Journal articles on the topic 'Light Opera Group of the Negev'

AbstractColluvial sediments of talus relicts (“talus flatirons”) around mesas preserve a record that sheds light on slope-forming processes at temporal scales > 103 yr. The sedimentology and soil stratigraphy of two groups of talus flatirons in the northeastern hyperarid Negev desert reveal four deposition events in the younger talus and at least two in the older one. Numerical modeling of high-resolution 10Be depth profiles suggests that these taluses were deposited during the middle Pleistocene; the younger talus group first depositional event occurred at 551 − 142+ 80 ka and its abandonment occurred at 270 − 38+ 17 ka. The abandonment of the older talus group and stabilization of its surface occurred at 497 − 114+ 176 ka. These ages indicate that the development of the studied talus sequence is not specifically associated with Pleistocene glacial–interglacial cycles. The 10Be modeled concentrations indicate significant differences in the average inheritance of talus flatirons of different groups. These differences can be attributed to variability in the transport distance and duration of gravel exposure during transport but could also reflect some temporal variability in cliff retreat. Our results also demonstrate that talus slopes in hyperarid areas, despite their steepness, can store sediment for long periods (~ 500 ka) and thus constitute a valuable archive.

Katie Mitchell has been directing opera since 1996, when she debuted on the operatic stage with Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni at the Welsh National Opera. Since then, she has directed more than twenty-nine operas in major opera houses around the world. Mitchell here speaks of her directorial approach when working with the genre, addressing various aspects of interest for those who want a better grasp of the dynamics of opera-making in the twenty-first century. Ranging from the director’s imprint, or signature on the work they put on the stage, to the relationships forged with people running opera institutions, Mitchell reflects on her experiences when staging opera productions. She sheds light on some fundamental differences between theatre-making and opera production, including the issue of text – the libretto, the dramatic text, and the musical score – and the very basic fact that in opera a director is working with singers, that is, with musicians whose attitude and behaviour on stage is necessarily different from that of actors in the theatre. Running throughout the conversation is Mitchell’s commitment to ensure that young and contemporary audiences do not see opera as a museum artefact but as a living performative experience that resonates with the aesthetics and political imperatives of our contemporary world. She speaks of the uncompromising political imperatives that remain central to her work ethic, even if this means deserting a project before it starts, and reflects on her long-term working relations with opera institutions that are open to new and alternative approaches to opera-making strategies. Mitchell underlines her respect for the specific rules of an art form that, because of its collaborative nature, must allow more space for theatre-makers to venture within its complex performative paths if it wants to secure a place in the future. Mario Frendo is Senior Lecturer of Theatre and Performance and Head of the Department of Theatre Studies at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta, where he is the director of CaP, a research group focusing on the links between culture and performance.

Abstract The history of the design decisions directly related to the construction of the Sydney Opera House remains largely anecdotal. A rich group of items recently discovered in Australia may now start filling this gap, as documents brought to light include the drawings issued by the general contractor to build the concrete formwork for the shells, drawings of the temporary structures and falsework, site images, and contractor’s notes. All in all, the drawings display sophisticated combinatory solutions for attaining the structural form required whilst introducing repetition and flexibility in the making of the discrete pieces. While suggesting a remarkable combination of manufacturing and structural shrewdness, these blueprints call into question the canonical history of the building roof’s famous ‘sails’, the rhetoric of the ‘spherical solution’ used to arrive at them, and, most importantly, the information production and knowledge management model we conventionally work within.

