Brighton Media Centre
Ian Elwick


CG - The first question - why centre new media practice ? - what’s the benefits for actually creating a centre which is based around new media practice?

IE - It’s a centre because people need to get together, have face to face contact. They need support, they need to be co-located. Despite all the wisdom at the end of the 80’s about teleworking, telecentres etc. everybody said we would be working at home by now and what’s actually happened is that places like this have grown because people don’t want to work at home. A lot of people have started a business and have realised they don’t want to work at home. They want to be in a small company within some kind of framework.

CG - So what are the benefits of that then?

IE - Things like the access to shared equipment. Access to the facilities which we provide. Over the last three years we’ve been able to provide structured cabling which provides faster networks, cheaper communication. There’s shared technical knowledge, shared experience. All those things you find in place because we’ve themed the types of companies coming in here. Of course when we started in the end of 92 there wasn’t any such thing as new media, there wasn’t any such thing as multimedia. We were looking at the media industry and how it was going. We were looking at convergence and I realised people would want to use new technology more and more and that because the technology is so multi dimensional they would be able to cross platforms between different types of work and different disciplines. That’s exactly what’s happening. I understand what new media is, I understand what multimedia is, and it’s got lot of different definitions but I don’t really accept that it’s different from media in a traditional sense because you need other skills which then go to feed into this new product you are creating in the new media environment.

CG - So you don’t feel there’s anything fundamentally different between new media and what might be called old media in that context.

IE - There are differences you can identify. But I think it’s confusing to call something new media.

CG - OK. What do you think are those differences?

IE - Take radio. There’s a traditional form of radio, but people can make their own net version of the radio. They’re using the technology to develop new ways of broadcasting but it doesn’t mean to say there isn’t an old form for media and that it isn’t being evolved partly by use of the technology and partly by experience. People have found new solutions to old problems. You can apply that to TV and video and film.

CG - So in that sense it’s an evolution.

IE - Yes, so whoever invented the term new media or multi media, inevitably those terms are going to fall by the wayside, because as soon as you call something new it’s old.

CG - One of the terms I’ve preferred to use is the notion of emerging media, that media which are emerging have a particular impact on social, cultural and economic structures, and as they coalesce and take form they can be absorbed into conventional methods of practice, but that the notion of emerging media is a significant one that needs to be taken on so that you’re not constantly reinventing the wheel every time that new media changes. In that sense would you say that the Brighton Media Centre is about is emerging media or about picking up on media which is already coalesced which therefore has some kind of value ?

IE - I think that because of the way people work together these emerging technologies have coalesced into something definitely as a result of being here. I think people refer to us locally because they think its happened here, because it’s much more difficult for it to happen elsewhere, they just haven’t had the framework or the physical location to put these things together.

CG - If the things that are valuable within that framework are the access to shared equipment, the technical infrastructure, then presumably all those things operate within a market and could actually be delivered outside of the building. Does that mean that the building is of a limited time value, that once those things are offered outside, the building will be no longer significant.

IE - When you say they can be offered outside, then if they’re offered virtually then they’re missing the point I am making about why people come together.

CG - But that’s what I’m not sure about. Why is it that people come together?

IE - The central thing that we started with was to focus a fragmented industry. That’s what we set out to do. There’s been lots of other things on the way, but that’s what we set out to do. And so from our point of view we are trying to create a focus, from other people’s point of view they seem to be drawn towards that focus. And that’s how they see the thing working for them. Obviously we go round and ask people, but they want that focus and you can’t get that focus in some other way. You can get some kind of virtual focus, but even video conferencing is not the same as meeting face to face.

CG - If what you’re about is creating a focus for an industry that’s dispersed at the moment, there’s a number of factors that come into play. One of which is do you have a point at which you say ‘OK the industry is now focused enough so we don’t need to be supporting it”... And secondly if you say that is the case, what’s the job that’s been done along the way. Is it possible to define something that is an outcome that no longer involves the media centre if the basic premise of the media centre was founded to create a focus for that industry?

IE - It’s a very hard question because in the first place we didn’t know what we were doing. We were just responding to a grass roots need. And without that pressure we wouldn’t have kept it going because it certainly wasn’t very easy financially. It’s beginning to settle down now and you’re asking me this question at a time when we’re actually planning to do more of this work because it’s a bit easier for us to do. We can raise the finance. We can do new things. And maybe we can help people in other places to create centres. And all of that requires not just an idea and a few events, it requires quite a lot of long term planning. Obviously we’ve got dragged into property development. That’s a long term business. On top of that you’re talking about the investment needed to create the environment that these people want. What we have to do is look at the market, see how it’s developing, and make sure we’re up there with the market and moving with it. What I don’t think will change will be that people will always want to congregate somehow. Now whether they will always do it in the same way in 5-10 years time is something we look at constantly. People come and tell us, we don’t have to ask. So maybe in five years time they won’t want offices or studios in the same way, but I believe they will want to come together in some way.

CG - I can see that people want to be part of something, that there is a need to identify with something.

IE - I didn’t actually mention that.

CG - You said people feel the need to come together.

IE - That’s different. They get something out of being socially with other people. I didn’t actually describe the process of being proud of the badge.

CG - That’s what I’m interested in. You can articulate the physical infrastructure benefits, but the reason people do it is something else, something about feeling part of something. Some sort of intangible benefit from joining something in that way. Is that ultimately productive or does it have some negative long term effects on what might be the ecology of practice in that area?

