Down and Nowt in Darlington – But Not Out

Posted on by atomheartfather

Rufus T. Firefly: And now, members of the cabinet…
[pounds gavel]
Rufus T. Firefly: we’ll take up old business.
Cabinet Member: I wish to discuss the tariff.
Rufus T. Firefly: Sit down, that’s new business. No old business? Very well…
[pounds gavel]
Rufus T. Firefly: we’ll take up new business.
Cabinet Member: Now, about that tariff…
Rufus T. Firefly: Too late, that’s old business already. Sit down.

- Duck Soup, The Marx Brothers (1933)

As this post goes out, Darlington Borough Council’s Cabinet is assembling to rubber stamp a decision to end all funding for Darlington Media Group after 30 years of service to the town. Never mind that the decision has been delivered just weeks before it is due (on March 31st) to take effect, and that precious little notice is being given. DMG has become accustomed over the years to “plans” suddenly becoming “old business”. In a previous post about the council cuts, I explained how in the past, measures of our performance were simply forgotten about. I also expressed doubts about the likelihood of a Third Sector-led resurgence of the arts, given the local authority’s history of working towards a corporatist-inspired enabling council. Today’s decision confirms these doubts.

Darlington Media Group is now being asked to deliver an arts offer to the town without any financial support and without a roof over its head. Last year we recorded over 25,000 unique visits to a workshop designed for participation in the arts. We established a strong core of skilled volunteer support for an unprecedented programme of media and visual arts education, production and exhibition. Regular users of the workshop observed that it has never before been so busy. With such deep and active involvement from members of the community, and plans for a new Arts Vision aimed at strategically involving DMG, we submitted our plans for the next three years, confident that they resonated with the new reality. Apparently not. Hmm..

How has this come about? One glance at the list of organisations that have been offered funding, and how they have scored against the funding criteria, reveals the thinking behind the “third sector strategic grant” fund. Top of the score list is First Stop, the drop-in centre on Tubwell Row for anyone in need, mainly homeless people and young people. A close second is the local Citizen’s Advice Bureau, the service that helps people resolve their legal, money and other problems. These and the other organisations that received funding do sterling work in the town. But their role is primarily problem solving, helping victims of our grossly and increasingly unequal society. This hardly chimes with the kinds of aims against which applications were supposedly judged; helping people in Darlington become healthy, educated, skilled and financially secure, building more resilient and self-sufficient communities, making Darlington an ambitious and entrepreneurial place, and so on.

Much of this sort of language is of course spin. Accentuating the positives was always going to be a key role for an aspirational document like One Darlington, Perfectly Placed. But its use as a measure for this particular funding stream was misplaced. Clearly, there is vital work to be done in the town supporting those who are most vulnerable to the cruel economic policies of neo-liberalism as delivered in the UK today, work which DMG is involved with on a daily basis. By default, the Third Sector Strategic Grant Fund, the grand title for the fund that has supported our work these thirty years, has become a crisis fund. Hmm….

So the question still remains. Can the local authority really engage creatively with a willing independent arts sector to deliver the Vision for the Arts? DMG set out its vision of how this could work in our submission to the Arts Enquiry process. If there are to be cuts in public spending, and money has to be saved, facilities should be handed over to independent arts and community organisations with the capacity to renew and improve infrastructure through sweat equity as well as direct finance.  In return, the town should expect an arts offer that proves popular and inspiring in equal measure. The model is, after all, widely practiced around the world. Berlin renewed many of its old tenements in the 1980s by giving squatters tenancy rights.  More recently, Czech photography gallery Galerie 4, who led us to the author of our current photography exhibition, has been handed an old monastery building for a peppercorn rent by their local authority.

Darlington has the old building – Darlington Arts Centre. And it has the strong and willing independent arts movement in Darlington for Culture. DfC’s recent work in attracting enthusiastic crowds to the Arts Centre should surely give the local authority pause for thought when they decide on the wider fate of the arts. If DMG is to have its grant cut, we could still make a go of it in a DfC-run Arts Centre.