Abstract Negevite, ideally NiP2, is a new phosphide mineral from pyrometamorphic complex of the Hatrurim Formation (the Mottled Zone), Southern Levant. It is found in phosphide assemblages of the Hatrurim Basin, south Negev Desert, Israel, and Daba-Siwaqa complex, Jordan. The mineral occurs as tiny isometric grains reaching 15 μm in size and forms intimate intergrowths with other phosphides related to the Fe-Ni-P system. In reflected light, negevite is white with yellowish tint and isotropic. Reflectance values for COM recommended wavelengths [R (%), λ (nm)] are as follows: 54.6 (470), 55.0 (546), 55.3 (589), 55.6 (650). Chemical composition of the holotype specimen (electron micro-probe, wt%): Ni 42.57, Co 3.40, Fe 2.87, P 42.93, S 8.33, total 100.10, corresponding to the empirical formula (Ni0.88Co0.07Fe0.06)Σ1.01(P1.68S0.31)Σ1.99. The crystal structure of negevite was solved and refined to R1 = 1.73% based on 52 independent observed [I >2σ(I)] reflections. The mineral is cubic, space group Pa3, a = 5.4816(5) Å, V = 164.71(3) Å3, and Z = 4. Dx = 4.881(1) g/cm3 calculated on the basis of the empirical formula. Negevite is a first natural phosphide belonging to the pyrite structure type. It is a chemical and structural analog of vaesite, NiS2, krutovite, NiAs2, and penroseite, NiSe2. The well-explored catalytic and photocatalytic properties of a synthetic counterpart of negevite could provide new insights into the possible role of higher phosphides as a source of low-valent phosphorus in prebiotic phosphorylation processes.

Certainly it was the year to visit the USSR, as one rubbed shoulders with pre-Summit reporters awaiting Reagan/Gorbachev, and pilgrims celebrating the millennium of Christianity in Russia. Wandering up the Nevsky Prospekt, you saw musicians hurrying with instrument cases in hand; and whichever way you crossed the Neva or the canals, the babel of language sounded like a session at the United Nations. As Tikhon Khrennikov (still Chairman of the Composers Union 40 years after its notorious 1948 Congress) pointed out in his welcoming address at the opening concert, the Festival's purpose was ‘for building spiritual bridges between nations using music as the unique and indispensable means of communication’. Stylistic restrictions were withdrawn so that listeners would get an unusually broad idea of the ‘many-sided panorama of modern musical art’. Thus, not only ‘serious’ music but also pop, jazz, folk, and traditional musics were performed. Having attended the previous two Festivals, it was very interesting to observe the progressive attitude of the Third. Not only was there more of everything, but more variety: not only symphonic, chamber, and choral music events, but also organ recitals, modern violin music, opera, children's theatre, a song evening, and even one for light music. Not only did the best Soviet conductors and performers participate, but also the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra, jazz groups of the USSR and elsewhere, and the British avant-garde vocal group ‘Electric Phoenix’. Although the concerts were heavily weighted with Soviet works, still almost 40 countries were represented (from Cuba to Mongolia) with works by more than 150 living composers.

Maha Appraisal Hits Gas for Eni in Indonesia Eni encountered natural-gas-bearing sands with its Maha 2 well in the West Ganal Block offshore Indonesia. Drilled to a depth of 2970 m in 1115 m water depth, the well encountered 43 m of gas-bearing net sands in levels of Pliocene Age, according to the operator. A production test, which was limited by surface facilities, recorded a gas deliverability of the reservoir flowing at 34 MMscf/D. The opera-tor collected data and samples during the test, to study in preparation of a field development plan for the Maha field. Two additional appraisal wells are planned for the discovery. Eni, along with partners Neptune West Ganal BV and P.T. Pertamina Hulu West Ganal, expect the field to be developed subsea and tied back to the nearby Jangkrik floating production unit (FPU), about 16 km to the northwest. Eni has been operating off Indonesia since 2001. Its current equity production in the region is around 80,000 BOE/D. Shell Sells Out of Philippines Gas Field Royal Dutch Shell has agreed to sell its stake in the Malampaya offshore gas field in the Philippines for $460 million. The major sold its 45% stake in Service Contract 38 (SC38), a deepwater license which includes the producing gas field, to a subsidiary of the Udenna Group, which already holds a 45% stake in the project. The divestment is part of the company’s strategy to narrow its oil and gas operations. The base consideration for the sale is $380 million, with additional payments of up to $80 million in 2022 and 2024 contingent on asset performance