Proposal by Slidesgo

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Technology in Troubled Times

By Peter Clark

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The Met Opera’s Musicians, Unpaid Since April, Are Struggling

https://www.metorchestramusicians.org

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Live in HD

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A Historic Night as the Metropolitan

Opera Tries to Ensure Its Future

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Met Opera and orchestra reach deal, allowing season to start

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Cinema and smart phones: the art
of increasing audiences for opera,
ballet and theatre

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Cinema and smart phones- the art of increasing audiences for opera, ballet and theatre

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New York’s iconic opera house has been silent since March. And after six months with no pay, one third of the Met Orchestra’s musicians can’t afford to live in the city anymore.

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Met Opera closure leaves ‘devastated’ musicians without pay for over a year

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BBC to broadcast Royal Opera

House reopening concert

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April 2021

Opera North is a national opera company based in Leeds, and is a leading UK arts organisation. Their core purpose is to use music to bring extraordinary experiences to people of all backgrounds and ages, every day. Inherent in this work has been the act of bringing people together; musicians, audiences, students, participants all in the same space to make and share music. As the scale of the crisis became clear, that fundamental part of their work became impossible. We spoke to the team about their Covid-19 response strategies and how they have been coping in the face of a pandemic. Opera North's five-point Community Story covers:

On Monday 16 March, as with many other cultural organisations, Opera North was forced to cease all live activity. In recent years we had been growing our digital capacity, but overnight all our focus shifted to three key areas and how we could use digital to:

Stay connected to our audiences, supporters and participants.

Continue to make music

Replace the lost income of live performance

The past year has seen cancelled performances, a fundamental shift to digital, a few live performances back in the theatre summer 2020, and now we start to look towards blended digital/live and moving back into live performance as lockdown eases over the coming months.

Adapting to New Approaches

We've used this time to experiment with and develop our digital offerings. We've learnt a lot. One key takeaway is to take risks, accept failures, learn from them and try again. Collaboration across teams has been absolutely key to success. These are just some of the key things we did:

Developed our website, extending and improving the "watch online" section where 3 performances already existed. This was shared with existing audiences and increasingly reached new audiences around the world (paid digital marketing building on this)...

We created an 'OperaNorth@Home' strand, sharing regular content repurposed from the archives & gathered into themes, or creating new filmed and written work.

We created an ONDemand platform in partnership with Substrakt. So far we've had 2 livestreams and 2 pieces of streamed content available on the platform and we are developing this on an ongoing basis. This was a huge learning curve in understanding how audiences act differently to live digital content, right down to understanding the technical details of livestream.

From Couch to Chorus, our online virtual choir, has reached over 5,000 people and raised incredible amounts in PAYF donations. Around 60% of participants are new to Opera North, over 90% say it has improved their wellbeing. We've analysed data and surveys, and made improvements with each iteration.

We've created a new series of Podcasts - Thinking with Opera - in partnership with the University of Leeds. Exploring opera and its component parts with special guests.

We launched a soundwalk for Leeds: As You Are. Pick up some headphones in Leeds city centre and take a 2km walk past many of the city's landmarks accompanied by an original soundtrack by South African composer and cellist Abel Selaocoe. The ticketed timeslots were hugely popular with many dates sold out but as non-essential shops closed we were unable to continue, though hope to re-open very soon.

Considering our Comeback

As lockdown eases there remain questions and uncertainty, and planning is challenging as things change constantly. We, like most organisations, are looking at different options for seating plans in the venues we tour to, reviewing pricing, sense-checking audience sentiment in the latest surveys and trying to gain an understanding of how this might all come together as we are able to perform again.

Communicating to build confidence is key. We're doing work around various audience segments to understand who has remained engaged during the last year, who we need to reaffirm our relationships with, as well as looking to build on our new digital audiences.

Staff have been undertaking COVID marshall training, so both front of house and backstage we have trained staff who can ensure the environments we and our audiences operate in are safe and secure. Marketing campaigns will undoubtedly have a whole new element of messaging to them as we re-open and we craft content that reassures audiences they will be in safe hands when they join Opera North for an event.

Navigating the New Normal

Over the past 12 months we've seen how well our livestreams and ONDemand platform have worked and this digital output will continue in some form alongside our live performances. We'll be looking to invest in digital upskilling of staff and digital R&D so we can continue to develop this strand and embed it in the core work of the company.

Through our online workshops we've found a large new audience of people who may not feel comfortable to attend in person, are from further afield - whether London or Australia, or are physically unable. It's important we continue to keep these audiences engaged whether through blended digital/live events or purely digital activities.

Coming soon will be a series of online events and concerts for audiences to enjoy. As we approach June, we hope to bring live performance back in both indoor and outdoor settings, alongside ongoing digital and online events. In Autumn/Winter 2021 we're planning to be back to live performances in our venues across the country.

2021 is a big year for Opera North as our capital redevelopment project, Music Works, comes to an end and our new facilities are opened up to our communities including a new bar and restaurant, a new orchestral rehearsal studio, an Education Studio and the re-opening of the Howard Assembly Room. So it will be more of the new, and less of the normal, for us!

Data-led Decision Making

We've done audience surveys after each of our major events to learn and improve following audience feedback. Every single survey we did resulted in at least one change to our approach or offering, whether it was to add evening classes to From Couch to Chorus or to update our comms for ONe-to-ONe (Zoom serenades!) clarifying what to expect.

With ONDemand, audience surveys were vital and we took the first livestream survey results and responded to them with changes to the booking and logging in process, and to our communications, to increase audience satisfaction by 26%.