But the signs are not good. The official response to DfC’s plans has been lukewarm to say the least, with doubts about viability, concern about risks, and the lack of DfC “professionalism”. Instead, DBC are currently putting their faith in their grand plans for a new arts hub, to be built with the expected proceeds of the sale of the Arts Centre. A low risk strategy? No chance of the Arts Centre building remaining unsold?  Or of further new cuts to council spending as a double-dip recession blows the bottom out of the government’s plans? Are these perhaps the kinds of risks that should be better addressed?

Herein lies the nub. Self-management, as a means of making financial savings, involves cutting waste at the top, by reducing management overheads. But this also means less paperwork, less hierarchy, less league tables, less point scoring, less lines of accountability. Self-managed groups are handed the tools for the job and given a set time to deliver. If they don’t deliver, the tools are taken away. That’s it. DBC’s ability to work this way has been consistently eroded over the last 20 years. With a combination of New Labour corporatism and Conservative lack of imagination, giving power to the community has become a risk too far. We now face the appalling prospect of faith being put in the very systems of governance that delivered this financial crisis in the first place, rather than a genuine alternative that can harness the energies and abilities of community.

Perhaps it is ironic then, that One Darlington, Perfectly Placed has at least given the town one national gong - the PRIMO (Public Risk Management) Europe Strategic Risk Management Award 2009. But then we are now living in a Never Never Land, where the government’s privatised job-seekers service believes that unemployment is primarily due to individual failure rather than a lack of jobs. Why not also argue, as PRIMO  do, that risk management reduces crime and increases cycling in Darlington.

Darlington Arts Centre to Close – Official

Posted on by atomheartfather

Today Darlington Borough Council announced it’s intention to close Darlington Arts Centre, the home of Darlington Media Group for 30 years. The buildings are to be sold to a developer, who is likely to want to demolish them and exploit the high value West End residential land. However, as part of the West End Conservation Area, this may prove difficult. The Arts Centre will continue in operation until July 2012, when it will close for good.

In an email to users the council said:

Recent information suggests that there is serious interest from companies who would buy the Arts Centre building..All the models for continuing with the existing Arts Centre building still required subsidy at a level the Council could not afford and work to the building for which no funding source had been identified, and also had other unsolved practical problems.

However, the council plans to reinvest any proceeds from the sale in a new arts hub:

There is ..an opportunity to create a new arts hub in the town centre, more accessible to all sections of the community than the existing Arts Centre, broadening participation in the arts, with lower operating costs and so a more sustainable long-term future.

Meanwhile, DMG, along with a number of other arts organisations, will need to find a new home in the town. The 6th Form College, a major user of the site, is said to be developing new facilities on it’s own land to replace space rented from the arts centre. But others like the Open Arts Studio and DMG itself, will need to find an alternative venue until any new arts venue has been built.

What Future? We Are Very Small Fish

Posted on by atomheartfather

The Media Group has, by any standards, had a pretty successful few years. In that time, we have more than doubled the number of people engaged in Media Group activities, both in the Media Workshop and in community projects around the town. To achieve this, we have more than doubled our turnover, on a reduced grant from the local authority. As we deliver such things as exhibition programmes, courses, and productions in which local people can take part and learn, we have always argued that this small annual grant of £15,000 represents excellent value for money for the council, not least because the programme is delivered by enthusiastic practictioners, professional and amateur together.

The Media Group is run by its users. A voluntary association since 1983, we voted at our 2010 Annual General Meeting to become a full legal entity, a multi-stakeholder cooperative. In future the Group will be run by its users AND its workers.

But all of this is just candy floss when it comes to the crisis now facing the arts in Darlington. After a funding agreement that was supposedly going to “measure our performance” against these user and finance targets, the debate has simply moved on to the world of drastic spending cuts. Just as decisions are about to be made about the future of the arts in Darlington, it is worth standing back for a few moments to consider why we have come to the situation we are in.

A little remembered speech by David Laws during his brief tenure of the post of Chief Secretary of the Treasury in May included the following:

“Unless we send out this sort of shock wave through Government departments to say ‘You can’t spend on all these areas’, that they are not actually priorities, we won’t get the step change in behaviour we expect.”

