72. The delayed 2021 roundup
It turns out that 2021 was a pretty terrible year all round. I know you almost certainly had and awful one too. But I’ve been doing annual round ups each year for a long time so here goes.
Not everything is work
At the office (or the ‘home office’) we finally launched the New Thing. The opening went well and the work won a stack of awards (and continues to do so). Everyone involved was simultaneously excited and exhausted. Katrina, our CEO, who comes from the world of arts festivals and knew that a ‘festival hangover’ was coming. As a result there was institutional acknowledgment of post launch exhaustion - perhaps lessening the blow. Of course we didn’t just launch the New Thing, many years in the planning, but several other unplanned Pandemic New Things too.
The buzz that usually comes from taking friends, colleagues, and guests through a New Thing was massively tempered by travel bans, lockdowns and everything else 2021 threw at us. In fact, Melbourne went into a short-ish lockdown just two days after we launched! In the absence of that buzz there was a kind-of 'continuous effervescent fizz'.
Conferences were remotely spoken at, remote video tours were given to various international organizations who wanted to know what it was like - knowing that travel to come and see it was not going to be possible. Even Sue, our amazing project manager didn’t get to see the results of her work - she returned to NZ before we opened. And two of the software developers who worked on it, Simon and Ali, relocated interstate and still haven’t been able to return to see the results of their in-gallery work. Not to mention all our fantastic overseas collaborators.
Nevertheless it has been good work. It achieved much of what we set out to do - even with the curveballs of the pandemic. The underlying thinking has proven to be sound and the execution has been flexible enough thus far to stretch and bend as needs and contexts have changed.
And it still heartening to pop over from the home/office to the galleries and see different people enjoying them. The unfiltered nature of Google Reviews have also been positive, and they sits nicely alongside formal audience research results.
Much of the work was ‘infrastructural’ - hard infrastructure like the building and networks and capital investments in new technology; but also soft infrastructure like the new brand, skills and processes, new curatorial practices, and even content specific changes like a more risk tolerant approach to combinatorial uses of third party IP. The latter you can see in the success of the 'interactive movie quote fridge poetry' of the Edit Line, as well as the way in which the Constellation draws upon works not in ACMI's collection. There’s also been the collections-related software emulation work that continues under the auspices of two Australian Research Council Linkage projects. All of that will hopefully support future public output and institutional capacity - maybe even while it still remains somewhat novel in the Australian sector. With the first audience evaluations coming through, we can also see that it has attracted a broader and more diverse local audience - necessary in any circumstance, but even more so when your national borders have been closed for so long.
My colleagues and everyone at ACMI should be super proud of what was achieved.
The other notable work thing for me this year was the development and launch of the CEO Digital Mentoring program. It was almost a 'New York-style' birth of the program, being initially sparked from a casual coffee catch up with an inquisitive and generous funder. The implementation of the program was hugely affected by lockdowns but has shifted the nature and tone of conversations around technology as it intended to do. I enjoy doing these sorts of programs and getting the chance to have extended chats with smart people! The cross-sector/art form nature of the mentoring program was probably its greatest weakness - but hopefully it's long term strength. Asking arts leaders to think outside of the specificities of their organization, their practice, and look for commonalities and shared opportunities elsewhere or in adjacent fields was always going to be hard. The immediate needs of their institutions and turbulence of the pandemic made that much harder. On the otherhand, looking outwards always reveals opportunities for innovation.
What the program confirmed for me is that there’s still a huge gulf in the non-profit cultural sector (and elsewhere) of skills and novel thinking for moving beyond the old 20th century ways of (and reasons for) doing and being. Part of that is the result of chronic underinvestment in the sector over many decades - it’s hard to find the energy to change when you are in constant crisis. Even the pandemic, whilst accelerating societal change, hasn’t yet led to significant progressive structural changes - despite what we might have hoped for in the early days..
Most people who know me know I’m impatient with social change. But there’s been a lot of change. And in a short period of time. And that’s not even counting pandemic change. People are tired. There’s change fatigue across all organisations.
Work adjacent
2021 was the year I was convinced to take up the presidency of AMaGA, the Australian Museum and Galleries Association. In the past I have spent my tiny slice of spare time on being a board member of various organizations in the past going right back to MusicNSW almost 20 years ago and it seened right to give AMaGA a go. Sadly, I had to step down from the board of Diversity Arts Australia in order to free up capacity which was a shame.
Because of the timing of one of Melbourne’s lockdowns - kicking off just as I was about to depart for the 2021 annual AMAGA conference - I don’t really feel like the role has really properly begun. The new National Council has only met over Zoom and it took until December for me to catch up in person with Katie Russell, AMaGA’s also-newish Director. In many ways this has been challenging but also liberating. A national networked membership organization should benefit from an equally networked leadership structure, right?
The 2022 AMaGA conference will probably be the biggest visible change - and I’m glad that it has been able to take the leap into an ongoing hybrid model. From the outside it often feels silly that so many conferences have snapped back to the old ‘in-person’ formats - but from the inside the economics of conferences are really weighted towards the in-person and unless you are willing to take some sizeable revenue risks then I understand why it’s hard to forge a new path. The new path of hybrid needs significantly larger numbers of sign ups, all of whom will pay less, and probably will attend fewer sessions at the same time.