We've participated in the Indigo/Insights Alliance 'After the Interval' and 'Act 2' surveys and used the resulting data to inform our thinking and planning. We're just about to send out the next tranche of surveys too...

We're working closely with The Audience Agency on our Howard Assembly Room segmentation as we look to re-open the venue later on this year. The insights The Audience Agency has delivered will be at the very core of the marketing messaging, and also the programming and repertoire choices we make. It won't stop there, as we load the segmentation into Spektrix and work on developing our various segments over the coming years.

The Audience Agency webinars, insights at online events and newsletters/articles are always read and shared by the team and the findings are useful in guiding where we might go with pricing, how our audiences might be feeling and how what we offer needs to be informed by that.

If you have any questions or are ready to send over a story, please get in touch with vanny.lambert@theaudienceagency.org Interested in contributing a Community Story of your own? Download the template HERE.

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Opera North is a national opera company based in Leeds, and is a leading UK arts organisation. Their core purpose is to use music to bring extraordinary experiences to people of all backgrounds and ages, every day. Inherent in this work has been the act of bringing people together; musicians, audiences, students, participants all in the same space to make and share music.

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National Theatre Live | Official website | Filmed live theatre

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In cinemas now

Best of Enemies

David Harewood ( Homeland) and Zachary Quinto ( Star Trek) play feuding political rivals in James Graham's award-winning drama.

In international cinemas

Best of Enemies

David Harewood ( Homeland) and Zachary Quinto ( Star Trek) play feuding political rivals in James Graham's award-winning drama.

In international cinemas

A National Theatre production

An extraordinary new production of Shakespeare's most enduring tragedy, with a cast that includes Giles Terera ( Hamilton).

In international cinemas

The Crucible

A National Theatre production

Arthur Miller's captivating parable of power, with Erin Doherty ( The Crown) and Brendan Cowell ( Yerma).

In select international cinemas

The Seagull

From The Jamie Lloyd Company

Emilia Clarke ( Game of Thrones) makes her West End debut in this 21st century retelling of Anton Chekhov's tale of love and loneliness.

In select international cinemas

Jack Absolute Flies Again

A National Theatre production

A rollicking new comedy by Richard Bean (One Man, Two Guvnors) and Oliver Chris (Twelfth Night).

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Search for screenings at your local cinema for National Theatre Live. See upcoming titles, release dates and trailers for the best British theatre screening at your local cinema.

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Logistic:

- Sharing theories, evidence, and case studies of each direction

- Adjust the structure of presentation:

a. Add definition, development of digitization and the influence of Covid-19 in the first part

b. Sequence and emphasis of the four directions: Financial problem, Capability, Audience engagement and Copyright issue

c. For the Capability part, a new argument related to mental health was added

- Propose questions for the meeting with Anna

- Take National Theatre into consideration

For next week:

- Meeting with Anna (10th Wed 11:30-11:45 am)

- Find more theories and evidence to support each argument

- Further research on the case studies: MET Opera, National Theatre and Royal Opera House

- Upload more PowerPoint templates to padlet

- Always share new ideas and resources

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1. Structure of presentation: 1 argument-1 case study, or first arguments then the case study?

2. Can we mention other organisations as examples or solutions to support our arguments, instead of being used as the case study?

3. Cases to be decided: Royal Opera House or National Theatre

4. Is it appropriate to only use positive cases?

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1. We can structure our presentation how we want: 1 argument-1 case study, or first arguments then the case study. The main thing is to show our understanding of the connection between theory and practice (what it means in practice for art managers);
2. It is possible to make examples in addition to case studies, but we need to explain the reference broader; this makes preferable to stay focused just on the case studies;
3. Both ROH and NT are good case studies, it depends on the specific problems we are talking about and which one fits better;
4.The case studies can be also negative, comparing and contrasting the different solutions adopted by institutions;
5. If we need and if it is possible we can also contact the institutions for additional information, in addition to check social media, website and annual reports;
6. For references from other classes is necessary to use this format: "pers. comm., 2021".

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Some VR experience design by the National Theatre

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Some VR experience design by the National Theatre

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Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media

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Abstract: With 360-degree filmmaking and Virtual Reality (VR) - the audience can now be immersed in the milieu of the filmed location. Hitherto hard to reach territories, and hard to portray narratives can now be realised and experienced first hand - rendering new opportunities for empathetic, political and cultural engagement. The possibilities of these new technologies of capturing and exhibiting locations and situations have drawn journalists, activists and documentary makers to the form. In this article, we examine four such case studies that have sought to make use of the VR cinema 360-degree format to illuminate specific aspects of human experience. In the award winning Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness the filmmakers and VR designers create an emotionally powerful experience based around visual impairment. In the second case study, Home: Aamir, theatre practitioners (National Theatre) create an experience that positions the viewer in an immersive first hand account of one migrant's journey from the Sudan to the Calais Jungle camp. 6 x 9 was produced by Guardian journalists and places the viewer into a harrowingly realistic and challenging experience of a US solitary confinement cell. The final example, Draw Me Close, (National Theatre and the National Film Board of Canada) is a complex and experimental piece of virtual theatre that examines grief, loss and bereavement. To describe the close engagement required for the study of these four examples we propose a 'virtual-reality ethnography' methodology and evolve an initial framework of attention through which to engage with and research the emergent complex experiences being conceived and delivered through VR and 360-degree film-making and experience design.

