Kirklees Media Centre - Huddersfield
Keith Jeffery


CG - The perception of Kirklees Media Centre is that it’s primarily a business development centre. How do you achieve the balance between the economic and the cultural outputs ?

KJ - It is primarily a business development agency and I like to think of it in terms of an agency rather than a building. The primary impulse for the funding of the centre came through the economic development service of the council. We are primarily an economic development agency for Kirklees and that is what we are primarily funded for. But because of the nature of the media we need to have very strong cultural strand to our activities. We have always tried to be quite neutral in our activities, but supportive. Our new digital arts facility is a non-neutral thing which is a bit out of step from the way that we have always developed because we are going to have to develop an artistic vision for that.

CG - Surely it must be difficult to be neutral in all your activities. There must be a line beyond which you won’t go and a degree of intervention that you are going to make around who you have in the centre. If you are drawing that line, whereabouts do you draw it, and how do you make those differentiations; is it that you are tweaking activity or do you have a sense that you want to focus activity in a particular direction.

KJ - Yes, there is a line that we draw and it’s to do with the mixture of tenancy. The philosophy of the place is that there is a mixed economy; there’s public and private sector, there’s community-based and business-based activity and obviously artistic as well. When we first opened we got the tenants that we could who were broadly within the parameters that we set around our definitions of media and then took it from there. When space becomes available we look at who are likely to become the most interesting companies in terms of adding to the mix of tenants we want in.

CG - Are those criteria overt or is it simply that part of your role is to act a bit like an entrepreneur who is balancing out what is there?

KJ - Yes, I’m not supposed to just give out space in the centre without reference to the existing tenants to make sure there is no direct competition - and that is becoming harder and harder these days. There is a sub-group of the board that I’m supposed to run things by, but I don’t always do this because sometimes it’s obvious that we need to have a particular company in, or financial pressures dictate that we use all the space.

CG - Do you feel that companies that come in have a commercial advantage over those that don’t use the centre?

KJ - Definitely, especially new start businesses. If you’re not in you’re not seen to be at the heart of the activity and you miss out on opportunities. Stuff comes to me and if it’s approved then I circulate around the tenants and if you’re not in here then you just don’t get that.

CG - Do you think that the centre might become counter-productive, that if the centre can’t expand to cope with all the tenants that it might need to hold that it might end up damaging the ecology?

KJ - That is why we have developed the Kirklees Media Initiative and that why I’m trying to talk of the Media Centre in terms of an agency rather than a building. The Media Initiative’s specific aim is to develop media industries in Kirklees. It grew from the steering group of the Media Centre, and many other constituent groups who had a stake in the media centre. Once we were open that group lost it’s function. We then turned the focus of that group outwards to Kirklees and invited literally everyone - we identified about 300 local media related businesses and organisations - we wrote to everyone and said ‘can we get involved ?’. We developed a strategy and a developed a steering group from that.

CG - Do you think there is a point at which there might be more than one Kirklees Media Centre, or that you might at least pass the ownership of this building over to it’s tenants and go and do another development somewhere else?

KJ - We wouldn’t hand over the asset because the asset is what we earn the income from to sustain the development activities. I have always said that we saw ourselves as being a focal point but not the focal point - part of a network. I can see the potential for going out to say Halifax or Wakefield and developing a media centre there.

CG - If part of the significance of something like Kirklees Media Centre is the fact that it establishes a critical mass of activity. What is the outer orbit of that critical mass and where do you set up the boundaries for that critical mass. Would you keep extending the umbrella outwards as you get bigger - is it about developing deeper or developing wider?

KJ - It would be difficult to develop our activities geographically outside Kirklees. I do find myself going through mailing lists and if people aren’t in Kirklees then cutting them off because we’re not funded to support their activity. Having said that, if people come in and want advice we do so. In terms of areas of activity we’ve tried to come up with rigid definitions of what media is but I think it’s just like you know it when you see it.

CG - Geographical areas as well, Halifax is not in Kirklees (Dewsbury, Batley, Huddersfield are ) so presumably Halifax could be a client for a lot of businesses who are based here because it is so close. So in that way you’re disadvantaging industry within Halifax itself because you’re offering a competitive edge to industries within Huddersfield for which some of the clients might be in Halifax - it might mean that Halifax will suffer because of that. Although there is inevitably a degree of competition between local authorities for developing local economic infrastructure, do you feel any bigger sense of responsibility?