and commodity prices, according to Shell. The deal is due to complete by the end of 2021. The Malampaya gas field, discovered in 1991, currently supplies fuel to power plants that deliver about a fifth of the country’s electricity requirements, based on energy ministry data. Equinor Green Lights First Phase of Bacalhau Development Off Brazil Equinor, along with partners ExxonMobil, Petrogal Brasil, and Pré-Sal Petróleo SA, will move forward with a planned $8-billion Phase 1 development of the Bacalhau field in the Brazilian pre-salt Santos area. The Bacalhau field is situated across two licenses, BM-S-8 and Norte de Carcará. The target resource is a high-quality carbonate reservoir containing light oil. The development will consist of 19 subsea wells tied back to a floating production, storage, and offloading unit (FPSO) located at the field. The vessel will be one of the largest FPSOs in Brazil with a production capacity of 220,000 B/D of oil and 2 million bbl of storage capacity. The stabilized oil will be offloaded to shuttle tankers and the gas from Phase 1 will be re-injected in the reservoir. The FPSO contractor will operate the FPSO for the first year. Thereafter, Equinor plans to operate the facilities until the end of the license period. The development plan was approved by the Brazilian National Agency of Petroleum, Natural Gas, and Biofuels (ANP) in March 2021. First oil from the field is slated for 2024. Wintershall Strikes Gas at Dvalin North An exploration well drilled by Wintershall on its Dvalin North prospect in the Norwegian Sea has encountered a significant gas reservoir. The discovery at Dvalin North is estimated to hold to hold 33–70 million BOE and is just 12 km north of the company’s operated Dvalin field and 65 km north of the operated Maria field. The well also encountered hydrocarbons in two shallower secondary targets, with a combined resource estimate of 38–87 million BOE, making the potential for the field in excess of 150 million BOE. The well, drilled by the Deepsea Aberdeen rig, encountered gas, condensate, and oil columns of 33 m and 114 m in the Cretaceous Lysing and Lange formations, respectively. In the primary target in the Garn Formation, the well found a gas column of 85 m. The license partners, including Petoro and Sval Energi, are evaluating development options for the discovery, which could include a tieback to the Dvalin field. Third Odfjell Rig Tapped by Equinor Odfjell has been awarded a three-well, $40-million drilling contract for its semisubmersible drilling unit Deepsea Stavanger by Equinor. The rig will join sister units Deepsea Atlantic and Deepsea Aberdeen under contract with the Norwegian operator. The rig is scheduled to start drilling the first of three planned exploration wells in the North Sea in February 2022. The wells are expected to take about 4 months to complete. The contract includes continuing options after the initial phase. South Africa Shale Tests Encounter Gas at Karoo Pockets of shale gas were encountered during test drilling in the semi-desert Karoo region of South Africa, according to the nation’s energy ministry. A total of 34 gas samples had been bottled and taken to laboratories after the government’s Council for Geosciences set out to drill a 3500-m stratigraphic hole in the Karoo to establish and test the occurrence of shale gas. “The first pocket of gas was intercepted at 1734 m with a further substantial amount intercepted at 2467 m spanning a depth of 55 m,” said Gwede Mantashe, South African energy minister, during his budget vote in parliament on 18 May. In 2017, geologists at the University of Johannesburg and three other institutions estimated the gas resource in the Karoo was probably 13 Tcf. Earlier, the US Energy and Information Administration estimated the Karoo Basin’s technically recoverable shale-gas resource at 390 Tcf, then making it the eighth largest in the world and second largest in Africa behind Algeria. Seadrill Venture Nets New Drilling Contract Seadrill’s Sonadrill Holding Ltd., the 50/50 joint venture with an affiliate of Sonangol, has secured a 12-well contract with one option for nine wells and 11 one-well options in Angola for drillship Sonangol Quenguela. The $131-million contract before options is inclusive of mobilization revenue and additional services with commencement expected in early 2022 and running through mid-2023. The contract is contingent on National Concessionaire approval. Sonangol Quenguela is the second of two Sonangol-owned drillships to be bareboat-chartered into Sonadrill. The drillship is a seventh-generation, DP3, dual activity, e-smart ultradeepwater drillship delivered in 2019, capable of drilling up to 40,000-ft wells. A further two Seadrill-owned units are expected to be bareboat-chartered into Sonadrill. Seadrill