The Stage

Edinburgh festivals launch £300K digital development plan

Published Monday 19 July 2010 at 13:16 by Thom Dibdin

A “Geek-in-Residence” is to be appointed by Festivals Edinburgh, as part of a two year, £300,000 project to harness and lead new digital developments for the benefit of its twelve member festivals, their audiences and participants.

The Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab is headed by Rohan Gunatillake and funded by Creative Scotland’s National Lottery Fund. It aims to be an enabling project, which will help the different festivals to work with technologists, artists, audiences and digital communities. The purpose of such collaborations will be to develop and create prototype digital and technological tools that can improve the festival experience for audiences and participants.

It will tackle themes such as helping festival audiences make the most of their experiences, artists rights for participants in the digital age, new ways of distributing festival content and making the festivals greener.

Announcing the new project, Faith Liddel, director of Festivals Edinburgh, said: “It is about specific business challenges for us such as navigating the festivals for audiences, increasing awareness of the festivals - nationally and international - and increasing the number of shows and spend that our audiences have. We commissioned Rohan to investigate and imagine what we might do to meet these challenges in the field of technology and innovation.”

The Geek-in-Residence role is expected to be that of an interpreter between the artistic and digital communities, according to Gunatillake. “In the same way an artist in residence is not necessarily a full-time position, it is more a connection between the wider parts of digital networks to the festivals lab. They are a channel for more ideas.

“Some ideas will be developed in house. Some ideas there might be partners who are just looking for a space or a set of users with which to develop the project, so they might be ready made projects that just use the festivals to partner up with. There is quite a range of different ways that projects can be developed.”

The Innovation Lab moves forward from such existing ideas as the geographical-based listings iPhone app piloted in 2009. It will also look at ways of using the data amassed by box office systems for the festivals like the fringe, as well as looking at how technological advances will effect participants.

Martin Reynolds of Festivals Edinburgh told The Stage: “A challenge for the festivals, and a real ambition for the festivals, is to engage with new or faraway audiences and extend their virtual capacity, so we need to distribute content. So how do we do that? How do we work with artists and companies to ensure that all the rights frameworks around bringing a show to the festival are robust. One specific project within the Innovation Lab will be working with companies, artists and lawyers to come up with some new ideas there - as opposed to barriers.”