KJ - No, in this particular field there are so many opportunities and it’s growing so fast that I don’t think that really arises. We have been specifically set up to develop media industries in Kirklees to give competitive advantage over other people, that’s what we do.

CG - So it’s not like first Kirklees, second West Yorkshire, third The North.

KJ - No, that’s not our goal. That’s for people like Yorkshire and Humberside Arts and the Training & Enterprise Councils. Its their role more than our role.

CG -There isn’t a sense in which you feel that in order for Kirklees to develop you need to be making interventions at regional level?

KJ - Yes we do do that, definitely, we develop links with the Yorkshire Media Production Agency for example. We do work with people in through the Yorkshire and Humberside Arts Local Authorities Media Forum, we do work with people and give advice.

CG - Do you sell that all that expertise, does the Media Centre have a currency that it can trade in around the expertise that it has developed?

KJ - We could do, yes, but we don’t. The way it happens is that people ring up and say we’re thinking of developing a media centre can we come and talk about it. I did the same when I was setting this up.

CG - I’m interested in the personification of media centres, how much does each centre take on the identity of the person that is running it ? Do you feel that the agency that you talked about might more appropriately be being linked to individuals who have an entrepreneurial role than to the actual bricks and mortar themselves.

KJ - A lot of people that we have to deal with respect buildings, there’s a sort of prestige and power that is associated with the building. But from my point of view it is about the individuals, about working with the people who have that sense of entrepreneurialism/creativity, just finding interesting people. Part of my job is to uncover those people because there not always visible, they just get on with their stuff.

CG - Is it the case that you may find somebody who can take on that role, but in that order to convince people of the validity of that role you need a flagship development ?.

KJ - You do need a front person, but you need to be able to have something substantial to operate. You need success as well, you need to be able demonstrate that success.

CG - Do you feel there is a paradox there between the essentially dispersed nature of new media activity, and the flagship development. That the development of the centre runs counter to the development of the network ?

KJ - No, I don’t because I think we are a social animal. One of the reasons why you work is to meet other people. People will always want to come together with people who are like-minded.

CG - Could you envisage a scenario in which the Kirklees Media Centre has its brass name plates outside showing all the companies that are hosted here, but many of those companies are remote. They may subscribe to the principle of the Kirklees Media Centre but they operate from somewhere else and use this only as a meeting centre?

KJ - It’s not the ability to meet but the ability to work in that environment, and to work and build relationships with other people in that environment.

CG - In one scenario you could say, ok ,we have 50 businesses and none of these business are delivering, for example, high level scanning techniques, and there is a demand for it. You could either say we will endeavour to provide that, or we will support a business in trying to provide that themselves. I’m not quite sure which route might be most appropriate for you. Are you saying that you will follow an opportunity if it exists regardless of the danger of disrupting the ecology that you are trying to construct.

KJ - I see it in terms of ladders of opportunity - there are various points of entry within Kirklees. We’re the second rung on the ladder where you might develop your practice to a certain level, where there’s the time and space for experimentation. One problem is the difficulty in putting stuff on the table and saying ‘ take that away and have a look at it and see what good stuff creative people can do ’ , especially in new media. That’s why we launched the Kirklees Media Production Fund. We’ve got funding from CableTel and the Council, the Technical College and Yorkshire Media, Print and Production Agency, because one of the things identified was that local video makers were getting stuck in this vicious circle of only doing corporate work. They were spending all their time chasing contracts, whereas the real high value stuff was is in doing programming for TV or other outlets.

CG - Does the context provide the limits for the possible development of media activity in Kirklees; is there a point at which you will be saying, ‘we can never change the profile of Kirklees beyond this amount, people in London, Manchester, Newcastle will have this view of Kirklees and we will never be able to get beyond this point ?’

KJ - No, we’re very ambitious. We talk about it in terms of it in an international context, especially when you have the Centre for Sonic Arts next door being an international centre. Part of the Creative Town Initiative this year is about completely changing the image. In terms of new media technology, a little bit of influence now might have a massive effect. We’re very ambitious, but we want to take one step at a time as well.

