John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

17.0 Appendix IX: Programme Manager interview
1. Can you briefly explain folly’s mission?
folly’s mission is an ever evolving mission, principally we have a distributed
programme across Lancashire, Cumbria and on line. We will eventually have a
venue back in 2008. So that then delivering a gallery based programme - but
this is quite an exciting time for us working with different partners and places
and spaces than we normally would when we had a much, much smaller venue
in Castle Park.
2. Can you briefly state what you do at folly?
I am the Programme Manager, I started being responsible for all the public
facing aspects of our programme but that’s another slightly different staffing
structure. I look after what’s called the f.present programme and that includes
all of our exhibitions and things like film nights, etc. and festivals.
3. How did you think PBB would support folly’s mission?
I came from an architecture, design and a visual arts background and essentially
media arts practice was relatively new to me so I very much saw it as a way in
which folly’s remit could be expanded upon. I was aware that media arts
practice was evolving itself particularly in terms of object based practice and
device based practice and this seemed to be a perfect opportunity to actually
enable folly to see that too. It wasn’t necessarily seeing it automatically. It had
a much defined view of media arts practice and I think at the time I was wanting
folly to experience something slightly different. PBB enabled us to do that and I
hope it has a lasting impact. Although I am aware that within our own
organisation I might pick a piece of work from the show which I thought was
really great and someone else might say that is one of the a poorest pieces of
work. There is quite a bit of not confusion or contrast or contradictions there
but I wanted folly to embrace particularly a design agenda that I thought was
something that has been slightly lacking in media arts practice. You work with
such cool tech invariably there is lots of cool design going on too and we are
involved with various different projects related to design particularly our touch
screen network project which is far more about network devices and the ability
of network devices for tangible user interfaces and how they are designed is the
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