Shock is a well-worn tactic for those who would like to see less state activity and more privatisation. It is eloquently detailed by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine. The idea is to shock local decision makers and people alike into accepting drastic changes, “step changes” in their lives. This doctrine was handed down to local authorities like Darlington with the news of a whopping 28% cut in their central government funding. The message was clear – the state will play a much-reduced role in future. But crucially, the debate about the alternative has been going on in government circles, local and national, for a number of years. Officers at the Town Hall have been quietly working on the so-called “enabling council” model for some time, with reorganisation already well down the road.

So when the 28% cut in local government grant was announced, the underlying message was clear – speed up the moves towards an enabling council. Darlington’s Labour councillors are indeed genuinely shocked, and it is understandable that they feel the need for urgency in resolving the problem. So the decision to drop nearly all arts spend was indeed done in a state of panic. A Labour council has stated its priorities – to defend the weakest in our town – and “luxuries” like the arts need to go. Fortunately for the council, Darlington for Culture has stepped in, and is now busy trying to put together a plan to save the Arts Centre. And a key aspect of that plan is the Cultural Parliament, which offers a democratic way of involving local people and local artists in running the programme at the Arts Centre. Sound familiar? Yes, the Media Group model. And DMG has been approached to be involved. But we openly wonder whether this is really the model that local councillors will support, after years of rubbing shoulders with the “enabling council” people. Is the Cultural Parliament a democratic idea too far? Watch this space.

Beauty and the Bike becomes an international brand

Posted on by jasonberge
The scene – a mass cycle ride in the Czech capital, Prague. I’m filming from the back seat of a cargo bike as other participants ride along with me. Suddenly one cyclist comes up to the camera. He recognises me from the screening of our film a few days ago in a city centre cinema.
“Maybe next time in Darlington”, he declares with a strong continental accent and a broad grin on his face. The thought of these 4,000 or so cyclists riding through our small town certainly stirs the soul.
Taking Darlington Media Group’s iconic film about stylish cycling, shot in the north east town and in Bremen, Germany, around Europe, has been a humbling experience. since it’s premiere in December 2009, the film has been screened in towns and cities around the world, from New Zealand to Canada with a fair chunk of Europe in between. It has been translated into Spanish, German, Portuguese and Czech. It’s YouTube site has now had over 100,000 views.
Every week there seems to be another screening being organised by local cycling advocates, conference organisers or transport experts. Last week was the Newcastle Bicycle Festival. Next week it will be the Cheltenham Cycling Campaign. Outdoor public screenings have been organised in Australia and Berlin, activists in Vancouver organised a screening of the film for local councillors, whilst others in New Zealand showed the film to the country’s Green Party. Transition Towns, a worldwide community project which aims to equip towns with the means to deal with climate change and peak oil, have introduced transport solutions via the film.
Interestingly, this global enthusiasm for the Darlington film is very much grass roots. It’s message is perhaps too honest – it identifies both the joy of fashionable cycling and the lamentably inadequate cycle infrastructure that such cyclists are expected to tolerate – for official establishment agencies, whose primary media approach requires spin and marketing. A glance at the project’s Facebook page reveals the global reach that Beauty and the Bike has achieved, and the kinds of grass roots groups that connect with it’s message. The world is indeed a global village.
Beauty and the Bike has not made it to many mainstream film festivals. But in October it won the public prize for best film at the distinctly grassroots 2011 International Cycling Film Festival in Germany. The festival is organised by local cycling activists in and around the German Ruhr Valley, an area not particularly renowned for the quality of its cycling infrastructure.
The core work of the Media Group continues to be to provide low cost access to media facilities and skills for the people of Darlington, and with over 25,000 visits in the last year it has never been as effective as it is today. Perhaps the worldwide recognition afforded to Beauty and the Bike will inspire some of these future film-makers.

Here Comes Everybody’s Art?

Posted on by atomheartfather
For the last hundred years the big organisational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market. This debate was based on the universal and unspoken supposition that people couldn’t simply self-assemble; the choice between markets and managed effort assumed there was simply no third alternative. Now there is.

- Clay Shirky. Here Comes Everybody 2008

An intriguing convergence of circumstances is taking place in Darlington. After 30 years of council-managed arts, our local authority, in the face of devastating cuts to its central government grant, has been forced to consider new ways for the town’s arts programme to be delivered.