Introduction

The history of immersive media from panoramas to present-day 360-degree film and virtual reality practice exhibits a preoccupation with landscapes and alternative vistas. From Dioramas to Panoramas, Stereoscopes, to virtual travel experiences showcased at World Expos (e.g. Hale's Tours), to Sensorama and Cinerama, these were experiences that offered to transport the viewer to picturesque, exotic and distant landscapes. For a fuller study of these precursors see Huhtamo, 2013. We will return to this notion of transportation in more detail later but first we want to contrast these sensational, marvelous (they are presented to be marveled at) and idealized landscapes with a particular sub genre of contemporary virtual reality experience which appears obsessed with geographies that are dystopic, traumatic and problematic in which mental health sufferers, the visually impaired, refugees, prisoners, are either trapped within, or struggle to navigate and comprehend[1].

As with its aesthetic predecessors, the contemporary immersive place-based or landscape driven experience involves a quality of transportation as the viewing subject shifts orientation from one place to another, but is also characterized by the transference of the subjectivity of the navigator into the VR user, the interactor and the appropriate inhabitant of a distinct positionality designed in to the experience. The viewer's intended presence within the landscape is embodied (i.e. provided with a represented body) to a lessor or greater extent depending upon the nature of the experience and the complexity of the formal aspects that are registering or representing subjectivity.

The first characteristic - transportation - requires a reconsideration of those earlier examples and predecessors that can now be understood to have brought these exotic vistas to the viewer. In the contemporary VR experience however, there is an augmented sense of this transportation - there is a process of a shift in position, of being taken out of one context and positioned within another. This sense of transportation or sense of being 'taken to' and 'taken by' the experience is managed through a range of different tropes and techniques which we will examine. In the case of the second characteristic - transference - there is a further complexity in establishing the distinctiveness of these processes, practices and affects in relation to the viewing and playing subjectivities engineered through film and game apparatuses - how are we transferred in to this new subjectivity and what are the phenomenological and cognitive experiential qualities of this? At the most basic level this transportation is dependent upon predominantly visual techniques with some audio enhancements, although there is artistic experimentation in the use of other sensorial stimulants and augmentations[2] and the transference of the subjectivity is primarily achieved through the use of audio, although as we shall see there are other elements which contribute to this process.

True VR constitutes simulated environments, whether replications of actual places or fictional worlds, presented via high-powered headgear and sometimes other bodily accessories such as touch controllers, feedback vests and even chairs (such as the Roto VR). In 360-degree film the audience can look around, but they can't navigate it or control anything beyond the direction of looking in what Beier describes as "head-referenced viewing" (1999) - the experience here is one of the virtual flaneur. In VR however, the user has a degree of control over the experience and has the ability to move around the environments and interact with them. Much of the navigation and interaction is enabled via concentrated looking, responding to either visual or aural cues. The same goggles that enable VR also facilitate the viewing of these 360-degree videos and images, hence the ontological confusion between them.

Writing about the proliferation of documentary uses of VR, one reviewer exclaims:

I realized that the future of virtual-reality storytelling is not in just traveling through exotic or sci-fi locations to forget, but in being present in the reality of today so you could remember. Instead of merely receiving words, audio or visuals, each user is a co-pilot or co-author. We are not just a fly on the wall, but a participant. (emphasis added)[3]

The past two years have seen a proliferation of the curated festival programmes in which we now see an emergent journalistic form making use of the potentials of these technologies and techniques as an artistic and communicative medium being exhibited alongside examples of the more familiar fantasy and science fiction genres. In this trajectory we see work that seeks to examine the human condition and test the putative abilities of VR to generate empathy in the creation of highly personalised and individualised human stories. These stories take us to the normal, the real and the mundane of everyday lived experience in extraordinary circumstances to invoke a sense of universal human connection and at times to specifically promote a political or social engagement with the issues raised. In what follows we examine four such case studies.

In Home: Aamir, theatre practitioners (National Theatre) create an experience that positions the viewer in an immersive first hand account of one migrant's journey from the Sudan to the Calais Jungle camp. 6 x 9 was produced by Guardian journalists and places the viewer into a harrowingly realistic and challenging experience of a US solitary confinement cell. In the award winning Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (hereafter NOBID) the filmmakers and VR designers create an emotionally powerful experience of visual impairment making use of the recorded reflections of theologian John Hull as he loses the final vestiges of his sight.

Draw Me Close, the fourth example is a complex and experimental piece of virtual theatre that places the subject of the experience in a position of vulnerability as they adopt a child's persona and are taken through a series of physical interactions with an actor playing their 'mother'.

Methodology

The authors have been evolving a methodological approach that is responsive to increasingly complex participatory and immersive experience design. They draw on previous work on gameplay, film audience behaviours, transmedia audiences, ludic cultural experiences and more recently live and experiential cinema. Each of these innovations or evolutions in experience design require a 'close playing'[4] that marries the approaches of cultural anthropology, film studies, games studies, transmedia studies and technology studies. Each of these afford critical lenses that help illuminate these complex research subjects and the increasingly complex subjectivities that they produce. The approach needs to be capable of capturing the formal, technological, aesthetic and representational practices of the 'designed' element whilst also accounting for the affective and embodied perspective of the perceiving/experiencing subject. In our practice we deploy a 'close' virtual-reality ethnography: an approach to participant observation in which we are simultaneously participating in three registers, as the researching subject - the 'researcher' (observing, evaluating and forming new understandings), the virtualized subject - the 'experiencer' (our cognitive presence in the VR domain) and the embodied subject - the 'navigator' - (physically manipulating and navigating the space). This is not the case for Draw Me Close, or Home: Aamir which are not distributed via aggregation platforms, for these experiences a more conventional post-experience discussion amongst participants/viewers and fellow researchers is required along with a sensitivity for and attention to the elements of the experience we describe below.