IE - I hadn’t really thought about negative effects. Certainly at a basic level we try and give people as much support as possible so that they can be successful. A very small percentage of companies that have been through our doors have failed. Most have succeeded either by staying the same and being good at what they do or by growing.

CG - Have you looked at the bigger picture of net profit and loss. If you examine the investments made in the media centre itself. You might say ‘we’ve got a media centre, it’s going to cost us £5m, let’s not have a media centre, let’s have media development agency which is only going to cost us £500K leaving £4.5m to support industry directly,’ Obviously you’ve gone down one route. But if you’re presented with that scenario, are you able to justify one model over the other.

IE - Interesting question. We’re just getting to grips with it ourselves. We’ve undergone some changes over the years and we’ve just taken over this new extension so we’re looking quite closely at what we do next. We’ve got two new buildings together which comprise quite a lot of space, 22,000 sq ft. What do we do next? We’ve have enough demand for the two and half years we’ve been open in these buildings to fill them 4/5 times over. Mostly with micro businesses, up to 9 people. I think probably this year and next year, we will be able to attract quite a lot of private or public funding to increase that if we want to. But your questions is why? Why not do it some other way?

CG - If you had looked at all those industries out there and had chosen to become a conduit for the same funds but had left them to set themselves up in their own particular locations. Would that ultimately be better? I don’t know. There are probably be reasons why.

IE. - I would say it must be something to do with badge engineering. There is a reason for people coming together which is stronger than having them in different places all over town, or all over the country. You are talking about ecologies, some sort of framework and that framework has to have a substance to it. When I started all this I was just interested in what they were doing in Brighton. I realised that Brighton was a bit unusual because it had so many people working in this field. So it made me think of how it compared to other cities, what are they doing. To start with I thought we would make Brighton a centre of excellence. Then I realised other places could have smaller media centres, they might not necessarily be comprised of the same things. You’ve got to look at at each place according to what’s out there. In other words market testing before you create something. So a bigger city might need a smaller media centre because it’s got less people likely to work in this way. All of that could be tested fairly easily now we know what to look for. But what we started with, to try and make clarity out of confusion and try to focus something which was disparate and fragmented, is still valid. I think that people feel like they’re still completely independent and come and go as they please. But they’re contributing something to the centre, and the centre gives something back to them and that’s why they stay. It’s not necessarily me as the centre owner or manager that makes those things happen, but bringing the elements together and making sure you get the right companies coming in.

CG - That doesn’t necessarily say why the bricks and mortar building is more appropriate than an infrastructure development.

IE - You can’t monitor an infrastructure development so easily. What happened with us was that there were literally hundreds of individuals and small companies around Brighton working in media but it wasn’t recognised as a local industry by anybody. The Council gave a bit of moral support, but they didn’t think there was much going on. The local TEC didn’t recognise it at all. It was only by bringing it together and showing there was a critical mass that the whole thing took off. It has had the affect of attracting other companies to this area and that affect is beginning to snowball. We didn’t have much funding, but we managed to create something out of what we’ve got and we’ve begun to attract funding and more companies. Companies have spoken to us about moving here from London. So that’s a combination of factors. One is our own success, one is because Brighton itself has become a bit more together and it’s the technology. The technology itself is much more powerful than it was five years ago. One person can do on one very small computer what several people used to do. That’s a continual process. But they still would be excited by being next to other people doing similar things and that’s the kind of people we’re trying to attract.

CG - One of the things that’s crucial here is this notion of being excited.

IE - It’s essential. You can’t value it, but that buzz is exactly what makes a place work.

CG - In a crude way you can value that , you go back to the profit and loss scenario. You can say the reason why we haven’t done just a media development agency is because of this thing. This thing is the excitement. I’m trying to get at what that is. How do you value it, monitor it, test it.

IE - If you could put it in a bottle and sell it ! It takes a lot of energy but it also takes a bit of discretion, who you put next to what, if there are two companies that are maybe in competition, you have to be the maestro that orchestrates the presentation of those two elements to each other.

CG - One of the phrases I’ve heard used is synergy. Another concerns the construction of a creative milieu. That is often the thing that we build on, but it actually has no real credence in the funding structures which we inhabit because it has no measure or no articulation. In many ways you’re in a position where that thing is incredibly important to you and you’re in as good a position as anybody to begin to seek to define what that is and articulate it and create those arguments that other people can use.

IE - We’ve thought about it a lot. I don’t know if I’ve come up with anything that defines how you can measure it. You can measure success, if you measure the number of companies we’ve nurtured and people they employ, how much money they make, whether they win competitions. But at some point you’ve got to bite the bullet and say this thing works. If you were to take the example of a big corporation, that, in effect, is what we’ve got here. Quite a big company, turning over £15million a year and employing over 100-250 people. If you stick with that example it becomes relatively simple to analyse. In that sense, we the managers are rather like a marketing department and the most successful companies on the planet are the ones that have strong marketing.

CG - You’re making a direct link between what we might term as some articulation of cultural value and marketing.

IE - I’m talking about success. How you measure success, how you invest in the thing that brings it all together and presents it to the outside world.

CG - The thing that is exciting about the media centre, makes it significant and worth the investment is actually something to do with profiling, with intangibles, actually it’s about a buzz.