will manage and operate the four units on behalf of Sonadrill. Shell Makes US Gulf Discovery at Leopard An exploration well at the Shell-led Leopard prospect in the deepwater US Gulf of Mexico encountered more than 600 ft net oil pay at multiple levels. Leopard is in Alaminos Canyon Block 691, approximately 20 miles east of the Whale discovery, 20 miles south of the recently appraised Blacktip discovery, and 33 miles from the Perdido spar host facility. Evaluation is ongoing to further define development options. According to Shell, Leopard is an opportunity to increase production in the Perdido Corridor, where its Great White, Silvertip, and Tobago fields are already producing. Meanwhile, the Whale discovery, also in the Perdido Corridor, is progressing toward a final investment decision in 2021. Shell operates Leopard with a 50% working interest. Partner Chevron holds the remaining 50% stake. Shell Could Leave Tunisia in 2022 Shell informed Tunisian authorities in May it will hand back upstream concessions and leave the country next year as it turns its focus to renewable energy, according to a Reuters report sourcing a senior official in the country’s energy ministry. The license in question is the Miskar concession in the southern city of Gabes. The operator has also requested the early hand-back of the Asdrubal permit, which expires in 2035. Recent reports suggest the operator may be looking for the Tunisian government to extend its permit on the field under more favorable terms ahead of its planned departure.

Undulators are important devices for accelerator-based light sources whose magnetic field quality determines the photon beam performance. Superconducting-type undulators have been developing rapidly in recent years around the world. The insertion device group at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in China started an R&D project to develop prototypes of superconducting undulators (SCUs). A half-meter-long planar SCU has been produced recently. The SCU was designed based on the simulation program OPERA-3D giving a period length of 15 mm and a gap of 7 mm. This prototype was manufactured and fabricated precisely, and was then tested by vertically submerging in liquid helium in a Dewar. After quench training several times, the maximum current in the main coils reached 480 A. The magnetic field was measured by Hall probes mounted on a sledge in the middle of the undulator gap. The peak magnetic field reached 1 T. The measurement results indicate that correction coils with suitable current can not only optimize the magnetic first and second integrals but also reduce the phase error, which is expected by design.

“In the performing arts the very absence of a complete score, i.e., of a complete duplicate, enables music, dances and plays to survive. The tension created by the adaptation of a work of yesterday to the style of today is an essential part of the history of the art in progress” (Rudolf Arnheim, “On Duplication”). In his essay “On Duplication”, Rudolf Arnheim proposes the idea that a close look at the life of adaptations indicates that change is not only necessary and inevitable, but also increases our understanding of the adapted work. To Arnheim, the most fruitful approach to adaptations is therefore to investigate the ways in which the various re-interpretations partake of the (initial) work and concretise latent aspects in a new historical and cultural context. This article analyzes how, and to what ends, the re-contextualising of Georges Bizet’s Carmen in other media—flamenco dance and film – changes, distorts and subverts our perception of the opera’s music. The text under analysis is Carlos Saura’s 1983 movie about a flamenco transposition of Bizet’s Carmen. I discuss this film in terms of how flamenco music and dance, on the one hand, and the film camera, on the other hand, gradually demystify the fascinating power of Bizet’s music, as well as its clichéd associations. Although these forms displace and defamiliarise music in many ways, the main argument of the analysis centers on how flamenco dance and the film image foreground the artificiality of the exotic sections from Bizet’s opera, as well as their inadequacy in the Spanish context, and also on how the film translates and self-reflexively comments on the absence of an embodied voice for Carmen. “C’est la Carmen! Non, ce n’est pas celle-là!” As the credits from Carlos Saura’s Carmen are displayed against the backdrop of Gustave Doré’s drawings, we can hear the chorus of the cigarières from Bizet’s opera singing “C’est la Carmen! Non, ce n’est pas celle-là!”