Wednesday, Day of Creative Industries Panel

5.30pm – the mayhem is over and am just taking a couple of minutes out before the next event. Our session went well. At ten past ten, there were 20 people in a room set for 100 and it suddenly seemed a long way to come for 20 people – but then it transpired that an earlier session was over-running and Andrew, chairing the panel, decided to wait. Good call – within 10 minutes we were packed, with people bringing in extra chairs or standing at the back, with a sublime disregard for H&SAW! Pablo had put everyone’s presentation on to his Apple because the provided PC laptop wouldn’t support his slides – and of course, with a predictability that leaves you dumbfounded, and despite the half dozen dummy runs before the audience arrived, the bloody thing crashed as soon as the first presentation started. With weary patience, the shipboard tech support got it running on the ship’s laptop, and we were off. Hardesh Singh is a Malaysian music entrepreneur doing some very interesting work opening up the market in his home country, working with telecommunications companies on the new distribution of music – he won the British Council Young Music Entrepreneur of the Year this year. He was serious, unshowy and let the audience gasps come in response to what he did rather than how he presented it. Then Dr Abha from Simla in India – working with women weavers, using crafts and creative practice to help empower women to achieve some independence – the project has been so successful that they are talking about rolling it out across India and the world. She really is an academic specialising in women’s issues, and this is just one project she runs – again, a gentle speaker, whose images of the cloths the women were weaving drew spontaneous applause from the audience.
Then the fireworks began. Kiran, a Trinidadian now living in Miami, works with Disney and Warners and all the big media names imaginable. His work, as he described it, is at the very edge of ‘cutting edge’ – ranging from films to events to major stage shows – he is currently developing a peripatetic ‘Museum’ project, which will tour the world, and will use astonishing 3-D and augmented reality technology but whose core purpose is to ‘clone’ all the greatest artworks in the world and make them available to audiences who might never otherwise have the opportunity of experiencing the real thing – even the Louvre (whose management described Kiran as their worst nightmare – if people can have the work come to them, what need to go to the Louvre!) but they agreed to the cloning of the Mona Lisa on condition that, at the end of the tour, the cloning software becomes their property entirely!
The presentation was lightly and charmingly made, with Kiran never once making the mistake of drowning the audience in tech-speak and openly enjoying and sharing their wonderment at what he was showing. His own delight in the work was infectious.
And then Pablo arose. Looking like the embodiment of an El Greco-esque character, long and very thin, with a small narrow beard outlining his jaw line and his longish black hair cascading on to his shoulders, he was dressed completely in black save for an outsize diamante skull head as a belt buckle. His fierce black eyes shone piercingly through the black framed square spectacles he wore, enhancing the intensity of his heavily accented but completely intelligible, racing Colombian English. He gave the audience no breathing space, showering them with images and references, and unforgiving of them in their media illiteracy. In fact, he started with literacy – asked this audience of sophisticated government and business delegates how many of them could use a Playstation, knew what an X-box was, could upload apps on their phones – inevitably, he was met with embarrassed silence – he then said ‘if you don’t know how to use this stuff and what it can do, how can you possibly tell your children what they can and can’t do with it?” He then took the audience on a journey from when he first started programming computers aged 8, through the history of images invoking Gutenberg, Tesla, Gabriel Garcia Marques and many others, taking the audience way beyond anything they had imagined, making you question what you knew and wonder at what you didn’t – it was noisy, dramatic, political, passionate, provocative, funny and totally magical – one of the best I’ve ever seen. He ended with two coups de grace – he produced a T-shirt, just a common or garden T-shirt – one you wear and wash in the normal way, but one that has technology built into it – through augmented reality, he held the Tshirt against himself with the webcam focused on it and, as we watched on the large screen, butterflies appeared endlessly from the material, as it were, and fluttered around. And then he turned off the computer and showed the audience a book – it’s a book he’s just written for the schools in Colombia, teaching the kids about using technology. And technology is built into the book itself – in order to access parts of the book, kids will have use their mobiles; ‘bar codes’ of information are part of the text - and so on – as he says, the kids will get it immediately – it’s the teachers that will have the problems! Of course, there was a roar when he finished – everyone was knocked sideways and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who wanted more!
So then it was left to me to finish it – as Andrew commented under his breath to me as I go up to speak, “Follow that!” – and it was a bit like that – not for the first time, I cursed myself for not getting more advanced Powerpoint skills! – but mine was so different, I think the change of approach helped move things on – by the time I got going, despite the inevitable technology difficulties that, ironically, Pablo was tearing his hair out trying to resolve behind me, the audience had been thoroughly warmed up. They were therefore immediately responsive to anything that even remotely resembled a joke! That obviously affected me too so rapport was pretty immediate and I felt good as it went on. I quoted my brief conversation with the Minister the night before and i think it suddenly brought the whole discussion back into accessible reality – ‘monetising the Carnival’ was something everyone understood so, as I used it to take them on an unanticipated journey into CIDA’s Innovation process, our work with our Silicon Valley partners, the impact on clients and collaborators and the story of the Creative Town, I could feel (and hear) them responding.
As I have been writing this, Alison, the organiser of the programme, just came up to me to tell me that the word amongst delegates is that ours was the best session of the conference – very satisfying – if creatives can’t enthrall an audience, what hope the rest?!
I’m off to the pool deck to go dancing with Pablo!