CG - If you don’t see a limit to growth what are the hurdles?

KJ - There’s not a limit to ambition but there is a limit to growth. Huddersfield, where most of the activity happens, is a small town and were still having to convince people the value of media as an industry.

CG - You have a profile, you have your name on the map, but is that because you have actually managed to get yourself up and running before anyone else and have distributed enough literature to say you’re here. However, that existence isn’t backed up by some notion of content that people can identify with. Are the art commissions a process of trying to flesh that out ?.

KJ - Yes they are. I want this place to be exciting and full of interesting people doing interesting stuff all the time and to keep coming back. I’m not really bothered if it’s seen to be cultural or not.

CG - Yes, but if what you want is to raise some kind of buzz around the place - how do you convert that buzz into the things that are the outcomes that you are committed to; the notion of developing businesses, developing art ?

KJ - Charles Landry talks about it in terms of creative milieus. A milieu which attracts more creative people and creates a virtuous spiral. We have only so many people here, so we need to bring other people into the building through our activities and then that has an impact on their activities when they go back home and back to their own workplace.

CG - How do you regulate that buzz and ensure that it’s going in the right direction. Does that take us back to this notion of the entrepreneur. That you sit and you watch it and you say that ‘ I will stake my position on knowing that this is going in the right direction’ - or do you have measures?

KJ - No we don’t. It’s funny but we haven’t been asked by anybody to deliver to certain outputs except perhaps by our financial targets, which we by and large do. So we haven’t really tried to quantify, except in terms of ‘ it feels right, it feels busy ’ . We count the number of people who come into the building. We always note in our quarterly reports interesting events that are happening.

CG - That relies a lot upon you trusting your ability to make that assessment and what if at some point if you get called upon, if someone says hang on I need to know more ..... ?

KJ - Next year we are going to have to be doing that. We’ve got outcomes that we have committed to for the lottery and we are going to have to work to those. Numbers of people, numbers of performances in the cafe bar, synergetic projects all those sort of things, we will have to start quantifying those.

CG - If you say that the new art commissions that you’re doing are about attempting to move forward in terms of identity and profile and content. You are going to be forced to have to make artistic assessments about quality. You could say that the entrepreneurial role that you’re occupying will empower you to do that, but is it a different task ?.

KJ - That’s why we have employed an artistic director. We need somebody who can do that and up until now we haven’t had anyone. My role over the last three years has been to develop the cultural and artistic aspects of the Media Centre as well as the media industry development side as best I can. As both are starting to take off we can split those two functions now and we have an artistic director to look at the cultural content of what we do while I work on the media & economic development side of it.

CG - Going back to what we were talking about earlier, that you do have some criteria about what you include and what you don’t include. You have now created two separate sets of activities each of which have boundaries, yet one is tied to economic output and one is tied to cultural output. Do you see that there are likely to be conflicts within that and if how do you resolve them ?

KJ - I don’t see the where the conflicts come in. I see opportunities.

CG - Do you ever feel that there’s a sense from people outside that they’re cautious about working with those businesses in the Centre because they’re seen as being ‘nannied’ . Is there a caution because those businesses have been developed through an artificial process.

KJ - No, I haven’t come across that before. Just the opposite. People tend to take the businesses more seriously because they come in, they see a nice building, they’re quite happy with the company and of the people that they’re dealing and they don’t really know what the Media Centre is, they don’t understand what it’s about. It’s a very difficult concept to explain to people and what happens is we pass a prestige on to the company and so they’re taken more seriously.

CG - You’ve followed this route of Lottery funding and through the Lottery you will be setting up a number of projects which will have resource implications. For the first time you are buying in to depreciating assets whereas up until now you have always worked with appreciating assets in the form of buildings. That is going to put a different set of pressures upon the objectives that the centre has, because until now it’s been very low risk. Do you feel there is a necessity to take on those risks to develop, that it’s the only way forward ? Or is it that you’ve taken that route because an opportunity has presented itself and that opportunity comes with risks which you’re happy to accept for now ?