IE. - The problem about a media centre/new media centre is difficult to quantify. What you say this year is different from what you’ll say next year. And it’s different to track an industry that’s moving that quickly. But if you take a mature example with lots of other metaphors and illustrations about work then I don’t think it’s that difficult to work out what’s happening. Take PR - you can have external and internal PR. That’s what we do within the media centre. Spend a lot of time and effort going round to try and ensure the companies are working in harmony and solving problems. Externally we try to attract inward investment. We present it to the outside world, which is the local council, businesses and then further afield. They want some recognition and they want to be part of a bigger whole that’s going somewhere and you can use those analogies straight out of the corporate text book. If you look at surveys on sales people, of the 3 things that motivate most of all the one that wins every time is being part of a winning team. They don’t actually mind how much they earn. It’s actually being part of success. That’s the basic human value. What we’re talking about again is motivation. What is it that drives people to come here and what makes them stay, and by and large they stay. If they move it will be because their business fails which is very rare, or we becuase can’t accommodate them because they’ve grown so much - that’s happened to about 15 companies.

CG - If we say that what is valuable about building a centre is that its stakeholders feel that they’re part of success, or part of something that’s successful. In a commercial company that notion of success is easy to define because it’s about making more money than the others. In a situation where you have a broader brief to develop the wellbeing of the community both economically and culturally, how might you define success ?.

IE - Success can be measured in a number of different ways. Here they measure it in terms of how much things get better. If they see gradual physical improvements, that we attract well known people, interesting events, win awards, get in the paper. All those sort of things make them feel part of something that’s growing. Building a profile. They get this feeling of success from our success and we get the same from theirs. So that helps some other other companies that might not be doing so well. How can I do better. It’s not necessary to talk direct to us. We can’t orchestrate all these people just like the director of a big company can’t motivate every department It’s very similar.

CG - You talked about the need to focus a fragmented industry and inevitably an issue of exclusivity emerges. There will be people who are included and others who are excluded because you will need to put some boundaries on your activities. Has that been an issue ?

IE - We’ve tried very hard not to be exclusive and create a clique. That partly emerges from dealing with people. Some people have favorites. If we get into that ball game then we’re dead in the water. We have to be seen to be impartial. That’s quite important.

CG - How do you manage and demonstrate that impartiality?

IE - You try and make sure balance shifts around. With something like web site design we either don’t get involved all or we give the same brief to all of them.

CG - Presumably in that situation if there is a company that does it better than another, they are going to get preferential treatment.

IE - We don’t tend to act as a major contractor. Mostly this is outside people coming it. We are just like a channel.

CG - Do you feel an obligation to use designers housed within the centre.

IE - Sometimes we use designers deliberately from outside the centre. You’ve touched on an interesting point. It’s almost common sense really, you’ve just got to do as many things as possible, to defuse any competitiveness within the centre which makes people start hating somebody else’s guts, or you just have a policy of going outside because it helps broaden the network.

CG - How do you select tenants ?

IE - There’s been times when we’ve had to be selective. And then, common sense, we might not have a particular type of company so we’ll go for that one. We’ll go for people who seem to be a bit more sound. Some people are just bad news.

CG - Is there a test ?

IE - Well that’s the trouble about making it rigid, because as soon as you make it rigid it would probably become public and then you get yourself into all kinds of political ball games. It’s much better to be seen to be clear and impartial and not to make decisions that other people can pick holes in.

CG - So tenants are chosen on a case by case basis.

IE - We actively try and go out and get people we haven't got already. We were trying to get a new radio station that had started up. But we just didn’t have the right space at the time. That was the main reason - they wanted to come here. That’s a bit of a supply problem actually.

CG - On the other side of that then, is there a level of acceptability as to what companies might do within the centre, do you have, in an old sense, some kind of policy on what companies who are benefiting from the centre are able to do.

IE - What their business is ?

CG - Yes. In crude form, do you police their activities ?

IE - We don’t have too much of a problem with it because people tend to come here because they perceive that we’ve cornered the market and they want to be in that corner. There are very few companies that people have taken objection to except for maybe personal reasons. There is one company which is a bit controversial and they teach languages but some people in the centre use them.

CG - Do you have something like an Equal Opps policy?

IE - For tenants coming in?

CG - For the Brighton Media Centre, the organisation. The analogy of the big corporation that has an EO policy that it applies through recruitment etc. Do you feel it’s possible to do that or that it’s counter productive?

IE - We operate Equal Opps ourselves and encourage other people to do it. Obviously with over 40 companies you can't tell them how to run their businesses and there’s all kinds of different ways of doing it in that mix, but by and large they’re small companies and nearly all the people within those companies tend to be roughly equal status. So if they take anyone on, its probably as a partner or director, or on an employed basis, they are going to be treated more or less the same as anybody else in a small office.

CG - But you wouldn’t set yourself a target of having at least one company that is employing specifically people with some form of disability, for example.

IE - If we talk to anybody like that we do try and attract them either to work in the facility or use it in some other way.

CG - So what this goes back to, is this notion of the entrepreneurial model. All those things are tested against the credibility of the centre director. Rather than saying these are our overt policies, you’re saying we will run the centre on the basis of what I understand to be best for the centre.

IE - We do have an Equal Opp policy and if anyone asks us we will show them a copy of it. The other thing is the unspoken rule that because of the way we act we are perceived to be embracing equal opportunities and people won’t get very far here if they’re not ‘right on’ in some way.

CG - It’s unspoken.

IE - But this is part of equal opportunity. I can’t be a dictator. I can’t say ‘you’re not coming in here because you haven’t got the right policy’. But we try and do it by encouraging those sort of companies and the rest follows on.

CG - Would you be in a position where you would take on the wellbeing of those organisations ?.