Funders and sponsors haven’t figured out what that means for their success metrics - although it makes a lot more sense on paper to stick your logo on the front of a video that will be watched online by 10,000 people over a year than briefly appear in a lecture theatre for a few seconds, once, in front of 300 people - and appear in a printed program that even fewer people read once. And of course, government tourism agencies like to fund activities that will bring people across borders and into hotel beds much more than streamed events that generate no ancillary civic spend.
Even though I stepped down from Diversity Arts Australia, I remained on the boards of Art Science Museum in Singapore and the soon-to-open National Communications Museum in Melbourne. Periodically hearing how ASM has weathered the pandemic in Singapore provided a valuable barometer for my own experiences, along with hearing, every few months, from the activities of others on the advisory board scattered across US and Europe was always envigorating. The very last overseas trip I made was to ASM at the start of 2020, and I was really disappointed not to have gotten the chance to see ASM’s Orchestral Manouevers exhibition of sound art. ASM’s very different funding model - a private museum as part of the Marina Bay Sands resort - has also provided a useful conceptual counterweight to how I think about what a museum ‘can’ do. I’ve found ASM’s programming and practices, under the directorship of Honor Harger often more progressive, activist, and experimental than publicly funded institutions elsewhere. ASM has found a way for that approach to be very compatible with ticket revenue too.
The NCM is a different beast. A small museum that has some really bold plans, it is emerging from a volunteer-based collection organisation into a public-facing exhibition and educational attraction. The ambition is big and what is really interesting is how much more agile they can be as a small institution with ‘just enough’ capital funding to make a transformational new beginning. I also love being able to share my experiences at ‘planning the opening of new things’ with them.
The work
Just before ACMI opened in February I woke up with about 90% hearing loss in my right ear. It was sudden and unexpected. I went to the GP and got immediately diagnosed with an apparently quite common but mysterious thing called ‘sudden sensorineural hearing loss’. I was immediately prescribed some drugs with a side effect warning of ‘may cause inappropriate happiness’ - probably the sole source of mirth at the time. I spent the next few weeks in and out of the University of Melbourne hearing clinic being prodded and tested by student audiologists. Many graphs of the frequency response of my ears were generated. There’s no known ‘cause’ for SSNS but it is thought to be associated with stress and a lowered immune system. Opening a new iteration of a museum in a pandemic probably had a fair bit to do with it.
Music listening became awful and I had to sit on the right hand side of everyone to hear them properly - it wasn’t all frequencies that were gone but just most of the 500hz to 3.5khz range. Think of that as most of the piano keyboard from the bottom 1/3 to the highest notes. It took about 10 weeks for some of that hearing range to slowly come back. Long enough to start getting mired in the depressing thought patterns of ‘what if it doesn’t come back?’.
Now, 12 months later, headphones sound almost properly balanced between left and right ears now and the lingering tinnitus is not that much worse than that from decades of DJing and going to gigs with body shaking soundsystems. Most of the frequencies are back. Pro tip, if you wake up with sudden hearing loss in one ear, don’t hesitate but get to a doctor so you can get quickly on the inappropriate happiness pills!
This year more than other years I started started to dig through older music. My cabinets which held the Sub Bass Snarl archive under the watchful care of Luke up in Sydney were shipped down to Melbourne and I spent a lot of time revisiting tracks and sounds from them. Periodically over the past decade I would visit Luke’s house in Sydney and get a few hours digitize sporadically but with them all on easily on had now I have been systematically digitizing, label by label, microgenre by microgenre.
With Plex now set up on the home network to run ‘our own private family Spotify’, I’ve been fascinated to observe how many of these archival tunes ‘automagically’ connect to newer sounds with Plex’s sonic analysis tools. These new pathways through the music collection have led me to odd b-sides, remixes that I never played out, and some quirky album fillers that work well as bridges between genres. With popular music going through a huge 1990s revival at the moment, it is fun to observe the machine learned ‘sonic similarity’ drawing threads between something released in 2021 and tracks from 1990-1996.
Perhaps because of the hearing loss incident, or just the relentless grind of the pandemic, I listened to 17% less music than the previous two years. Maybe it was also the continuing lack of a commute. But proportionally, new artists were up 5% and new tracks up 21%. So less overall but quite a bit more diverse music this year - 2196 new artists I had never previously listened to, in fact!
Outings
Obviously the ongoing pandemic put paid to most plans and I barely got to go and see any gigs or exhibitions in 2021. However the Australian Museum’s Unsettled exhibition really needs a mention. I swung by with teenage G on a quick visit to Sydney on an afternoon between seeing the Doug Aiken retrospective at the MCA and a rush hour train service to Katoomba to see my mum. Unsettled was one of the wordiest exhibitions I had been to in a long time - more text than even the older galleries of the American Museum of Natural History! But it was also one that used those words so effectively to tell the vitally important 'alternative' history of Australian colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and genocide. My only disappointment is that it was a temporary exhibition and closed at the end of the year - although it continues online.
Looking ahead
2022 marks thirty years of Luke and I doing our decks'n'effects thing, Sub Bass Snarl. We had some grander plans before Omicron than are currently being considered but fingers crossed you’ll be able to catch a couple of gigs with us and a big soundsystem this year in Sydney and possibly even Melbourne.
Of course, even as I write the final words on this, the world continues to change in unexpected and awful ways.
Stay safe.
In solidarity,
Seb