KJ - It is the only way we can go forward. We were given a building which was half built, half developed and we were given three years to raise money to finish it off. As there was only one source of funding we had to make sure we got it because we just didn’t have any choice. There are risks associated with the Lottery, such as depreciation, which is a problem we’re are going to have to overcome in the future. We’ve got a really solid level of income and we’re going to have work our financial projections based on 94% occupancy rate for the foreseeable future. But I’m not that worried about not achieving that. I think we have always been around that sort of level anyway. The way media is going, even if a second recession did come along, it would be effected far less than other sectors of the economy. So, I feel reasonably comfortable that over five years we can survive in the model that we have got now, because we have planned that far ahead.

CG - Picking up on the depreciation issue. Many media centres have profiled themselves on the basis of the resources that they have available to people. In most instances those resources are very rapidly depreciating resources. You have steered clear of that up until now although you are now making a significant move that direction. Is there a danger that your need to sustain those resources becomes a drain on the developments for the other parts of the centre.

KJ - Yes, one way of approaching it is if we get a reputation for being an R&D experimental lab and we develop the right alliances with the right suppliers, I can see the potential there for getting free kit to test out. The other way is to make sure that the hardware we get in is going to last a long time. We need to take a creative approach to it to make sure it is as future-proof as we can make it. In five years time we could be scraping things together on kit which is falling to bits. I think there are ways out of that and although we have a depreciation fund building up, it will be inadequate. We have to make sure that we are still functioning and operating and that there will be other sources of funding that we can apply to. By that time we should have a track record so we can persuade people. It’s a calculated risk but it’s not one that frightens me.

CG - It’s a factor in the success of a lot of organisations that their capital resources are seen as losing credibility after a certain amount of time because they haven’t been able to develop them sufficiently. Organisations go through cycles in which they have resources that are attractive and fashionable and then they lose them and go into a bit of a dip until they can come back up again with the next investment. Kirklees Media Centre is still on its first rising roll - how do you feel about moving in to that kind of cycle ?.

KJ - There’s a very good model here in Huddersfield in Bowman Street Studios. It came from the Caribbean community of Huddersfield and it started off as a basic four track studio centre. It’s gradually grown and grown because of its professionalism. it aims to ensure that people get the best equipment that can be provided and always works to upgrade that equipment. They have now reached a stage where they have got a major recording studio in Huddersfield which is dealing with chart acts, the major record companies come up and use it. That’s why I’m not so concerned about sustaining the equipment because there are ways of getting equipment and cash in to buy it. If we have got the right people in place and a professional approach, people will want to come and use us and work here. Perhaps the equipment might not quite be as hot as the New Media Centre in the ICA ,but because of the support structure around it nobody else can produce better work.

CG - If in order to ensure that there is a professional approach to your resources you identify a training need, do you take responsibility for that training as well ? do you become more and more interventionist?

KJ - Again the idea of the place is that people don’t have to know how to use the kit. There is a technician there and there is an artistic director there. The idea is realising the concept.

CG - In many ways its difficult not to see the Kirklees Media Centre now as being quite separate from this other resource based, production based, organisation. You hinted that it might become something else in the future, but have you made a positive decision to manage it at this stage because you feel it’s appropriate to Kirklees Media Centre or because it’s the only way to realise this opportunity.

KJ - It’s both. The success of the Media Centre is dependent on the assets that we’ve got through the Lottery. The Lottery is concerned about outputs and the facility could say ‘ well we’re a separate organisation ’ . Therefore we have to control the activities of that facility because if that facility was separate from us they could do what the hell they wanted and the Lottery would want it’s money back. I obviously can’t allow that to happen, so it needs to be quite closely tied in .

CG - Presumably you could have set up a company to manage that activity. At some there is a possibility that the identity of this project will start to merge with the identity of the media centre itself. How you move forward from that position and the challenges this might present to the role of the Media Centre itself.

KJ - Yes that’s why I think in the short term we need to be in control of it. We’re not planning to float it it off in the next two or three years. It’s a possibility that we won’t necessarily rule out but it is crucial to have success and for that success to be visible. The content of what we do is not always readily apparent and we do need to establish that.

CG - You have mentioned the significance of developing and sustaining a ‘buzz’ around the centre. Is there a danger, in the context of the entrepreneurial model of the centre, that the entrepreneur may get bored with one level of ‘buzz’ and want a different level of ‘buzz’. Therefore the focus of that buzz shifts away from the things that are more productive towards things that are more risky and there is a subsequent risk placed upon the centre ?