IE - You’re talking about paternalism. I’m not going to do that! It does in the end get back to being some sort of dictator and you have to use common sense I think.

CG - You’re playing off the dictatorial against the entrepreneurial. You’re saying its OK to be entrepreneurial but not to be dictatorial - I’m not sure what the difference is. The power in both those situations rests with one person, but the entrepreneur is seen as benign, while the dictator is not benign.

IE - I wasn’t trying to make those judgments. We’re trying to run a successful centre. That people will enjoy working in. I know dictator was a word I used, to try and underline that equal opportunities implies a flat hierarchy, which is the way we run our business. Meaning that everybody has an equal chance to get on , they will be given the support to enable them to realise their full potential. That is another mission statement - even if it’s a covert one - of our our business. We want everybody to realise their full potential and they’ll have support to do that. Now how you translate that into how we tell other companies in the media centre what to do is fairly difficult . You’re really talking about us using our intuition when they come along because they probably only formed 6 months ago and you don’t really know what they’re going to do next . You just have to take it on trust and try and get them to accept the culture of the place that you’re in. So it gets back to this physical environment , the fact that we’re trying to set a culture here.

CG - In that sense it’s still about that entrepreneurial/dictatorial model. What you’re saying is that you want to develop the culture of these businesses, but whether or how that development happens is completely your responsibility. It isn’t articulated in any form. You’re not saying what we’d like to do is for all the companies in this media centre to undergo equal opportunities training once a year and we will organise that for them . You're actually saying we are going to look at these companies and see where they go and if they’re not toeing the line, we’ll try and gently coerce them back on track.

IE - It’s interesting that you’ve raised it in that way if I was able to I would offer people that kind of training , but we have very limited resources, maybe we’re just getting on to the stage now where we can do that . We’re talking to the local enterprise agency about giving people instruction in how to run a small business, for us to facilitate it. In other places, like the local innovation centre up at the university they’ve got a marketing person on site who does that - they give business counselling . We haven’t got the spare time to do that but we\'ll work with other funded organisations to do it if we can .

CG - If we move on from the notion of Equal Opportunities and business training, it’s easy to look at how you might develop those businesses in terms of their economic success. Given that, I assume, the centre has some kind of cultural remit , how do you develop the cultural outputs, and how do you reconcile the cultural and the economic ?

IE - We have a feel for the place which is cultural and we’re trying to proactively increase that in some way. By events and performances, exhibitions, we did start up a magazine called 20:20 which has proved quite difficult to continue publishing, but that was the idea behind it . So the whole thing has a strong cultural feel . We also work with cultural companies within the centre, like Lighthouse particularly, and as much as possible with cultural organisations outside the media centre and the universities . There are 2 universities here and we’re trying to work with both of them.

CG - Again it’s going back to that entrepreneurial model that there needs to be some kind of cultural buzz around the Brighton Media Centre. Do you have a process for supporting that, would an organisation that has a particular cultural bias get cheaper rent.

IE - Yes, companies which have charitable status do get cheaper rent and in addition there’s half price rates on the hire of our equipment for non-commercial organisations.

CG - Is there a limit to how much of that activity you could support . If the centre was full of organisations that had charitable status would you have to charge more presumably ?

IE - Yes, we do need to have a certain amount of commercial activity in order to support that .

CG - What's the balance at the moment ?

IE - I would say that at least two-thirds of the activity is non-commercial . By the same token probably all of that is cultural . That was a deliberate decision because it actually cost us money to do that . Its an opportunity cost.

CG - So the commercial lets that you do, they support non-commercial cultural activity ?.

IE - Because we made a loss last year we have taken on this building and by moving it into profit means we can carry on subsidising those non-commercial activities.

CG - So do you see that as your role to subsidise those activities ?

IE - Yes, because I’m bonkers, that's why.

CG - Its quite a serious question, because there are people whose job it is to support cultural activity. What you're doing is turning yourself into a mini arts board by taking a level of profit - taxing the people who are paying full rents - and passing that subsidy back to people who are doing cultural work. Do you seek further support for that from arts funding bodies ?

IE - Yes, its the next thing we’d like to move into, and to do that we can’t be mavericks, we have to conform to other peoples criteria to make sure that that works.

CG - Do you feel that the cost of meeting those terms is actually too much, that it’s easier to have your own internal economy ?

IE - It’s Catch 22 really, you need another person to set an artistic programme and probably another person on top of that to start doing fund raising. We have tried. Last year we did an A4E bid and put an awful lot of time into it , but it wasn’t enough and it was suggested that we withdraw it , Now I thought it was a bloody good bid, but it was suggested we’d get a lot further if we withdrew it for the time being,

CG - So is your feeling then that its not actually worth the investment to develop those funding sources ?

IE - No, I don’t think that but we were spread very thin last year and since we’ve taken on a couple more people we are in a stronger position to be able to tackle some of those problems. But before that we were in the same position as a lot of the small companies in our building where it’s very difficult to fund new activities when you’re spending all of your time working on your core activity.

CG - As we mentioned before, you tax the commercial clients in order to allow a subsidy for the non-commercial clients. If you didn’t allow that subsidy for the non-commercial clients and instead took the money that you might have used to subsidise them and used that to pay for an arts development worker. That person could then seek funds that could directly support those organisations to pay commercial rents. Have you considered that as an option ?