In order to capture the complexity of the experience and to make distinctions between the three overlapping subjectivities - we deploy the following approach. One of us takes the viewing position and verbally describes the experience - whilst the other takes notes and records these reflections. We then switch positions and repeat this exercise before discussing and comparing notes, and we then revisit aspects of the experience which were significant or memorable. We are closely attending to the phenomenological and proprioceptive dimensions to embodiment in these virtual environments, to the 'sense' of presence that is designed in to the experience, to the qualities of immersion, to the interaction, to the affective dimensions and to the use of aesthetic tropes and techniques already familiar from other media forms (such as documentary film for instance). Much of the work of developing an understanding of the value of terms such as 'immersion' and 'presence' as having analytical and descriptive purchase has come through the convergence of disciplinary insights in game studies (Laurel, 1989, 1991, McMahan, 2003, Thon, 2008, Calleja, 2011, Elsaesser, 2014). In what follows, we deploy these terms in the following way: immersion will be used to conceptualise the extent to which the experience dominates our senses, engages our minds and overwhelms our attention; for presence we will simply be referring to the extent to which the experience achieves or attempts to achieve a sense of being embodied in a distinct environment separate to that within which our body is physically located. A sense described at the extreme by Lombard and T. Ditton as the 'perceptual illusion of non-mediation' (1997).

Through the application of this methodology we have identified six specific aspects to these experiences that are worthy of close examination and that we propose as the beginning of a framework for the wider analysis of VR/360 Film which can be adopted and adapted as a structure of attention for those experiences which cannot be re-'played' or re-'viewed'.

The contextual framing of the pieces: Paratextual framing, ranging from physical installation pieces, the specific context of experience, the credits that introduce and close the experience, the wider discourse or debate within which the experience is situated presented and articulated.

Traversing the limen - the staging of the shift between the real and the virtual:

This may be managed before the headset and headphones are in place but sometimes the staging takes place once these are worn. This is the process through which we are 'transported' to the place of the experience as well as transferred in to the subject of the narrative. There is a range of techniques that this requires.

The aesthetic and formal qualities of the environment: including the textual, visual, auditory, sensory elements and the narrative content, characters portrayed and structure of the story.

Point of view - from where, what or who am I looking and how can I look?: Identifying the diegetic point of view and experiential point of view including the mobility of the gaze. This is a critical and complex aspect of the experience design and is likely to require much further conceptual and analytical elaboration beyond this article.

Interactivity: how experiencer engagement and action is engineered/directed/ enabled, including whether there are 'gaze prompts' both visual and aural. Here interactivity needs to go beyond observation to include actions that have a consequence within the environment of the story.

Experiential qualities: to include an analysis of clear intentions signaled by the artists and the context as above, then an analysis of the experience from the perspective of the experiencing and researching subject.

The Contextual Framing

Each of these examples have had their premiere at festivals, where they have been reviewed and in all of these cases, critically acclaimed. By the time they are available for wider distribution and consumption we are already well aware of this positive critical framing. In each of these examples, the VR experience is situated within a wider familiar context using a range of different strategies through which the audience member becomes 'situated' - these contextual framings act as transitional tissue through which the participant makes their 'journey' into the virtualized environment. The factual, artistic and experimental framing of these case studies makes a critical difference to their potential interpretation. Otherwise - rather like the character of Dr. Samuel Beckett in Quantum Leap (1989-1993) who is disorientatingly transported and transferred to new times, places and subjectivities and has to spend the entire episode working out why they are there, who they are and how to behave.

Home: Aamir (2016) is clearly positioned within the wider narrative of the refugee crisis, and the installation itself is set up in a replica of one of the Calais Jungle shelters replete with rubbish and other bits of detritus. 6 x 9 forms part of a journalistic campaign regarding the psychological damage caused by solitary confinement. It draws on footage from a highly acclaimed US PBS Frontline documentary Solitary Nation. This campaigning context was clearly signposted at the site of its original presentation where the viewer was further taken in to the context of the experience via the means of the creation of an installation space in the dimensions of the cell, in which the viewer can perch on the prisoner's bed for the duration of the VR experience. NOBID... is situated within a wider discourse about blindness, and was from the outset, intended to form part of outreach activity in support of raising awareness about sight loss. NOBID.. is made by established documentarians and the lead production company, 104 films, are award winning leaders in "disability cinema". The Draw Me Close experience is pitched as a highly personal examination of grief, memory and a surprising revelation of forgotten or misremembered and unexplored domestic violence. In this latter example, contextualisation and framing also takes place through a process of physical preparation: the removal of shoes, a polite request if light physical touching is okay, you are then guided in and out the space. These share a dominant thematic concern which also supports the contextualization of the pieces, they are each an attempt to offer humanizing experiences for easily dehumanized and generalized subjects: 'prisoners', 'refugees', 'blind people' and 'the terminally ill' or 'victims of domestic violence'.