. Why did the director choose this particular section of Bizet’s Carmen with which to begin his film? Moreover, what is the significance of combining Doré’s drawings with these words? In a way, we can say that the reality/illusion polarity signified by the sung words informs and gives a preview of one of the movie’s main themes—the futility of an adapter’s attempt at finding a “true” Carmen. The music’s juxtaposition with Doré’s drawings of nineteenth-century espagnolades adds to the idea of artifice and inauthenticity: Saura seems to be dismissing Bizet’s music by pairing it with the work of another one of the creators of a stereotyped (and false) image of Spain. Demystifying the untrue image that foreigners have created of Spain is one of the film director’s main concerns in his adaptation of both Bizet and Mérimée’s Carmen. The movie’s production history reinforces this idea. In his book on the films of Carlos Saura, Marvin D’Lugo notes that in 1981 the French company Gaumont had approached Saura with the project of making a filmed version of Bizet’s Carmen, “with a maximum of fidelity to the original text” (202), an idea which the director clearly rejected. Another important aspect related to the production history is the fact that Antonio Gadés, the film’s choreographer and actor for Don José’s part, had previously created a ballet version of Bizet’s Carmen, based solely on the second act of the opera. The 1983 film production is then the result of Carlos Saura—the film director attempting to reframe the French opera in the Spanish context—and Antonio Gadés—the flamenco troupe director—collaborating to create a Spanish dance version of Carmen. The film’s constant superimposition of its two diegetic levels—the fictional level, consisting in the rehearsal scenes, and the actual level, which coincides with the characters’ lives outside of and in-between rehearsals—and the constant blurring of the lines separating these two worlds, have been the cause of a plethora of varying interpretations. Susan McClary sees the movie as “a brilliant commentary on ‘exoticism’: on the distance between actual ethnic music and the mock-ups Bizet and others produced for their own ideological purposes” (137); to D’Lugo, the film is an illustration and critique of how “the Spaniards, having come under the spell of the foreign, imposter impression of Spain, find themselves seduced by the falsification of their own cultural past” (203). Other notable interpretations come from Marshall H. Leicester, who sees the film as a comment on the fact that Carmen has become a discourse and a cultural artifact, and from Linda M. Willem, who interprets the movie as a metafictional mise en abyme. I will discuss the movie from a somewhat different perspective, bearing in mind, however, McClary and D’Lugo’s readings. Saura’s Carmen is also a story about adaptation, constantly commenting on the failed attempts at perfect fidelity to the source text(s), by the intradiegetic adapter (Antonio) and, at the same time, self-reflexively embedding hints to the presence of the extradiegetic adapter: the filmmaker Saura. On the one hand, as juxtaposed with flamenco music and dance, the opera’s music is made to appear artificial and inadequate; we are presented with an adaptation in the making, in which many of the oddities and difficulties of transposing opera music to flamenco dance are problematised. On the other hand, the film camera, by constantly foregrounding the movie’s materiality—the possibility to cut and edit the images and the soundtrack, its refusal to maintain a realist illusion—displaces and re-codifies music in other contexts, thus bringing to light dormant interpretations of particular sections of Bizet’s opera, or completely altering their significance. One of the film’s most significant departures from Bizet’s opera is the problematised absence of a suitable Carmen character. Bizet’s opera, however revolves around Carmen: it is very hard, if not impossible, to dissociate the opera from the fascinating Carmen personage. Her transgressive nature, her “otherness” and exoticism, are translated in her singing, dancing and bodily presence on the stage, all these leading to the creation of a character that cannot be neglected. The songs that Bizet adapted from the cabaret numéros in order to add exotic flavor to the music, as well as the provocative dances accompanying the Habaňera and the Seguidilla help create this dimension of Carmen’s fascinating power. It is through her singing and dancing that she becomes a true enchantress, inflicting madness or unreason on the ones she chooses to charm. Saura’s Carmen has very few of the charming attributes of her operatic predecessor. Antonio, however, becomes obsessed with her because she is close to his idea of Carmen. The film foregrounds the immense gap between the operatic Carmen and the character interpreted by Laura del Sol. This double instantiation of Carmen has usually been interpreted as a sign of the demystification