IE - All the people in the organisation are interested in the cultural side but there is a conflict there because Lighthouse see themselves as the in-house cultural people. I think that the demarcation line’s becoming clearer - they’re definitely in the fine art field, even though they do support quite a lot of people who are working commercially - through the equipment that they hire, or the training they do. But their expression is on the fine art side. The kind of things that we’re supporting overlaps into that but not in any area that they’re particularly interested in, like events (we organised something with Stelarc - things like that ), but for instance, what we’re going to be doing is developing the gallery over the road. That's going to be quite an interesting step forward. Obviously I tested this on Lighthouse and they see it as being quite supportive.

CG - Following on from that, how do you resolve conflict between industrial development and the centres own survival . You mentioned there that you have a kind of loyalty to the tenants , but if somebody came along and wanted to relocate to Sussex and said ‘we think we can do it better than Lighthouse and we’ll pay more rent’. Would that benefit the industry better in this area, would you be prepared to follow that route ?

IE - I don't see why , its just going to disrupt all the channels that have been set up. I suppose, in a way, when you’re trying to set up a network in an area you actually setting up lots of dendrite tentacles which interlink . If you say we’re going to have that and smash this one off then you’re actually bashing away at things that are part of the framework.

CG - So what about the point when the balance between the centres development and the infrastructure development becomes a conflict. For example, if the only businesses that can survive in Brighton are those that are based at the centre, because those that develop outside the centre can’t progress and you start to have a negative effect on that ecology. Do you get to a point where you might say ‘OK we’ll close the centre and disperse the industries back into the ecology because they’re now healthy enough’. Using the hot-house notion, that you’ve taken those industries in, you’ve developed them and now you chuck them back out to survive on their own - do you feel that that's a possibility ?

IE - Its an interesting scenario. Its a bit hypothetical - I would say that we do that anyway, we don’t consciously do to but we’re very happy if somebody is successful and that means that they move out to their own premises because this place is too small for them . That’s happened about 15 times.

CG - But is there a point at which the industry will actually saturate ? That you can’t hothouse any more industry ?

IE - But when that happens the market will force us to change. We already do that, we’ve shifted every year. We’ve never had any website designers until 2 years ago and now the centre’s full of them - that's one way you could express it, but there are other ways - now we’re in a position to be more pro active generally. We will try to create events that are going to attract people working at the cutting edge because that's where we think our future lies. We won’t do it by keeping people out .

CG - Is there a scenario that you can envisage which involves the media centre becoming an unnecessary layer. What you talked about originally was artificially creating a critical mass - you say we'll cluster this, but at some point that critical mass actually becomes the definition of a critical mass - that it’s actually reached a point where activity is self seeding, self generating. So the media centre layer becomes an unnecessary level of bureaucracy, or an unnecessary expenditure. Would you feel that there's a point in that where you would actually say ‘OK, fine, we’ll hand over the building to the tenants, sell it to them’ , and create a fund for the production of cultural work for the next 50 years because that might be more effective than the centre continuing to be there.

IE - Yes, we are considering, along with Lighthouse, buying the building. As far as all the other things go they’re not that realistic I don’t think. We’re into having a very small organisation. The team to manage this place is very small, 2 or 3 people. In that sense you’re just managing a property, and that isn’t anything to do with all the other ambitions we have . All of those can be taken care of in whatever we’ll be doing next and we’re building that up. We’re interested in further exhibition and we’re trying to work with other people in the local area to make sure that we enhance what's already there rather than clashing with what other people are doing. In that sense we’re very interested in the overall structure. I think if we keep on doing that we’re not going to be a superfluous layer, because if there's something that might become a superfluous layer now then it wont be there in 5 years time. Because we’ll take it away and do something else with it anyway.

CG - What that paints is the media centre becoming some kind of civic structure in its own right, you're creating a kind of micro-town that has its inhabitants - these micro-businesses, and the media centre itself is the civic authority.

IE - You’re making us sound paternalistic. It’s not something that's on our agenda. We’d like to provide support, so I suppose we’re parental and we’re incubators and that sounds parental. To some extent we’re leading the way, so that people who come in here can find their feet, but mostly these people know what they’re doing and are getting on with it and are using the facilities to help them.

CG - So the media centre itself is not going to fuse out - it’s not going to say the job is done. It’s going to keep growing, keep expanding to manage more and more activities,

IE - Well you’re saying that - we are going to expand at the moment, but I don’t see that as an infinite process.

CG - So there is a point at which it will stop expanding ?

IE - Yes there might be, who knows what's going to happen , that's the whole point, that's why I suppose we are quite good at doing what we do, because we’re responsive to the industry that we’re in, which is very fast moving. If in 5 years time we’ve got 3 buildings and we only need 2 we’ll get rid of one, we’ll sell it to somebody.

CG - How far ahead do you plan ?

IE - At the moment we’re looking at a 5 year plan and we would like to do one other building, but we’re looking at other things as well. I’m very interested in helping with other media centre developments, because its taken so much pain to get to what we’re doing that we can actually short-circuit a lot of things for other people.

CG - One of the things that interests me - this is very hypothetical - is this notion of the creation of new civic structures, that are based upon the management of micro-businesses. When that's allied with a certain form of cultural support that you are, in effect, creating these micro civic structures. If you spin out what's happened over the past 5 years the BMC could actually become very strong within Brighton. It actually has a winning formula to develop micro-businesses, to keep in touch with emerging technology, and to also deliver the cultural needs of both its tenants and a wider audience., But if it follows that route, do you envisage a point at which it actually becomes like a castle within Brighton, that it develop its own walls, it becomes a separate media town.

