they’re thinking ‘it’s not really for me’.” He said a big factor in turning bystand ers into participants was showing them what other people had got out of it. “We made a lot of those stars you see in shops – 99p deals – in fluorescent colours, using words that people had used in our evalu ation, so that when people came in, they could see the emotional connection that other people had. And that was very benefi cial for getting people over the hurdle.” So evaluation is vital but it has to be proportional. “After a 10 minute piece you can’t have a half hour evaluation… so we are fairly tickbox, but also with a ‘describe your emotions’ bit. We had a man in his early nineties who said something like: ‘I’ve had the most incredible experience. I woke up this morning and I didn’t realise I’d be climbing to the top of Mount Everest’.”
The importance of local
Another way to engage people in the tech nology is to ask them to make things, or commission things to be made. Alongside the workshops the project offers funding to create their own digital work. Fiona said: “Local is what shapes most of our lives, but every morning we wake up to Gaza, Ukraine and Trump. How do we make local resound as loudly as inter national? There’s an opportunity with this technology to make people feel very connected. So, these locally curated com missions are just as important as the VR touring collection. We’re talking to library services about which community would you like to make a piece of work with? Or which object in your collection? Leeds, for example, where they have a wonder ful collection of Victorian botanicals that audiences don’t often get to interact with.” She said a good commissioning approach was to say: “Don’t tell me about what tech
Digital Spaces VR. Photo © Hayley Salter Dave Lloyd (third from left) at CILIP’s Rewired event.
nology you want to use, tell me the story you want to tell, who is it for, and why do you think they’re going to stop and give you the time to listen to it?”
Dave said libraries need to do more than just provide the finished technology: “If we ask ‘Do you want to create something on VR?’ everyone just says ‘yes’. But are we really gauging true community feed back if I say ‘here is an experience, do you want to do it more?’”
He said the commissioning side of the
first Digital Spaces project proved that when people work with their own stories they get over this hurdle and look at what the technology can do for them – with results including a sound piece from Bell
Green which appeared on BBC Sounds and Radio 3, a jewellery making film from Foleshill library, and a local history piece in Tile Hill library.
Where next?
Technology affects all aspects of culture. Fiona says: “Take the opera composer Puccini who realised the potential of the new wax cylinder audio recording formats to sell his music to audiences around the world. These could only record around three minutes of music so he kept his show stopper arias to the length that would fit on one cylinder, changing the future of opera forever and ensuring his arias are still some of the most familiar pieces of classical music ever written.”
And she pointed to the rise of “boxset binge culture” as an example of how digital technology changed or disrupted audiences and industries. But despite this disruption, she says technology “will only ever be an adjunct to whatever we as human beings want to use it for. Storytelling is still the most fundamental thing that human beings do with, for, and to one another. The rest of it is just a new set of crayons. The technology does not make the stories. It doesn’t make a story good and it can’t save a bad story from being a bad story.”
Dave points to an inspirational example at Coventry University, saying: “I was asked over for a cup of coffee and to watch a group of neurodiverse actors with motion capture suits on. They were doing a piece of theatre where the two actors were not allowed to touch, they couldn’t connect, but through the sensory equipped suits that they were wearing, their avatars could connect. So people unable to communicate in con ventional society were given a way to try it. Could we put something like that in a public library?” IP
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