of the stereotyped and inauthentic image of Bizet’s character. Another way to interpret it could be as a comment on one of the inevitable losses in the transposition of opera to dance: the separation of the body from the voice. Significantly, the recorded music of Bizet’s opera accompanies more the scenes between rehearsals than the flamenco dance sections, which are mostly performed on traditional Spanish music. The re-codification of the music reinforces the gap between Saura and Gadés’ Carmen and Bizet’s character. The character interpreted by Laura del Sol is not a particularly gifted dancer; therefore, her dance translation of the operatic voice fails to convey the charm and self-assuredness that Carmen’s voice and the sung words fully express. Moreover, the musical and dance re-insertion in a Spanish context completely removes the character’s exoticism and alterity. We could say, rather, that in Saura’s movie it is the operatic Carmen who is becoming exotic and distant. In one of the movie’s first scenes, we are shown an image of Paco de Lucia and a group of flamenco singers as they play and sing a traditional Spanish song. This scene is abruptly interrupted by Bizet’s Seguidilla; immediately after, the camera zooms in on Antonio, completely absorbed by the opera, which he is playing on the tape-recorder. The contrast between the live performance of the Spanish song and the recorded Carmen opera reflects the artificiality of the latter. The Seguidilla is also one of the opera’s sections that Bizet adapted so that it would sound authentically exotic, but which was as far from authentic traditional Spanish music as any of the songs that were being played in the cabarets of Paris in the nineteenth century. The contrast between the authentic sound of traditional Spanish music, as played on the guitar by Paco de Lucia, and Bizet’s own version makes us aware, more than ever, of the act of fabrication underlying the opera’s composition. Most of the rehearsal scenes in the movie are interpreted on original flamenco music, Bizet’s opera appearing mostly in the scenes associated with Antonio, to punctuate the evolution of his love for Carmen and to reinforce the impossibility of transposing Bizet’s music to flamenco dance without making significant modifications. This also signifies the mesmerising power the operatic music has on Antonio’s imagination, gradually transposing him in a universe of understanding completely different from that of his troupe, a world in which he becomes unable to distinguish reality from illusion. With Antonio’s delusion, we are reminded of the luring powers of the operatic fabrication. One of the scenes which foregrounds the opera’s charm is when Antonio watches the dancers led by Cristina rehearse some flamenco movements. While watching their bodies reflected in the mirror, Antonio is dissatisfied with their appearance—he doesn’t see any of them as Carmen. The scene ends with an explosion of Bizet’s music heard from off-screen—probably as Antonio keeps hearing it in his head—dramatically symbolising the great distance between flamenco dance and opera music. One of the rehearsal scenes in which Bizet’s music is heard as an accompaniment to the dance is the scene in which the operatic Carmen performs the castaňet dance for Don José. In the Antonio-Carmen interpretation the music that we hear is the Habaňera and not the seductive song that Bizet’s Carmen is singing at this point in the opera. According to Mary Blackwood Collier, the Habaňera song in the opera has the function to define Carmen’s personality as strong, independent, free and enthralling at the same time (119). The purely instrumental Habaňera, combined with the lyrical and tender dance duo of Antonio/José and Carmen in Saura’s film, transforms the former into a sweet love theme. In the opera, this is one of the arias that centralise the image of Carmen in our perception. The dance transposition as a love pas de deux diminishes the impression of freedom and independence connoted by the song’s words and displaces the centrality of Carmen. Our perception of the opera’s music is significantly reshaped by the film camera too. In her book The Hollywood Musical Jane Feuer contends that the use of multiple diegesis in the backstage musical has the function to “mirror within the film the relationship of the spectator to the film. Multiple diegesis in this sense parallels the use of an internal audience” (68). Carlos Saura’s movie preserves and foregrounds this function. The mirrors in which the dancers often reflect themselves hint to an external plane of observation (the audience). The artificial collapse of the boundaries between off-stage and on-stage scenes acts as a reminder of the film’s capacity to compress and distort temporality and chronology. Saura’s