The best laid plans…

Along with everyone else we know, MSL has had to adapt as quickly as possible to a changed world. In a short few weeks, the time it took to take Covid-19 seriously, we have been able to launch Dot Dash, a significant six-month programme from what was proposed as four distinct projects.

When we devised the title we meant it to refer to the pattern of using dots to denote the top-level ideas of a storyline and dashes the supporting ideas. The irony is now that it may also refer to the dot-dot-dot-dash-dash-dash- dot-dot-dot of the morse code distress signal.

Most of Dot Dash will be presented virtually on various platforms. Some of it will be digitally live and interactive. And, who-knows-fingers-crossed, actual.

Digital roots

We planned some of this, of course. In 2018 my colleague Jon Pratty, posed the question ‘Can arts and heritage digital projects tackle deprivation in Hastings?’ We were – are – working on the creation of a ‘digital exchange’ that would make use of the town’s free WiFi to develop audience, business engagement and tourism benefit. It had taken almost four years to creep it forward, but lately we’d been making considerable headway.

We’d launched a prototype interactive map in September last year to showcase three original artist commissions that could be accessed from the town centre streets via mobile devices. This in an area known variously as the Trinity Triangle or America Ground, a critical few metres off the main pedestrian routes along the seafront and consequently in an economically, socially and physically blighted part of Hastings. We’d hosted a conference in the same month. ‘Is This For Everyone?’ posed some of the bigger questions about the social value of connectivity (and the answer was ‘yes’). We were also part of the four-year Trinity Triangle Heritage Action Zone (HAZ) programme about to kick off… this April.

Funding for a suite of projects was providing fresh commissions for a mix of creatives. Our programme was planned to roll out with a preview of a new work by artist-in-residence Chris Thorpe-Tracey at a lovely venue, Opus, for which we were about to sign a contract. A callout for commissions for others to respond to Chris’ work, adding to the Map, would follow. Alongside this we had R&D funding for another new work by Rosanna Lowe working with our long-time researcher/writer, Julie Gidlow, beginning a process of exploration for a street-focused event in late July.

It was intended that that event would provide us with the opportunity to realise a baseline audience measure, including a footfall count utilising the WiFi capabilities of current audience and business activity, so that we could track the impact of the HAZ over the four years.

We knew what we were going to do, so what’s the same and what’s different now?

Rapid response

Although we’re losing some money as a result of some higher overheads we are not in a bad place in the short-term as so much of our output was designed for digital platforms. We managed to get enough IT out of the office before we were locked out. To help with the finances we’ve applied for the Business Rates Grant and we’re applying for the Arts Council’s Emergency Covid 19 grant.

Thanks to the grants we can pay our artists, marketing and technical teams. And we’ve already re-configured some of our thinking about delivery and about communication. We’re making use of Zoom to meet virtually and manage live workshops, and YouTube, the Map and website to showcase the work. Our artists are already thinking about relating their new works to this new environment we’re in.

We need to work out how to compete for a different audience in what is rapidly becoming a virtual space but we’d been thinking about that already. And, importantly, how to deal with that audience, probably bigger, now wider-spread and isolated from us and from one another.

Re-directing some of our funding we’ve refreshed the Map design and are uploading recently finished works and looking ahead to staging ‘live’ events.

We know that we can count our audiences by means of website and social media hits. We’ll devise audience surveys as planned and can plug into The Audience Agency’s Audience Finder and see how they link into the arts/cultural knowledge base.

Real losses and unknown territory

The real losses are elsewhere. Regrettably we cancelled the booking at Opus, without penalty to us but leaving the managers without the fee that they might have had. We’ve had to pause the idea of the event in the Trinity Triangle in July.

But we can’t take the work onto the streets for some time. And we don’t know yet whether the small businesses we wanted to draw audiences into (the cafes and restaurants, bookshop, library, the Opus) will be able to re-open or whether the visitors we wanted to divert into the Triangle will come back.

We do know that we will be able to easily establish a terrible negative as a baseline measure for the value of the HAZ programming. There’s virtually no footfall there at present. The lockdown has effectively caused a reset of the count of audiences for arts and heritage, for business activity and tourism.

While the impact on us in the short-term is not so bad, because of the wider disruption of the arts funding ecology we might well not make it into the autumn as the crisis has left us in a landscape that we don’t yet understand and our plans and business model somewhat scattered.

It’s not a bad analogy: the Great Storms of 1287 inundated what had been a harbour and is now the Trinity Triangle with sediment, devastating livelihoods, destroying the local economy and sending William the Conqueror’s great castle crashing down the cliff face. It took nearly 500 years for the area to begin grow again. We’ll be trying to see what we can do in six months.

Margaret Sheehy is Director of MSL
http://www.mslprojects.co.uk/
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