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

28. Has being involved in PBB had any effect on your thinking about
creative disciplines?
When I first came to folly from working at the biennial in Liverpool where I had
a very architectural hat on I was preaching architecture a lot in terms of ideas
for programmes. I had my own perspective of media arts practice as quite
limited and often I wasn’t hitting the mark and by being involved in this show
has enabled me to broaden my own personal perspective. I have always been
aware of creating shows that bring together lots of different disciplines and lots
of practitioners to create an overall look and feel. That’s what we tried to do
with PBB although it didn’t feel like a heavy thematic show. It had lightness to
it which I really liked. So I’ve benefited from having my eyes opened a little bit
more. We worked on inviting certain people to make proposals and if anything
we found that the more interesting work was coming out of the open call. I know
that you worked quite hard at getting certain people to make proposals in the
open call and that has influenced me in terms of how we are developing f.city for
2007. We will put out an open call for existing works. At the moment we are
very much working on relationships and developing relationships with
practitioners - that’s the key influence, these are people that we want to work
with. We are aware of their work we like their work and we would like to
develop a project with them so we are working together in terms of developing a
proposal rather than saying here’s two grand what can you do for that which is
where we may have gone wrong in some respects. That approach worked in
different ways for different people and the relationships I maintained during the
development phase were quite different from those four practitioners. One was
very hands off, one was almost completely occupying our time, one was almost
veiled in secrecy and then the other one were just complete chancers - we had to
rein them in all the time they tried to fiddle the VAT and things like that. I’m
conscious in the way it’s influenced me by trying to develop a relationship with
people I don’t know. They feel confidant and happy and it’s like they hold you in
esteem to actually develop a good project and that’s as much as providing
people with good opportunities. The kind of opportunities that you provide
people is not about what point in their career they are it’s about providing a
good quality of opportunity and helping them to understand that. Working on
PBB has informed the way in which we introduced velocity which is the next
- 464 -