film makes full use of its capacity to cut and edit the image and the soundtracks. This allows for the mise-en-scène of meaningful displacements of Bizet’s music, which can be given new significations by the association with unexpected images. One of the sections of Bizet’s opera in the movie is the entr’acte music at the beginning of Act III. Whereas in the opera this part acts as a filler, in Saura’s Carmen it becomes a love motif and is heard several times in the movie. The choice of this particular part as a musical leitmotif in the movie is interesting if we consider the minimal use of Bizet’s music in Saura’s Carmen. Quite significantly however, this tune appears both in association with the rehearsal scenes and the off-stage scenes. It appears at the end of the Tabacalera rehearsal, when Antonio/Don José comes to arrest Carmen; we can hear it again when Carmen arrives at Antonio’s house the night when they make love for the first time and also after the second off-stage love scene, when Antonio gives money to Carmen. In general, this song is used to connote Antonio’s love for Carmen, both on and off stage. This musical bit, which had no particular significance in the opera, is now highlighted and made significant in its association with specific film images. Another one of the operatic themes that recur in the movie is the fate motif which is heard in the opening scene and also at the moment of Carmen’s death. We can also hear it when Carmen visits her husband in prison, immediately after she accepts the money Antonio offers her and when Antonio finds her making love to Tauro. This re-contextualisation alters the significance of the theme. As Mary Blackwood Collier remarks, this motif highlights Carmen’s infidelity rather than her fatality in the movie (120). The repetition of this motif also foregrounds the music’s artificiality in the context of the adaptation; the filmmaker, we are reminded, can cut and edit the soundtrack as he pleases, putting music in the service of his own artistic designs. In Saura’s Carmen, Bizet’s opera appears in the context of flamenco music and dance. This leads to the deconstruction and demystification of the opera’s pretense of exoticism and authenticity. The adaptation of opera to flamenco music and dance also implies a number of necessary alterations in the musical structure that the adapter has to perform so that the music will harmonise with flamenco dance. Saura’s Carmen, if read as an adaptation in the making, foregrounds many of the technical difficulties of translating opera to dance. The second dimension of music re-interpretation is added by the film camera. The embedded camera and the film’s self-reflexivity displace music from its original contexts, thus adding or creating new meanings to the ways in which we perceive it. This way of reframing the music from Bizet’s Carmen adds new dimensions to our perception of the opera. In many of the off-stage scenes, the music seems to appear from nowhere and, then, to inform other sequences than the ones with which it is usually associated in the opera. This produces a momentary disruption in the way we hear Bizet’s music. We could say that it is a very rapid process of de-signification and re-signification—that is, of adaptation—that we undergo almost automatically. Carlos Saura’s adaptation of Carmen self-reflexively puts into play the changes that Bizet’s music has to go through in order to become a flamenco dance and movie. In this process, dance and the film image make us aware of new meanings that we come to associate with Bizet’s score. References Arnheim, Rudolf. “On Duplication”. New Essays on the Psychology of Art. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986: 274-85. Blackwood Collier, Mary. La Carmen Essentielle et sa Réalisation au Spectacle. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1994. D’Lugo, Marvin. The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Feuer, Jane. “Dream Worlds and Dream Stages”. The Hollywood Musical. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1993: 67-87. Leicester, Marshall H. Jr. “Discourse and the Film Text: Four Readings of ‘Carmen’”. Cambridge Opera Journal 4.3 (1994): 245-82. McClary, Susan. “Carlos Saura: A Flamenco Carmen”. Georges Bizet: Carmen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992: 135-7. Willem, Linda M. “Metafictional Mise en Abyme in Saura’s Carmen”. Literature/Film Quarterly 24.3 (1996): 267-73. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Furnica, Ioana. "Subverting the “Good, Old Tune”: Carlos Saura’s Carmen." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/10-furnica.php>. APA Style Furnica, I. (May 2007) "Subverting the “Good, Old Tune”: Carlos Saura’s Carmen," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/10-furnica.php>.

