Overview of Cultural Engagement

The Mobile Muse Project was designed to be an innovative approach to providing cell phone innovation to different target audiences.  The project that I worked on was the Cultural Outreach, where we looked at involving cultural groups with using innovating cell phone technology.  The inspiration for the project was to engage community culture groups in working with innovative technology to further their own strategic and tactical goals in delivering their services, productions, and other artistic practices to the general community at large.  The different aspects of the project involved connecting and engaging community cultural groups, understanding their requirements and then providing a potential project partner from Mobile Muse’ different network partners and see through the project through implementation to delivery. 

The value of innovation to arts organizations is clearly understood.  Many Vancouver and B.C. based arts organizations regularly engage in different kinds of innovation.  For example, in the dance and theatre world the use of high technology to augment performances is well understood.  However, in terms of research value, what is less understood is the impact of how arts companies can embrace mobile technology and from that point of view find a useful aspect to engage and excite their potential audiences. 

One of the important things that we quickly realized was that there were two opportunities using mobile technology with arts organizations.  The first being that we could use the technology in a performance or production.  The second was to use mobile technology to promote, market and engage audiences that could potentially come to a particular event.  Because this project started in the Fall of 2006, we quickly realized that many of the arts organizations needed to get an earlier start were they to actually include a particular mobile technology within the context of a performance.  For example, using site specific technology in a performance for a dance or theatre would involve approaching an arts organization at last a year ahead of a production to fully have the potential realized.  Therefore, we realized that the best approach would be to engage the arts community groups by using the technology to promote and engage audiences.

We started concentrating on arts organizations that had specific events that were occurring in two time frame windows. The first being in the Fall until the end of December, and the second being in January until the end of March.  This did restrict some of the ability for the project to engage arts organizations that had projects outside those two windows; however, we felt that was a fair tradeoff given the fiscal realities of the year end occurring on March 31^st.  Furthermore, we were unsure as to whether some of the technology would continue to be supported without funding post March 31^st. 

The next stage was then to generate a list through research of all of the arts organizations that had activities within those two windows and then to develop a short list after an initial outreach.  This was completed and we had a good list of groups and potential interesting parties ready to attend informational meetings.  The other aspect was to find the correct network partners within Mobile Muse to work with potential arts organizations. 

We looked at a number of them but settled on PocketCINE and Ubiquity Interactive.  PocketCINE was an organization that had allowed mobile video to be displayed from a mobile phone and Ubiquity Interactive had a project had MetroCode, which allowed for a kind of talking yellow pages to be accessed from a mobile phone.  We conducted two informational meetings in November that allowed a number of arts organizations to come together and hear the opportunities and to see presentations from both organizations around their technologies.  From that, a further short list was generated and agreements were delivered and hammered out between the arts organizations and the different network partners in order to see through the implementation.