Everything You Need to Know from Remix Sydney

Overview

Global culture, technology and entrepreneurship juggernaut Remix stopped in Sydney for two days from May 8-9. We went, we watched, we wrote things down. Here are some takeaways from the event.

Three people to internet stalk after Remix Sydney

1. Anna Higgs (@AnnaEHiggs), head of digital at Film4. As well as being a totally inspiring powerhouse who, just lately, has commissioned stuff like Frank, 12 Years a Slave and 20,000 Days on Earth, she live tweeted the whole of Remix like a boss.

2. Peter Tullin (@PeterTullin and Simon Cronshaw, co-founders of CultureLabel.com (@CultureLabel) and this whole worldwide conference shebang known as Remix. They seem to know everything about what's going on in the culture/technology/entrepreneurship world, and they were genial hosts to boot.

3. Dr Hugh Bradlow (@hughbradlow) works for Telstra, not always the most inspiring company, as chief technology officer but he is so much more than that. A sweetly excitable geek who loved telling us about the system he's set up to measure energy use in his home, he also asked some of the week's biggest questions about the future.

Intra-preneurship: Building a Culture of Innovation

This ends up being hilarious. Because Leigh Carmichael, creative director at Dark MOFO, MONA's Winter Festival, has a simple and popular dictum: kill the committees. But that's not going to work for everyone on this panel who doesn't have the luxury of being bankrolled by a wealthy, art-loving gambler. Mark Goggin, director of Sydney Living Museums, is a good counterpoint, his talk entitled 'taking creative risks with public money'. That organisation (formerly the Historic Houses Trust) has definitely managed to bring in new audiences and stage a variety of interesting cultural events. But both Leigh and Mark basically agree: you have to empower creatives with as much decision making ability as possible. The organisation's leaders have to endorse creative risk-taking (even knowing they won't all be successes) and make sure that attitude rules the discourse. Mark points to the @sweden Twitter ("a new Swede every week") as an inspiringly risk-taking public program — even when the person in control has been sexist, racist, offensive or otherwise disappointing, the government has stuck it out.

Three ideas that stuck at Remix Sydney

1. We're suckers for storytelling. No matter what you're doing, you will need to be able to tell your 'story' at every stage — from getting funded, to finding your audience to showing off at a big, intimidating conference like Remix.

2. Think of your project as a treasure map not a road atlas. Anna Higgs uses this as a guideline for making cross-platform work, but it ends up being applicable to just about everything (except road trips).

3. How do you build a world where people lead meaningful lives when this is happening? Seriously, Dr Hugh Bradlow, CTO of Telstra, wants us to figure this shit out.

The Experience Economy: Creating Extraordinary Moments and Stories That Get People Talking

Everyone on this panel is certain they haven't heard the phrase 'experience economy' before, but they instinctively get it. They've each been part of masterminding an event or place that has gone beyond the usual definitions and ways of doing things — and brought together a community of people in a shared moment. There's Andrew Valder of the Garage Sale Trail, Heather Whitely Robertson of the MCA and Kaj Lofgren of the School of Life. It seems what Remix is hinting at is that brands might be trying to leverage this need that people have to connect with each other in real life (while at the same time tweeting and Instagramming it). Quelle horreur. Someone, at some point posits that art at the moment isn't about the art so much as it is about bringing people together to view it. There may be truth to that, but as Heather tells it, art is essentially personal, and ultimately the experiences we remember will be the ones we connect to internally, rather than externally. Can culture orgs create both experiences at the same time? That looks like the challenge.

Three projects to read more on after Remix Sydney

1. The School of Life — At Melbourne's School of Life (founded by Alain de Botton), the cafe gives out philosophical conversation cards with each purchase, facilitating chats that are more open and probing than the norm.

2. Four Pillars Gin — Admittedly, this Australian gin was created by a publicist, so its branding is top notch. But it's backed up its December 2013 Pozible success with a March 2014 double gold medal at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, and the team has real passion for both the pure spirit and building an Australian cocktail culture.

3. MoMa's Art Lab — Is this the coolest art app ever? The box says "for ages seven and up", but time has shown no one is too old for creative art education without the big words.

Public Forum: Rethinking Cross-Platform Performance for Live and Broadcast Audiences

Niche topic, but any lover of performance should feel the pull of it. It's not like as a society we're going to see theatre less, but now that we're consuming so much media, so constantly (several screens at a time, often), how can live performance works remain relevant to public debate? How can they find new audiences? This panel brought together some of Remix's key guests — Anna Higgs, commissioning executive for the UK's multiplatform Film4; Freya Murray, arts manager at SKY Arts, another multiplatform innovator; Allegra Burnette, creative director of digital media at MoMA; and Tom Uglow of Google's Creative Lab. These guys have all gone beyond the idea of merely recording a live show and broadcasting it into a box in the corner of a living room. Allegra was at MoMA during what's possibly art's most viral moment — Marina Abramovic's The Artist Is Present — and spoke of how unpredictable that was; they just put the pieces out there and facilitated the internet to do it's thing. Freya emphasised that when setting out on these kinds of projects, you need to be flexible and reactive to your audience. Go with the flow, even if that's the most scary thing of all.