Lukewarm Radiator

I hadn’t been out of the Lake District for about a month before travelling last weekend to speak at the Radiator Festival, an art & new media wingding in Nottingham, an idiosyncratic kind of town slash small city, where they have things called the Household Bank and a Leprosy Mission. I think Boots might have started there too (any pharmaceutical relationship to the Mission I wonder). I was looking forward to seeing my friend and one-time mentee Jeanie Finlay who lives there, an artist and film-maker who – like the ideal mentee she was – has surpassed her mentor’s meagre personal and professional achievements in every field. She even speaks Japanese.

I’m something of an alumni of the Radiator festival, having spoken at its first incarnation in 2000. As I recall, a handful of people – almost all working at the event – attended my gig, directly after which the organiser handed me a cheque for £350. Whilst I was still on the stage. I don’t think I have ever been paid more, or more rapidly for any presentation. I liked it.
Arriving at one of the Festival’s main venues, Broadway, after some phenomenally slow service at the town’s Wagamama noodle joint (and remember I’m speaking as someone who endures Lake District speed service on a regular basis) , I joined a late ‘remote’ talk by a commissioned artist. A handful of people, mostly working for the event, clustered around a small computer monitor into which one was typing in an online chat. The roar and fun of the downstairs bar was deafening, and a few semi-detached audience members shared beers at the back of this upstairs ‘space’ – one of those semi-circulatory, transitory rooms which neither invite relaxation or facilitate communication or interaction. I sneaked onto a seat and looked across at the curator Sarah Cook (the chair for our next day’s panel) who I had arranged to meet there, trying to ascertain her level of commitment to the event.

I found myself instantly wondering if anyone from the event had even spoken to anyone in the bar or foyer downstairs about it – announced it I mean, when it was starting, what it was, why they should come? The security guy on the stairs had shrugged when I had asked him what was going on up there. Yes, it’s hard to walk into a crowded room of drinkers and endure a few nanoseconds of embarrassment. Yes a few twats would probably shout at you as you struggle to be heard over the drinking, as you struggle to make ‘moving-upstairs-to-engage-in-an-online-chat-on-a-small-screen-with-some-obscure-foreign-artist-you’ve-not-hear-of ‘ actually sound inviting. But isn’t it the job of a festival like this to try and get new audiences.? Or just any audiences?
I am reminded of the late and much-missed Robert Woof (see my eulogy below), director of the Wordsworth Trust - someone who unfailingly rang you up a few hours before the Trust’s monthly poetry events to personally invite you to attend. You invariably did. As marketing gets, it doesn’t get much more targetted and God knows he must had dreaded doing it some days – I mean, this guy was the Director, not the administrator, he had other stuff to do. But he knew that how to get people in to events – at least outside of the safe haven of London – using a combination of guilt-tripping, manipulation of the English’s fear of embarassment and unwillingness to say no, and a sympathetic acknowledgement that you probably hadn’t read the brochure as closely as you might have.
Anyway, in moments Sarah and I had escaped to the roaring bar and fortunately quickly engaged in an – as ever with Sarah –widerangingly enjoyable but techno-flavoured discussion that included Sarah’s patient responses to:
“Is it just me, or does there seem to be a lot of that academic dance and technology stuff programmed here?”
“Is it just me, or is Open Source for artists really problematic – I mean, you’re not allowed any images on Open Mute’s Omweb thingy....”
“Is it just me, or is this a very small audience?”

You can see that after 4 weeks up my mountain, the Rural Laptop seeks affirmation for her distantly paranoid observations of the cultural world from afar.