IE - You’re pushing all the wrong buttons, because Franz Kafkas ‘The Castle’ gives me nightmares. I’d hate to see it become somewhere like that, we try to make ourselves very accessible. But taking seriously that notion of civic structure - its the antithesis of what I set out to create - I wanted to create something organic, with the minimum of rigidity, something which was responsive, which was able to develop with circumstances, which planned ahead, tied up loose ends. It wasn’t a civic structure in the traditional sense, but at the same time its got to have some kind of continuity, and in such a fast moving industry we have become a source of stability.

CG - When you said that you didn’t want rigidity, what you’re creating is a benign fiefdom.

IE - That's such an archaic term. We’re trying to create something for the next century so to accuse of being back in the middle ages is quite hard.

CG - Well there are people that say that the most effective form of government is benign dictatorship, that's the one that actually achieves the most. What you’ve articulated so far is that you want to work with the people you want to work with, develop their interests, support them by giving them the option of access to cultural outputs, but that you don’t want to firm those structures up too much, you don’t want to turn that thing into a democratic structure. You want to be responsive and responsible, but you resist the temptation to democratise that, to put in place a structure that says this is the way it has to be. You’re not answerable to the structure, you’re solely answerable to the individuals who are managing the system.

IE - You can’t easily democratise a place like this, because its pretty democratic already.

CG - How ?

IE - Because people vote with their feet, if they say they’re unhappy about something, we’ll try very hard to make sure its OK, and that they have an input into what we’re doing. We take notice of them, but you couldn’t ask them to actually manage this. Its a democracy like a polis - a Greek city state - people didn’t generally vote on what the leaders did , but they did get actively involved in the day to day management. I think what you’re trying to do is to see whether we’re fundable, and therefore conform to certain recognisable models. That has been hard for us because we’re a bridge between public and private enterprise.

CG - In most successful arts organisations what is being funded is ostensibly the structure, but its normally the individual, the person that's driving it who articulates a value that says what's actually most important here is simply that Arts Council invests in me. I will deliver these results, because this is my track record, and I will stake my professional status upon that. In many ways that's what happens, but its legitimised and validated by a set of structures and forms that make explicit certain things. Now you are resisting that, you are saying that the role you perform you cannot be turned into a structure.

IE - That's not quite true, we are turning it into a structure, what I’m saying is that it can’t be too rigid because we have to be very flexible to new things that are happening,

CG - But isn’t it implicit in a structure that there's a degree of rigidity ?

IE - Yes, I’m not denying that, and I almost accepted your idea that we’re a new civic structure, even though it was a bit of a strange concept for me. But I said we’ve created something that has got the continuity and stability that people are looking for, but at the same time we’re trying to match that with a corresponding amount of flexibility and adaptability to new events.

CG - But there's a balance there, that you’re completely in control of....

IE - But if we’re going to get people to back us, you’re talking about me and Nicky and the team we’ve built up. I don’t know how we turn that into something that is, as you say, legitimised.

CG - I’m not sure, what I’m interested in is - if that is put to the test, how do you defend what you have done. Do you put yourself up for election to your post once a year like some arts organisations would have done 20 years ago ?

IE - Well you can go by our track record, we’ve got 5 yrs of doing all sorts of things which make the right sort of noises, and before that, between us, we’ve all got a lot of experience.

CG - But in terms of the articulation of the cultural value, which is the public sector intervention part, we haven’t really been able to define that. Its about this thing, excitement, it’s about a buzz, it’s about meeting the needs of people sufficient enough to get them to coalesce to be part of this thing. But that could simply be that everyone is chasing the money. If you receive £500,000 of public sector investment, people will follow that. Did the track record follow simply because the money’s there. If somebody else was in that position using the money in a different way they might still have the same number of people. So how do you make an argument that says this is what we’re doing, this is valuable, it has a direction, a purpose, other than saying ‘trust me’ .

IE - The actual formal qualification for that you’d be better to get from Keith Jeffrey, because they’ve done a lottery bid and they’ve actually argued and won the case for managed workspace and the additionality which it creates. I haven’t been through that process,

CG - I have the impression that they’ve reached a fairly uneasy compromise, they’ve ended up constructing something that will probably create a fundamental split in the organisation because they’ve strived to meet the objectives of the funding authority which seemed, to me, to run counter to the objectives they were actually working with. That by attempting to meet a set of artistic and cultural objectives they’ve had to commit themselves to things that are going to detract from those entrepreneurial practices.

IE - I don’t feel any unease about that. We’ve already been engaged on a cultural programme, which has gradually gained more and more recognition. We’re at the point now where what's happening in the new gallery, some of the multimedia work we’re doing, people that we’re fostering, cultural connections we’re looking after. All of those things are going to develop into something that has got a strong cultural feel to it. But on top of that I think we’ve created a culture here, I don’t think we need to look much further than that. We have created a culture which we could measure,

CG - How ?

IE - People have tended to stay, we could do a survey, ask them what they get out of it, how the networks work for them, how they perceive the ambitions of this mission, how it relates to them, how it’s affected their businesses. All of those things are cultural and I think it would be quite a interesting study. It’s a living example of a cultural phenomenon, something which started from nothing.

CG - What about the bigger notion of culture ? That who I am has been expressed and that I’m able to share the expressions of other people who I feel close to. Those vague notions about cultural value, ?. If you can say we have 300 people who can all say their lives have been improved by 50% its very easy, but those things don’t exist , so what are the forms that you can use to articulate that ?