Traversing the Limen - the staging of the shift between the real and the virtual

Currently, the majority of the audience for these experiences will be relative novice users of these new devices, where the technologies are still rather cumbersome, strange and unfamiliar. The apparatus required to engage in these experiences is far from straightforward and although there is a great deal of celebratory discourse regarding the immersive nature of these experience there remains a challenging lack of immediacy and in the transition from 'outside' to 'inside' the experience - the moment of traversal. Beyond the difficulties of physically accessing these stories, in order to negotiate some of these barriers to comprehension and participation, we require a guide, a companion of sorts who will carry us over the threshold, instruct us in how to adapt to the new apparatus, the new affordances and restraints on our subjectivity, our embodiment and our entire sensorium. The four experiences under discussion provide us with this essential 'tour guide'. In these cases it is the central subject or their advocate who fills this role: Aamir in Home; Aamir; a more formal academic guide in 6 x 9; John Hull in NOBID... Draw Me Close is the most explicit and overt example of this, in which you are positioned as a child being taken care of and physically guided reassured and comforted throughout the space by a 'mother' figure.

For NOBID... the creator explains this transitional journey into the experience:

the experience gets more complex and richer as you progress in the experience, so the user has time to adapt to this very new environment and understand the difference between the sounds and how it's working, which simulates in a way how when you lose vision, your hearing needs to adjust to understand your sound environment.[1]

In Draw Me Close the depth of the experience and the intimacy require greater intervention to assist the participant in traversing the liminal space.

When you come out, you see that people want to talk [...] and sometimes we had to give people a bit of private space to compose themselves and that was an element in all of our planning we didn't know that we'd have to add in - stage management, or coming in as producers to come in and give people a hug to get them out, to transition.[2]

In each case there is process of transgressing the boundary between out of and 'in' the experience, as well as a transitory state of being 'poised' ready for the immersion. The guide provide the means of negotiating what Vanhoutte, Kurt et al., (2008) refer to as the 'transitional space' - the barrier between the real and the virtual universes.

The aesthetic and formal qualities of the environment:

As Lanier claimed for Virtual Reality: 'it has to be indistinguishable [from the actual entity] in some practical context, while it remains distinguishable in another' (Lanier, 1999). Home: Aamir is a 10-minute 360˚ verbatim storytelling film about Aamir, a 22-year-old Sudanese refugee. Through the use of an actor's voice-over of verbatim interviews, Aamir recounts his experiences of his journey to and out of the Calais Jungle Camp - from South Sudan via Libya and across the Mediterranean. The voice actor lends dramatic emphasis to the verbatim testimony of Aamir regarding his journey.

There are several static environments to visually explore, some walk-throughs and then a section during which you are in the back of a transit van being smuggled across a border. The technical restrictions of this form mean that a static camera has to be left mounted in situ, from various positions, on vehicles and on drones. In a follow shot where a camera operator is required we see the inevitable traces of their presence in the shot - in these the operator is visible with a disturbingly abject sawn-off hand.

6 x 9 is a first-person 9-minute 360˚ degree film experience in which the viewer is positioned in the subjectivity of being a prisoner locked in a solitary confinement cell. The CGI cell is aurally animated by verbatim voice over from real prisoners who have experienced such as space and from psychologists who have studied its effects. Visual effects are also used to emulate psychological conditions such as hallucinations, and visual distortions. We see cracks appearing on the walls of the cell, paint peeling, marks on the wall, as the voiceover reflects on the minute detail that they notice during their time of solitary incarceration.

It is an enclosed space that experientially inverts the normal tendency of 360 and VR towards the generation of expansive landscapes, this inversion creates an even greater feeling of confinement. The already confining headset is coupled here with a highly delineated experiencing space which aligns with the mental /emotional experience being portrayed. Text is used to augment the story on the walls of the cell, up above and below the viewer. Objects appear and disappear in the space, books, magazines, and the food tray. We hear noises from outside the space, from the prison guards and from the adjacent cells.

NOBID... is a VR experience that lasts approximately 30-minutes dependent on the speed at which you work through the different elements and is structured in six different 'chapters.' These chapters are sonically punctuated by the audible and familiar sound of the start and stop of analogue tape recorder buttons. The experience is atmospheric, expressive and at times moving and disorienting. The experience is guided by the voice over of John Hull, which has been taken and edited from the cassette tape recordings which he made to record his thoughts, feelings and reflections when he made the discovery that he was going to permanently lose his sight after almost a lifetime of struggling with visual impairment.

During the first chapter which recounts his experiences in a park with his children, Hull talks about the 'animated panorama', which surrounds him, which is made up by an enveloping and complex soundscape, thus preempting and pre-mediating the virtual experience in which objects appear in silhouette on a black background (see figure 2). This is a rendition of a similar scene from the film in which Hull describes how rainfall brings shapes and surfaces to life in the space around him, without which they would be empty and lifeless.

Hull describes this "acoustic space" and how wind and rain contribute to a more complete, more vivid experience of the world around him. The result of the Director's desire to "find a visual analogy for acoustic experience." (Middleton in Chen, 2016) In the park scene -these animated sonic moments include a newspaper; people talking on a bench; a car; a road; a merry-go-round; boats on the lake, ducks quacking and Hull's own children laughing in the distance.

Draw Me Close is a Virtual Reality experience that involves motion tracking, real time rendering, and a live performer. It is an 8-minute long experience devised and written by Canadian playwright and director Jordan Tannahill, developed through a collaboration between the National Theatre and the National Film Board Canada, which emerged as one of four projects developed in an NT/NFB VR lab. Draw Me Close imagines the last moment shared between Tannahill and his mother before her death. As Johanna Nichols describes:

...we call it theatre, over and over again we said that. And we would just say, essentially it's theatre, we're telling this story, we're telling it as a piece of theatre, the technology is there but it's theatre. The technology falls away...[3]

...we did over 600 performances in New York, universally, a dynamic is formed between the actor and the audience and then that initially grows and then, that's minute one and by minute 6 you're being put to bed, the suspension of disbelief, the surrender of trust and it happens so fast.[4]

Point of View - from where, what or who am I looking and how can I look?