KJ - Yes we have started to get to that point now. Our approach at the minute is to let people get on, and to help out wherever we can with things that are broadly within our aims and objectives. For the International Women’s Day festival we gave over a conference room for three or four days to different groups looking at different aspects of new technologies for women. We are now getting to the point where that means it’s costing us money because the conference rooms are very popular. We are just starting to reach that point and I’m starting to wrestle with that. On the one hand I think it could be quite positive thing because it might force people in to doing more professional things.

CG - Are you articulating a sense in which the Media Centre is always on the brink of being dragged down, that your role is protecting it from a level of abuse that will actually see it becoming redundant, that will actually see it just turning it into another small town clique ?

KJ - Yes, it could quite easily. In fact somebody said why not get a £12K p.a centre manager to make sure the rent is being paid. That’s why again it comes back to us being an agency and not just a building. It all fits in to this quite messy picture of what’s going on.

CG - You want the profile, you want to meet the needs of the businesses, you want to develop their professional practice, but you want to do it all within an entrepreneurial framework that you want to measure on a fairly intuitive level. Can that be done within a public sector framework ?

KJ - We’ve had to do that. That’s the course that we have had to take. There are things in the Creative Town Initiative that measure the size of the local industry and then measure the impact. I’ve also done some informal research into the size of the local media economy but we don’t really know. We have had to take the entrepreneurial opportunistic approach to get us this far but it’s not going to sustain us.

CG - There is also a sense that many people don’t actually place a lot of faith in the measures that are used. They are used as a bureaucratic shorthand for something which we don’t feel meets up to the measures that we actually use. Although we acknowledge that the measures that we use are very hard to define. When you’re in a development role sometimes those measures, which are often two or three years out of date, are not necessarily useful for you to work with. In terms of an area where it’s even more complicated because what you’re trying to do is match or juggle the cultural output with economical output you’re placing yourself in a very vulnerable position - especially when you’re now raising the stakes on the cultural side. Do you feel you are sticking your neck out?

KJ - No, I don’t. I see it all within an economic context anyway. It’s a problem with cultural industries as a whole. if you look at ICI they’ve got massive research & development and that's where all the new product comes from. Victoria Woods’ first play was in a subsidised theatre. That’s the context that I see it in.

CG - But ICI are only interested in economic output, they don’t have the sense that they want to make the world a better place. If you’re saying that you want to make Kirklees a better place, at some point there are going to arise potential conflicts between that notion and the notion that you want certain people in Kirklees to be economically better off. There are going to be preferential decisions. Do you feel that you can deal with those contradictions by taking each one as it comes?

KJ - Yes. There’s ambiguities anywhere, the thing is to know who is your primary market, who do you have to keep happy.

CG - Say, for example, Apple came to you and said we want to give everybody in Huddersfield an Apple computer. If your feeling and your intuition was that Apple are going to go out of business in three years time and by training everybody in Huddersfield to use Apples it’s going to be an regressive move. Do you then say then we will follow that route because it’s going to meet our outputs or do you not follow that route because ultimately it’s going to be counter-productive?

KJ - I’ll give you a real example which happened a couple of months a ago. We were approached by Sony to set up a Sony centre of excellence for media training. They came to us and they pitched their offer to us and we didn’t like it and we turned it down because we felt that what they were offering we were already doing anyway - and the deal wasn’t right - but we did turn the opportunity down of being branded by Sony.

CG - So the reasons for turning them down were to do with the fact that they weren’t supporting it enough economically or it was disrupting the profile or the ecology of the centre?

KJ - The deal they were offering financially wasn’t very good but more importantly we felt that it would disrupt the developments that were happening here. For us it would be shifting the focus.

CG - Do you think there will come a point when you will have to accept that level of disruption. If Yorkshire TV decide they want to up-root and re-locate in Kirklees do you say that’s great we’ll get that in because it will meet a certain set of objectives, but it will actually throw a lot of businesses that in the media centre out of kilter completely. Do you close the shipyards because by closing the shipyards you free up a workforce for the new car factory ?.