IE - We are part of an SRB bid and we have had to measure up to certain outputs, and those are a range of things that are quite specific, there are the definite ones that ask how many people have been employed, how many job opportunities were created, how many companies were created.....

CG - ......but they’re economic measures though,

IE - Yes, but the two do overlap, in Brighton there’s quite a lot of overlap between people working on the cultural side and people working on the economic one, but that's because there’s a big cultural industry down here which was invisible before we came along.

CG - If you merge them together, the danger is - because it’s much easier to articulate the economic argument - that the cultural arguments don’t get heard. That you end up going down the route that says we will follow the economic justification for what we do because its much easier. But we cant say why, it’s just because we don’t understand what's valuable about the cultural.

IE - I think we can do that..

CG - It’s probably possible to do it enough to get by, to get the funding, because nobody really knows the measures - there aren’t any - but is that enough for you ? If you’re saying that you are the entrepreneur and and you will manage this environment and manage it to be successful on cultural and economic terms. You may be able to articulate the economic terms, but not the cultural ones. Now the interesting thing in that, for me, is, because it’s very difficult to articulate those cultural terms it strengthens the entrepreneurial model. Because if we cannot measure these things and we need some kind of barometer, you are saying I will be the barometer for them, I will be the cultural commissar, , I will regulate culture. So if something is good I will support it, if something isn’t good I won’t support it and I won’t go further than that. So if a year later someone says, actually you supported a load of culture that wasn’t very good, you then go in to a process of argument and discussion about what was good and what wasn’t , but you don’t actually structure that in advance. Now that, for me, is the only model that I've come across that has the slightest chance of working, because you are up front about that position. As soon as you start to try and analyse and structure the notion of some kind of cultural measure it vaporises, it’s so elusive. In many ways that is what you’re doing here. I don’t know if you get the arguments where people say that you’re not doing enough of this type of work, or that type of work, and you then have to defend that . Is there a dialogue that exists ?

IE - There is a dialogue. It s more through the Arts Council than SE Arts. That might change as the whole funding process changes. The key to it is whether we can stand up and answer those questions, whether we can enter into a dialogue and whether we are responsive - and whether we can change. I would say that part of our policy that's been set by our board is that we will be cultural developers as well as centre developers and we’re looking at various strategies to effect that. One of which will be to have somebody, full-time or part-time creating a cultural programme and that's going to have be an investment of our own because there’s no funding for it. Eventually that person may be able to attract funding.

CG - So rather than the cultural and the economic being balanced internally, or within one person, you’re saying we are going to split that up and make one person solely responsible for cultural development.

IE - We had this argument the other day - when I started the media centre it was just me, and I was all of those things, and because I’ve got a background in the arts and marketing, design and development, all those curious things came together I was suddenly in a position where I could do it. But they’re all separate functions and as the organisation grows they all deserve somebody specialising in them, looking after that area. That doesn’t mean to say that I , or somebody in my position can’t coordinate those things still.

CG - The interesting thing then, is that by separating out the role you’ve formalised it.

IE - Yes, we’re getting more towards your civic structure. But then, in a way, because of the organisations we’re dealing with, you need to mirror their structure in order for them to have something they can understand.

CG - That's like a virus principle, that you start of with a model that works that is successful, that is able to grow. But then in order to grow further you take on and mirror the host structure and, following that scenario, you start to compete. That does happen in some places. There are some places where the cultural institution or the economic development institution is actually bigger than the democratic civic structure that exists around it. So how do you define the outer orbit if the BMC, firstly geographically, but also both economically and culturally ?

IE - I think we are aiming to become the Sussex media centre, but we will still be called the BMC, we’re not going to change - that's just geography, Brighton is the biggest town in Sussex, its right in the middle of Sussex, its got far more arts and new media than any of the other towns and the council have put it on their agenda - Brighton is going to be the place, they want Brighton to become a new city. That’s not very much to do with us, except that we probably started some of that process, by creating a critical mass around new media. We don’t want to start another media centre in this area, certainly not one like this. We might start satellites in the future, that's not inconceivable, where they will offer some facilities and some support but they couldn’t be as big as this and they wouldn’t have the same sort of development because there aren’t those markets or that demand, or that amount of culture in other parts of the county.

CG - If you take the model and franchise it to Southampton, because you think Southampton is big enough to support something like that. You’re not franchising it out because the thing itself can’t be defined. What you’ve articulated before as being valuable about it, is that entrepreneurial role so.
It is, in effect, an imperial development in which you would go in, get a building, do the same thing in Southampton. But it would be the BMC developing Southampton, so Brighton becomes the capital of those developments and becomes a corporation that spreads.

IE - It’s quite easy to see how we might go somewhere and set something up, because we’re good at setting things up. But it can’t be franchised , its not like MacDonalds, you can't homogenise it to that extent, because every place is different and has different industries and histories - we’re not going to do that. What we might do is, and we have considered Southampton, because we know some people there - is do what we did here - Just take a survey of everything that's going on, try and find some key anchor tenants who would set the whole thing in motion, offer them discounts to get the whole thing moving. We know the abstract version of the model, we have the recipe, but the ingredients will be different in a different place. That's what we’d have to be very careful about. We couldn't just hand you the recipe and you would do the same thing in Liverpool, because that wouldn’t work in Liverpool.

CG - So you’d retain the ownership of that in effect -

IE - I don’t know that we’d retain the ownership, but we would certainly want a very hands-on approach in starting it up, but it couldn’t run unless it had a very strong local management and eventually that does come down to ownership.