A key characteristic to VR as Brey posits is that it "incorporates a first-person perspective' (1999, p.5, 2008), similarly Søraker and Consalvo assert that: "first-person view to be the minimal requirement of virtual reality, since it truly immerses a participant in the virtual reality, far beyond any metaphorical sense." (2011: 63) The creators of each of the experiences make use of reference to this sense of being in someone else's shoes, either directly or by allusion: Home: Aamir "deepens the viewer's understanding by placing them in the shoes of this lost soul." NOBID... "Narrated by the same recordings, the virtual reality component places whoever's wearing the headset into John's shoes". (Chen, 2016) 6 x 9 - "put you in someone else's shoes" (Francesca Panetta). This claim is akin to what Dennet has referred to as an "illusory shift in point of view" (1978: 314-315). There is a constant reference to the first person perspective, even though these experiences are not always first person. In all examples - there is an offset- persona - a parallax view of reality - a decentered subjectivity; as already indicated, we do not become these central characters, but rather we are guided by them and accompany them.

In 6 x 9 - the virtual authoring determines the viewer's point of view, from three alternate perspectives - sat on the bed, floating above the bed and from the top corner of the cell.

...you begin to float up to the ceiling and kind of move across to the door and back in for the interview that I did with a guy called Victor Page, who said that he felt that he would be floating in this cell, felt very disembodied (Francesca Panetta )[5]

Draw Me Close goes further in what it achieves in terms of point of view and subject position; for this experience you are more directly transferred in to the subjectivity of a five-year-old Tannahill inside a 'live, illustrated world'. His mother is played by an actress whose movements are translated into the virtual world using motion capture system - Orion - that uses HTC Vive, while she engages with you in the physical world in a shared- performance. In this experience you become a fellow performer in the staging of an intimate drama, distinct from the other experiences Draw Me Close belongs on a continuum of interactive theatrical performance such as You Me Bum Bum Train and Punchdrunk at its most intense.

Interactivity

Only the latter two examples of NOBID... and Draw Me Close afford the interactive engagement of virtual reality, the other two are restricted to the limited head-referenced looking of 360 degree video. In NOBID... interactive elements are triggered through a concentrated 'looking' at different areas, through this focused 'seeing' you trigger and unlock different elements of the experience. Concentration of the gaze is prompted and directed through a combination of visual and aural prompts. If the viewer fails to respond to the visual prompts, textual instruction appears on the screen in order to orient the viewers gaze, and through sonic prompts, in the direction of the source of the noise - when the viewer casts their head in that particular direction, the image of the sound is realized.

In a later sequence, a further level of viewer interaction is required - this involves the viewer pressing the button on the side of the VR headset in order to increase the sonic presence of the wind which then manifests visually in terms of objects moving and responding to the direction of the wind - such as the park swings and wind chimes. Pushing the button harder and for a prolonged moment increases the flow and triggers blue birds to fly into the distance. It also progresses the narrative onto the next stage, which remains in a looped stasis if no action is taken by the viewer.

The experience assumes that the viewer is situated in a gyroscopic viewing chair - to be able to move dynamically through 360-degree space. This is counterintuitive to the intended sense of being in the place of a blind person, who isn't craning their body to 'see' but we will discuss this further below. "Special attention was paid to using sound to "drive the images", explained Landia Egal, in order to replicate the world as experienced by Hull, who increasingly relied on the sounds around him.

Draw Me Close facilitates an ambulatory interaction as you move through the physical staging of the virtual environment. You have a virtual hand and when guided to touch objects represented virtually, these are accompanied by a tactile experience of relevant objects, and their accompanying sounds. A virtual female figure appears in front of you, open armed asking for a hug, as you move to respond, your real body is held in an embrace. You are handed a pen and taken to the floor whereupon you engage in some drawing together. Your physical movements and actions have a direct impact on the environment and although guided and controlled through the entire experience, there is a high degree of embodied agency and interactivity within this virtual world. This is form of personal one on one VR experience that has been experimented with by Circa69[5] - their The Cube project made use of the Oculus Rift to stage an experience that combined elements of theatre, film and games with the tropes of detective fiction. It is hard to imagine at this early stage how these intense one on one highly interactive experiences could be 'scaled-up' and made more widely available but they clearly work to demonstrate the possibilities of the technology to provide immersive intimate collaborative performances which engender complex emotional connection.

Experiential Qualities

The use of first person narrative and verbatim dialogue is productive of a strong sense of subjective involvement in these experiences. Whilst we have insisted that these experiences do not really succeed in placing you 'in the shoes' of the central subject there is a clear attempt to situate you 'as if' you were Hull in NOBID.. for instance where the narration of this viewpoint is used to orient you in the space, and in relation to what is being perceived. What is engineered through the qualities of immersion and presence is a subjectivity of implicated and present witnessing. To be immersed in the affective and embodied experience of blindness, to 'feel' the sensation of journeying across unfamiliar lands, to be subjected to the psychological trauma of confinement and to be an interactor in the domestic space and confronted with the traces of domestic violence, is made possible through these new techniques. Each experience engineers a sense of presence in an unfamiliar and hard to communicate or represent subjectivity or environment. Home: Aamir also puts us in the centre of the inhumane conditions of a refugee camp and makes us a witness to the refugees' treatment by the authorities, and their stigmatization. The experience humanizes the refugee crisis through a focus on the story of one individual, countering the mainstream media representation of the refugee as a news story that is illustrated by references to visual and aural descriptions of masses and crowds which potentially dehumanize and distance us from the crisis. It also facilitates a shared experience of the struggle for refuge, loss of home and displacement more fully, more completely and through this has the potential to generate more compassion for a displaced subject. 6 x 9 is about the dehumanizing experience of solitary confinement. NOBID... is also about the insistence of the human in conditions of disability or difference, as the narrator John Hull insists - " being human is not about seeing it is about loving". NOBID... engages us with and helps us comprehend blindness more fully, to apprehend it more directly in order to have empathy for the subject matter - blindness in general and the specific subject being presented/ represented - John Hull and blind people in general.