KJ - We would try to build a consensus approach to it. In that scenario I don’t think it would particularly effect the businesses that we’ve got in here and we’d probably think its a brilliant idea , but I think what’s more important is the approach and the principles and the objectives that we have got attached to that which we talk about in the media strategy document. There is a network of people around and we do meet in different in types of networks so that when things like that come up we can talk about it, get a good picture, get a fully rounded picture as well because there is a lot of expertise in those networks and we can make a sensible decision. If the consensus of that group is ‘well get them in’, ok it might put say ten of your tenants out of business but then they might get a job up the road.

CG - Is your loyalty to that consensus or to the centre?

KJ - To the consensus because we can’t operate without the consensus. We have turned down opportunities because it would effect that consensus. That’s the thing about us being the glue, we fill the gaps in which nobody is operating. We could quite easily develop a new technologies community project but Artimedia are doing that. It’s being done and we don’t have to worry about that. We have never really wanted to get into serious training because, again, there are other people doing it.

CG - Do you think there’s therefore an argument for you not to deliver any services at all?

KJ - Yes, there’s been a strong argument for that from day one.

CG- How do you feel about that, do you feel that you will take on services but that you will take them on a short fuse or you’ll take them on . .

KJ - That is the original remit of the centre. We only take the delivery of services as a last resort.

CG - Do you think it’s ever possible to be anything more than duplicitous with the consensus because their role is to be defenders of the status quo?

KJ - You can tell different stories to different people but the stories are still true. There are lots of ambiguities about this place, you just pick out the best one to tell that particular person. The fact that I’ve got an accent and can talk to these councillors is significant, if I was some kind of middle class ponce trying to explain about media the whole thing would fall around somebody’s ears. They would just get pissed of with it. The process of selling it to local decision-makers is crucial and a long process and you have to give them success all the time. Where you do fail you have to make sure that nobody knows.

CG - Do you think media centres are the sports centres of the 90’s . Many arguments had to be made in the 70’s to develop these new, high profile, centres for leisure, they were sold on visions of participation when the reality is that they’re clubs for small groups of people.

KJ - There is that danger. But I’ve never believed in public subsidy. I’ve done an MA in Arts Policy and Management and I still can’t get my head around public subsidy for the arts in the way that it is now. There’s usually a good economic reason for subsidising a particular arts - like research and development or training. Not simply keeping open the local theatre because its a couple of hundred grand a short on its funding . There is a model which is quite quite prevalent in America in which a centre has assets which it earns commercial income from, which are then covenanted back in to artistic activities. A very powerful one, and given the context by which we are operating from, we know that funding in the arts isn’t going to increase. How do we cope with that ? Well you have to set up models and mechanisms where organisations can earn their own money. That’s what I like about this place.

CG - Do you think there is a danger because what happens is they become organisations which service only those people that use them. The bigger picture, the remit for developing cultural health of the community, actually will become lost.

KJ - What always excites me is when if you’re having to deliver stuff to a local community because you’re having to do that to pay bills you’re more likely to get it right to deliver what local people want.

CG - But if you’re going to do something that speaks about a set of concerns that raise people’s perceptions, that move people forward culturally, that challenge their understandings, you may have to accept that it’s a more expensive thing to do. But if you value the community then you’re going to make arguments for that investment.

KJ - Yes, again it’s about that idea of principled intervention. The problem I have with arts funding is that it’s just there to fill the deficit. I think you should give arts organisations an independence, and the only independence that’s worth having is financial independence. Obviously there need to be checks and balances put in, but it can be done. If you ’re responding to the needs of the local community a lot of those aims are far more likely to be reached because you play games to fulfil what arts boards and what arts funders want. That’s the game that you have to play. But it doesn’t actually chime with what local people are interested in. If you’re running a business, a private business you have to get it right otherwise you go out of business and that brings a completely different set of sensibilities and a dynamic to the work that you do. You have to make it interesting. You have to make it exciting because all the art, the culture, that excites me the most is that which you have to pay to get in and you value it a bit more.

CG - Do you think there’s ever a situation where the cost of something becomes too expensive, but that it’s still valuable. Do you think certain things might get costed out of the equation which actually have a value?

