Interim Show Learnings

More narrative reflections have already been covered (is it art, beautiful mess, is it 'acceptable' art), but here is our lessons-learnt and misc reflections

Tomgos:

• Nearly fell foul of lead-times, notably the printers - easy when it's just you, harder when you are relying on other people. Was simple enough to manage 'in my head', but any more complexity and real project management tracking might be needed
• Real art (not digital) is a pain to transport, a pain to store, and costs significant money (probably around £200 in this case, mostly on printing)
• Getting people involved early meant we had examples to encourage others, but also gave a good sense of how people might interact, and which cards might be popular
• The (relatively last minute) switch to push pins and cork-board saved our bacon somewhat - it gave a tonne of flexibility to move things, to expand outside the board etc
• Ordering unfoiled versions of the cards cost first (since the lead time was a lot lower on these) was a smart move, and worth the extra money - it meant we could send out the cards sooner, and was a good back-up had the foiled cards taken longer
• The piece require quite a lot of 'feeding and watering'- cards had to be restocked, the board had to be cleared etc
• Some basic research would have identified PostSecret, thankfully it wasn't too close to our idea, but it was a bit of close call!
• Everything looks tiny in a huge gallery space
• Getting in-person feedback was GREAT, and better than agonising over Insta view counts - how could we get this in other ways?
• People love the 'challenge' of the blank cards, and seemed to grasp what was required
• NOBODY stole the pen!

Tathos:

• Filling in this list is so lame!
• Getting other peeps involved was FUN! Participatory art is a lot more fun and a lot less dumb than I thought
• Getting people involved took the art in directions we didn't plan! It came to life! The cards were designed thinking of personal sharing and mental health, but people used them in all sorts of unexpected ways - positive messages, political commentary, and lots of genuinely funny jokes about farting - and even the most spicy messages had some sort of thought in them
• Really fucking amazing to see the thing come alive and grow and evolve over the show - and the stuff posted influenced the type of stuff that got added... IT LIVED!
• Nailed the balance between my input and Tomgos's e.g. he wanted to do faces, which makes sense, but I got him to do hands, which is much more interesting and less obvious
• Proud we went out of our comfort zone, even if Tomgos was cacking his widefronts
• It was scary that people might reject our art and it might sit there unused for 3 days - imagine!!
• Making a series of pictures was actually kinda fun, and having a theme running through them made them better, it wasn't boring and lame like i thought it might be
• Making cards with no blanks was a mistake and a throw back to the initial idea that we should have dropped - people took them like we wanted, but they were confused they couldn't post them
• People REALLY had the urge to communicate - when the board overflowed, people posted on the walls, when the pins ran out, people doubled-up, when cards ran out, people improvised their own - it was like an unstoppable organic creature with a life of it's own
• The pin board was laughably small, but we lucked out as we could post on the wall, and the pin board sort of acted like a coke to slow posting and stop all the cards going straight away, and as someone said, the tiny board smothered in cards surrounded by all the cards on the wall was a beautiful metaphor for the space we give mental health vs the space it deserves
• OMFG the breeze! It was terrifying because I thought the whole shit heap would blow away, but it was BEAUTIFUL too, the cards dancing in the breeze on their pins, like they were pleading to be read and understood
• Still think this list idea was lame, but I guess it was sort of useful