Under typical circumstances, this might have meant privatisation of the service. But the cuts are so deep that it is likely that the council will no longer be delivering any arts service of its own. The usual private sector strategy of cutting wages and working hours to reduce costs won’t wash when there are no wages to cut in the first place.

In the face of such a devastating scenario, the local community’s response has been to set up  Darlington for Culture, which is now coordinating its first programme of art in the Arts Centre (and of which DMG is part). In parallel, the Darlington Arts Enquiry has discovered, amongst other things that, beyond the council’s offer, there is a rich vein of arts programming going on in the town. In fact, DMG has been arguing for a number of years that this multiplicity of arts organisations is a positive asset that should be recognised and championed. Resistance to this idea is not difficult to explain. Arts funding is competitive. Employment within the arts sector – including within the council – is strictly in the interests of the employing organisation.

We’ve experienced this first hand for years, of course. The arts centre’s programmes of exhibitions, including in our own Decisive Moment Gallery, has still not be coherently presented to the Darlington public, whether in published programme material or at the Arts Centre reception. Rather, good personal relations with particular staff has enabled cooperation to emerge from time to time, despite contrary institutional demands. But if the arts are to have any future in Darlington, cooperation amongst arts organisations will now have to replace this structural tendency towards competition.

There are many problems now facing the arts in Darlington. But with one at least, DMG is perhaps in a good position to help develop a solution. Marketing the arts in Darlington has so far been a matter of individual organisations marketing themselves. Even worthy, and well-funded, attempts at umbrella marketing like Visit Tees Valley fail to capture even a sliver of the breadth of arts activity in the town. Here is where the next converging circumstance is pushing for change in the way we do things.

Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody explains how social media is enabling, at little or no cost, information sharing, and how with the minimum of effort this can be developed into cooperation. With these ideas in mind, DMG has put together a proposal for a mobile app called Around Town, designed to pull together the broad range of arts activity in the town and deliver information about it on a single platform. Around Town is a work in progress – it is currently the focus of an application to the Arts Council’s Digital R&D Fund (along with over 1,000 other applicants, it should be said).

Social media is still in its early stages. Examples already exist in the town of information sharing using social media, but there is still a way to go. Perhaps most importantly, content needs to be available to be shared in the first place. For this reason, DMG is placing an emphasis on our role as content creators in this pilot project. But as more people produce more content in the town, the idea of “art” in Darlington could soon be transformed.  But for now, here is our Around Town proposal.

 

100,000 Upload Views and Counting

Posted on by atomheartfather

Darlington Media Group’s recent documentary project Beauty and the Bike has received its 100,000th view this week on the project’s YouTube Channel. Less than two years after the launch of the project online, the 8 minute online version has been viewed around 78,000 times, whilst other shorts relating to the development of the project have been viewed over 22,000 times.

The 8 minute film is now available on YouTube with Czech, Portuguese, Spanish, English and German subtitles, and the geographical spread of viewers is growing as a result. Around 22% of viewings have taken place in the UK, 15% in North America, and 12% in Australasia. The remaining 50% of viewings are spread across a wide range of countries, with Germany leading on 6%, but others such as the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Singapore each registering thousands of hits.

Meanwhile, the full film, available on DVD from the project website, continues to be publicly screened in venues from Vancouver in Canada to Perth in Australia to Newcastle here in the UK. A recent screening in Prague was followed by a Critical Mass Ride in which numerous participants spoke of Darlington and its cult film.

Bookings now being taken for courses

Posted on by jasonberge

The following courses commence the week beginning Monday September 12th:

The Art of Photography

Digital Photography for Beginners

Digital Photos –Reworked

Shooting &Editing Techniques

Advanced Shooting &Editing Techniques

For more information please call (01325) 488 139

Check the Courses Calendar for up to date details on courses and other activities being run at the Media Workshop

All DMG courses run as a rolling programme –you can join anytime!

Courses on Demand

As well as our advertised courses DMG tutors have a wide range of photography and digital media skills which means we can meet most training needs from entry level to advanced –if you have a group that is interested,ideally six people,give us a ring.

For more information on our course run in partnership with the Arts Centre  (01325) 486 555 or visit Darlington Arts Centre