As described above, in NOBID: there are requirements placed on the experiencer by the interactive element that lead to a restriction of sensorium through privileging of a sonic or aural architecture over the complexity of visual input during the experience. The experience is reminiscent of Anna Anthropy's Dys4ia where the game mechanic is designed to produce frustration for instance, NOBID... shares elements of what appears to be deliberate discomfort, such that being angry and frustrated at the experience of NOBID... might be exactly the 'correct' affective response to what is being communicated, however limited the direct portrayal of blindness might be. The affect of dissonant and absent elements of cognition might be more important for this novel emergent form of communicative experience. You are not directly placed in the subjectivity of the blind person, since you are required to 'see' and visually acknowledge the objects that sonically manifest. You accompany Hull into the field, where his observations and reflections are both sonically constructed and visualized. Like Dys4ia, there is some degree of synergy between the experience being described - one of impaired cognition, of new limitations but also new affordances - to the experience of the VR headset and the aberrant structuring of the viewing experience. This is not an experience that you can enter and become one with, the body is required to be constantly moving, neck craning, spine twisting, sight obscured as you work to discern where to focus, what to perceive, what to attend. One point of interaction in NOBID.. for instance, requires intense looking accompanied by head shaking. It would be hard to imagine a more uncomfortable viewing experience - shaking your head whilst wearing the heavy headset and cumbersome headphones is extraordinarily unpleasant. However, there are moments of startling experiential dissonance, where the senses are at odds with each other and conflicting. Where the edges of the seated/gyrating/twisting body, are disrupted by the 'feelings' provoked by the visual and aural qualities of the experience.

Draw Me Close is distinct from the other three examples in several significant ways; it invokes a sense of co-presence in the way which IJsselstein and Riva have described: "a sense of being together in a shared space, combining significant characteristics of both physical and social presence" (2003: 5) or as Lombard and Ditton would describe as "social presence" which refers to the feeling of being together (1997). There is an additional sense of presence in the material and virtual space with whom you are not just witnessing but becoming another subject: in this case a 5-year old child. The experience engineers this shift in subjectivity whilst also invoking complex empathy for the 'mother' character who is your guide and collaborative performer in the intimate drama. It does not make use of first person testimony in the same way - but your 'child self' witnesses something of a performance of a version of a real dramatic event - the recounting of domestic violence. As a 'vivid memoir' it plays out the disappearance of the child's mother during the last moments before her death, the disappearance is literalised in the virtual space by the erasure of all elements of representation, leaving the 'child' at the centre of an isolating, horribly empty blank space. This experience produces profound feelings and responses from the participants which has been met by a modification of the experience such that you are given a period of time to adjust back to the real world.

Conclusion

In these examples (and in many more artistic endeavors currently being presented at Festivals around the world) the experiences anticipate the potential for these new technologies to extend our ability to empathise (McStay, 2018). These putative 'empathy machines' appear poised to enable us to embrace the other - across geographies, across social boundaries across very distinct physical experiences. "These experiments demonstrate the promise of using digital media technology to provide direct experiences that meaningfully engage individuals with environmental issues." (Ahn et al 2016:413) The current increase in the use of these devices in campaigning and experimental contexts to promote/provoke empathy with animals and nature where the affordances of the technologies are used to put us in to non-human animal and environmental 'bodies' (see iAnimal - https://ianimal360.com for an illustrative example of this) to facilitate a deeper engagement, greater sense of involvement and emotional investment preempts and assumes this artistic and aesthetic potential.

References

Ahn, S. J., Bostick, J., Ogle, E., Nowak, K., McGillicuddy, K., & Bailenson, J. N. (2016). Experiencing nature: Embodying animals in immersive virtual environments increases inclusion of nature in self and involvement with nature. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 21 399-419.

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Calleja, G. (2011). In-Game: Immersion to Incorporation. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Chen, N. (2016) The VR film that puts you in a blind man's world: Notes on Blindness' two directors talk through their work that combines documentary and virtual reality to portray the life of blind writer John Hull, Dazed Digital last accessed May 25, 2018 http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/31730/1/the-blind-themed-vr-film-changing-the-dimensions-of-cinema

Dennet, D. C. (1978) Brainstorms - Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Brighton, UK: Harvester Press.

Elsaesser, Thomas (2014) "Pushing the Contradictions of the Digital: 'Virtual Reality' and 'Interactive Narrative' as Oxymorons between Narrative and Gaming." New Review of Film and Television Studies 12 (3): 295-311.

Huhtamo, Erkki (2013) Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles, Mass. USA, MIT Press

IJsselstein, W. and Riva, G. (2003). 'Being There: The Experience of Presence in Mediated Environments', in: Ijsselstein, W. and Riva, G. (eds.): Being There: Concepts, Effects and Measurements of User Presence Synthetic Environments. Amsterdam: Ios Press, 3-16.