KJ - Yes, that’s where public money does come into it. It’s the research & development side and training side of it, those two mainly. I always look at it in an economic model because it works as well for a cultural model as well. If you want to produce art, good work anyway, you need to have the chance for experimentation somewhere. I never see a contradiction between those two. People pay £16 to go and see a football match and everybody whinges about it but 40,000 people still go.

CG - Do you think you would ever charge for your gallery?

KJ - -No, I don’t see how you can. There’s not an accepted model for paying.

CG - But if you felt that you could do it better by charging?

KJ - Yes, if we could. I’ve never thought of that actually. I’m not in principle opposed to it. If I thought we could get really good work in there which people would really want to see and get people to see it for a reasonable amount of money then I would do it. It’s like the internet, people almost expect to pay and it forces us to deliver us a better service.

CG - If you’re setting up the media centre as being a place where new media activity is progressing, do you feel that you’re are in a position to define what the exhibition of creative new media work is going to be ?. Are you going to define the equivalent of the arthouse cinema within new media practice ?. I know some people are beginning to develop ideas, but your centre is much further advanced than those situations. Do you feel that you could take it on ?

KJ - I’ve never thought of it in those terms actually. Yes I do want us to set standards but I don’t think we should be saying what they are. I’m quite prepared for the majority of our stuff to come out to be crap because we are a place for experimentation. Just because something’s crap it’s not a failure, because hopefully, we would have learned something. The thing that I am most concerned about is that the work we do has a root in popular culture. I think it gets lost, the impact and the real potential gets lost, when the fine artists and visual artists say become involved. It needs to come from the dance/techno side of things rather than the fine art/visual art side of it. That’s what I’m most concerned about.

CG - You have identified a philosophy for how you want that work to be developed and how you want audiences for that work to be developed. You also have at your disposal many of the mechanisms for doing that so you could say that, unless the media centre takes that on and tries to do that, it is actually failing it’s mission - whatever that might be.

KJ - I have always felt that that’s the job of the artistic director to think through . The work that I’ve done on the facility is to make sure that we’ve got the money. I’ve never really thought about it in those terms about certainly not in the way that you’ve articulated so, I don’t know, I will have to think though a bit more.

CG - Maybe that’s something that would be interesting to follow up because there are clearly people working in a media centre environment who see their role as about providing platforms for artists to explore or produce art works in a conventional sense. There are some developments which are about extending the role of the cinema into new media technology and in many ways they will be probably either follow a gallery model or simply follow the BFI cinema model. But what you’re hinting at here is that you might want to develop a paying audience for culturally significant new media. That partly happens in the Cyber Cafe, but it’s a bit sporadic and a bit loose but it would be very interesting to see what might be possible to resolve going down that route.

KJ - Yes, very few bits of digital media I’ve seen are really engaging. That's why I think the role of our facility is it to try and come up with something which clicks in the same way as looking at a painting or listening to a piece of music. How do we get what you get out of a book and put that into a digital context. That’s what we do, we have to fiddle around, we’ve just got to do stuff and keep on doing it and doing it until we get it right.

CG - How can you then curate that space in such a way that is both attractive for people to come and want to do that and also pay for that. But what you’re presenting to them is not Lara Croft, it’s not Formula 1 Racing, its actually something else, it’s something that reflects upon a bigger picture. Maybe there aren’t that many titles around but unless those titles have got the ability to have some degree of exposure they’re not really going to be seen and people are not going to get to know about them.

KJ - When you suggested it would be interesting in showing CD-ROMs in here I thought ‘ how do we do that ? ‘ Is it a function of the problem with CD ROMs or is that going to go away soon?

CG - It seems inherent within new media work. It’s volume is invisible so you have no sense of the scale of something when you first approach it. When you walk into a gallery and it’s got pictures hanging up you take a snapshot of that, you know how much time is going to be involved. Because you don’t know the volume of new media people tend not to commit themselves to engaging with it. Maybe because they feel it’s going to be hard work, but also because if they do like it, they’re actually going to have to commit more time than they actually thought to it anyway. On the other hand there’s actually a real value to it, because it means that you can build things in to a space which have incredible dimensions and depths that have no overhead, there is little or no premium to actually present those things. However, the bottom line is that there is no common language that people have. They don’t know how to walk in to that space and work with those things.