CG - What happens if the BMC develops to the point where it feels its localness extends quite a long way. I imagine that at the moment you probably get people from south London who would come down to Brighton to use the facilities here. So you might consider south London to be local. You might then say there’s a really interesting opportunity to develop something in Brixton, for example, which is following the BMC model, but you will manage it. In effect you’ve organically grown, its not like you’ve done a conquest, conquered another civic structure somewhere else.

IE - Exactly it would be organic, the examples we’ve mentioned - Edinburgh, Southampton, Brixton, - you can see they’ve all got completely different cultures, and any model you put in has got to be adapted for those circumstances.

CG - But the defining factor, the thing that links them together is this notion of buying into an entrepreneurial structure that is guaranteeing success and that that success is this cocktail of economic success and cultural success which we haven’t been able to define. We can define the economic, but because the economic is constantly tempered by the cultural in that equation it makes it very difficult to define the whole thing. It interests me that that doesn’t seem to be a problem, that people will buy into that because they see the success. Success can still be valued even if all of those levels of proof and detail don’t exist. Once that entrepreneurial model has established its level of trust , it’s unstoppable. Its not limited by opportunities, it can go off and seed opportunities.

IE - and I think that model works in business or in cultural institutions . Once you’ve achieved success then it breeds success.

CG - You obviously approve of that model while you are at the centre of it, but would you approve of it if you were on the periphery of that structure ?

IE - We’ve taken as many steps as we can to try and counteract that by outreach work of various kinds. We are very sensitive to that and we’re trying to make everything inclusive. Because we’re a small organisation with a big, visible structure with lots of companies, it’s quite hard for people to manipulate us and unsettle us. If something’s very physical its got an identity, its got a clear mission. If all of us were to die tomorrow this would carry on in some way .

CG - If you were to walk out tomorrow, what would be left ? It obviously has a certain momentum and that momentum will sustain it for certain amount of time, but because there isn’t a manual for the BMC, no-one can sit down, read it for 2 days and then know what to do. It’s actually about your ability to respond and interpret the needs of what you define to be the community or stakeholders that you’re representing.

IE - In that sense I am that person that you’re putting forward. The totalitarian who’s going to sort all this The cultural impresario. We are a catalyst organisation and I have to respond to that role because that is what I did it for in the first place . Since then I’ve built up the team, but also built up a network of contacts that help to support the whole thing.

CG - How do yuo get into into that position where you can say ‘I am the cultural impresario and I will be judged by the fact that I will deliver’. What's created that position ?. A lot of arts organisations operate within a kind of duplicity in which they have to say certain things in funding agreements in order to get money to do what they want. And a lot of arts funders are actually complicit in that. They accept that they have a structure that people have to adhere to, but ultimately what they want are the kind of results that come out at the end. Now, in order to get into a position whereby you have the kind of track record that you have, has that been a process of having to say you’re going to do certain things that you don’t think are right, or have you been able to say exactly what you have been intending to do all along and get support for that ?

IE - Yes, we’ve been able to do that - even at the early stages, I believed it was going to work because of convergence, that's what I said was going to happen and that's what did happen. Part of it, I have to say, comes down to my experience, you have to be a bit of an oddball to do what I’ve been doing, I haven’t meet that many other people who have run these sort of organisations, but I think they’re all a bit odd.

CG- - If you look at successful organisations around the country, it’s either because a person has created that organisation, and is identified with that organisation, or that has happened previously to such an extent that it’s created sufficient momentum for that organisation to just carry on simply by virtue of that momentum . I’m interested in how you get to that point where the momentum takes over. Does the arts funding system support you to get to that point or do you have to wheel and deal to get to that point whereby you have that degree of trust ? In order to become a cultural impresario on the outside, do you have to work with one on the inside ?

IE - I think that what's happened is that I’ve just got a lot of contacts and a network and I’ve never put all my eggs in one basket. That's something that I’ve learnt through running a design business for 20 years. I knew one designers who only ever had one client - but I’m not like that. Suddenly - because I had experience in arts, I was a designer, I’d worked in interiors so I knew a lot about buildings, I’d run a multi-tenanted building, I’d run a business and knew about cashflows, I’d managed a company of nearly 40 people - suddenly I had all the skills that were necessary in order to run a media centre, I just didn’t know I was going to run one. I think that anyone else needs to have gone through that amount of experience if they’re going to set themselves up to do something which is so diverse. You can’t pick, say, an accountant, and say this is the formula, go and do it. That's why I’m important, because I set this thing in motion and it seems to have worked as a self-sustaining model. Certainly more self-sustaining than the average arts centre. But the process has only just begun, I can see long-term now because I’m old enough to know how things begin and end and how they carry on. I can actually do something for this organisation, I have a rough vision of the far future and a quite detailed vision of the near future, so I can actually put that into effect. if I was to die tomorrow this organisation would certainly carry on but it wouldn’t do some of the more proactive things that I’m considering but it would still operate a very successful media centre.

You’re concerned about raising the stakes, chasing the game, but if the game moves somewhere else then what I’m saying is that you need people with a certain amount of experience to be able to follow the game and move into the new situation. All I’m saying is that I know that we can deliver it because, apart from my experience I’ve made sure that I’ve got other people around who are following technology and culture, seeing exactly what the changes are so that we can feed that into the formula to make sure that something comes out of the other end that you couldn’t predict simply by putting it into a computer.