Lanier, J. (1999). Virtual Reality. Whole Earth Fall 1999. Retrieved January 6, 2008, from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_1999_Fall/ai_56457593

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Louchart, S. and Aylett, R. (2003) 'Towards a narrative theory of Virtual Reality', Virtual Reality, 7(1), p. pp 2-9

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McMahan, Alison.(2003). 'Immersion, Engagement, and Presence. A Method for Analyzing 3-D Video Games', in Wolf, J. P. and Perron, B. (eds.) The Video Game Theory Reader. London: Routledge, 81-97.

McStay, Andrew (2018) Emotional AI: The Rise of Empathic Media, London: Sage. Empathic Media: The Rise of Emotion AI - A report on findings and analysis of technologies that gauge emotions, perspective, intention, attention and intention Swindon: AHRC.

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Vanhoutte, Kurt et al., 'Being inside the image. Heightening the sense of presence in a video captured environment through artistic means: the case of CREW' in Spagnolli A. et al. (eds.), Presence 2008: proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Presence in Padova, Padova: Libraria Universitaria Padova, 2008, pp.159-62.

NOTES

[1] See for instance the programme at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2017, the Sheffield DocFest in June 2017 and June 2018.

[2] For example, The Cube (2015) by Circa69

[3] http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/dying-along-with-whitney-houston-at-the-future-of-storytelling-festival/

[4] Giddings and Kennedy (2008) evolved an influential methodology for analyzing gameplay as an event. In this work the researchers record their gameplay and a live simultaneous reflection on that gameplay as it takes place.

[5] (Circa69 2015) has been created with Amsterdam Film Academy and Brighton based Amoeba Design as an interactive oculus VR / Leap Motion transmedia VR show.

[1] Landia Egal, Producer of Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness, talk at Reframed: Interactive and Immersive Storytelling, Lighthouse, Brighton, 27th April 2017.

[2] In an interview with Atkinson, 15 th June 2016.

[3] In an interview with Atkinson, 15 th June 2016.

Sarah Atkinson is Head of Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King's College London and co-editor of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Sarah has published three books and numerous articles on the impacts of digital technologies on film & cinema audiences and film production practices. Sarah has undertaken extensive work into the Live Cinema economy and is currently working on a number of immersive media projects including a Virtual Reality diversity initiative, a project which explores artificial intelligence and conversational interactivity in games and 'XR Circus' which brings together circus artists with immersive technologists.

Helen W. Kennedy is Head of the School of Media at the University of Brighton, UK. Her current research interests are feminist interventions into games culture, experience design and cultural evaluation. She is currently Principle Investigator in an AHRC funded Immersive Experience Project - XR: CIRCUS. She has published widely in game studies and is Principle Investigator in an international project aimed at the wholescale diversification and transformation of games. (REFIG.ca).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Virtual Humanity: Empathy, Embodiment and Disorientation in Humanitarian VR Experience Design ~ Helen W. Kennedy & Sarah Atkinson

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Abstract: With 360-degree filmmaking and Virtual Reality (VR) - the audience can now be immersed in the milieu of the filmed location. Hitherto hard to reach territories, and hard to portray narratives can now be realised and experienced first hand - rendering new opportunities for empathetic, political and cultural engagement.

# data[].attributes.headline
A publication reflecting NT's digital work by Nesta

# data[].attributes.subject
A publication reflecting NT's digital work by Nesta

# data[].attributes.body
Logistic:

- Discussed details about the content of the presentation

a. Choose one or two of the national theatre, met Opera, and Royal House Opera that can be used to illustrate the corresponding issues as examples, paying attention to focus on the depth of the discussion;

b. Note our core point: how the challenge you are responsible for reflects the impact of digitalization on arts management;

c. Write down the resources used in your part.

- Divided the work:

a. Katharine is responsible for the Introduction and Conclusion sections, including the division of work among group members.

b. Laura and Haram are responsible for the Business model section.

c. Cher is responsible for the Audience engagement section.

d. Tiffany is responsible for the Capability section and the uploading of documents.

- Planned the next schedule

a. 11.23: Finish the draft and remember to control the length and time.

b. 11.27: Finish the basic PowerPoint of your part and then send it to Tiffany for integration.

c. 11.30: Rehearsal

d. 12.1-12.6: Choose a time to officially record the presentation.

For next week:

- Put the finished draft on our shared word document and exchange ideas about it.

# data[].attributes.body
11.23: Finish the draft and remember to control the length and time.

11.27: Finish the basic PowerPoint of your part and then send it to Tiffany for integration.

11.30: Rehearsal

12.1-12.6: Choose a time to officially record the presentation.

# data[].attributes.headline
Bullet Point Summary of Individual Roles and Responsibilities

# data[].attributes.subject
Bullet Point Summary of Individual Roles and Responsibilities

# data[].attributes.body
Presentation Allocation:
Introduction&Conclusion: Catherine
Financial problems caused by digitalization: Laura&Haram
Impact of digitalization on audience engagement: Cher
Capacity of performing arts practitioners: Tiffany

A group rota is set for recording our discussions: Laura➡️Cher➡️Catherine➡️Haram➡️Tiffany

Laura: set up weekly meeting links; resources; presentation draft; PowerPoint Template; PPT sections

Tiffany: set up the group Padlet; set up schedule; PPT integration work; submit the final presentation; resources; presentation draft; PowerPoint Template; PPT sections

Catherine: presentation recording; rehearsal schedule; resources; presentation draft; PPT sections

Cher: resources; presentation draft; PPT sections

Haram: resources; presentation draft; PPT sections