Rowan Moore, in his work Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture, notes that “most people know that buildings are not purely functional, that there is an intangible something about them that has to do with emotion” (16). Emotion is critical to why and how we build. Indeed, there is a basic human desire to build—to leave a mark on the landscape or on our society. This issue of M/C Journal unpacks this idea of emotion, examining the functional and the creative in the design process, for a range of building projects, from the tangible: building transport infrastructure, exhibition centre, or a new-style museum; to those building projects that are more difficult to define: building an artwork, a community, or a reputation. In addition, this issue looks at how we also ‘unbuild’ the world around us. In the feature article Aleks Wansbrough critically takes up ideas of ‘build’ and ‘unbuild’ through an examination of how the role that the death of Man, which follows the death of God, has had on the idea of creation, and how Man is unbuilt in three works by three different artists: Francis Bacon’s “Study of a Baboon” (1953), Jan Švankmajer’s Darkness, Light, Darkness (1989) and Patricia Piccinini’s “The Young Family” (2002). In the first article, Ella Mudie also looks at ‘unbuild’. This is achieved with a review of how the Sydney Metro—a major transport infrastructure project—requires demolition work that will inevitably result in a reconfiguration of the character of Sydney’s inner city and the suburbs it intersects. Mudie questions unbuilding and rebuilding, drawing on literary texts in which demolition and infrastructure development are key preoccupations. In the second article on construction and destruction, Sarah Morley, looks at one of Sydney’s earliest iconic buildings. The Garden Palace—a purpose built facility designed to house the Colony’s first International Exhibition in 1879—was a famous, and favourite, building of New South Wales, prior to its destruction by fire in 1882. Morley explores the loss of the building and its contents; which included many Australian Aboriginal objects and ancestral remains.Simon Dwyer looks at building a story with light. Drawing upon a range of historical documents, this article investigates how world-renowned architect Jørn Utzon envisaged the use of natural and artificial light. In this way, he showed how light could contribute to the final build of the Sydney Opera House, through giving additional expression to the traditional building elements that he had carefully selected. Nadine Kozak highlights much smaller structures in her qualitative analysis of comments made by stewards about their Little Free Libraries. This, increasingly popular, movement offers opportunities for reading and to build community networks as people come together to build, maintain and stock Little Free Libraries. Kozak’s work also acknowledges some of the resistance to this movement and how communities are strengthened in their efforts to protect what they have built. The earliest detectives were forced to overcome significant resistance from a suspicious public. Rachel Franks investigates the efforts of Charles Dickens to change the perception of policing. Focusing on letters written about capital punishment and articles aimed at promoting the role of the detective, Franks unpacks how one of the great novelists of the Victorian age also assisted in building the reputation of a fledging detective branch. Moving forward in time, Hazel Ferguson also interrogates ideas of reputation. This work looks at the activities of early career researchers on social media which is increasingly being used to build communities around mutual support and professional development. Ferguson’s analysis, of the #ECRchat group on Twitter, aims to contribute to emerging discussions about academic labour and online reputation. In noting how the babble of a crowd can indicate the presence of others constructing ephemeral emergent communities where the voice of an individual is often lost, Rebecca Collins, identifies how sound informs our experience of space. In this article, she discusses the potential of sound to construct fictional spaces, build individual identities and evoke the presence of a crowd in relation to two artistic installations. Ben Egliston takes on another type of creative output with videogames. Egliston’s work considers how players build ingame competencies by engaging with media beyond the game itself; such as walkthrough guides or YouTube videos. This article provides a re-framing of the relationship between gameplay (and the development of competency) and the elements of games existing beyond the screen. Creativity is also central to George Jaramillo’s article which focuses on the relationship between Ionad Hiort and the Glasgow School of Art’s Institute of Design Innovation as a case study for understanding how design innovation can engender and build community capabilities. This work studies the development of a new type of heritage centre on the western coast of the Isle of Lewis in Scotland and the idea of a “place of interpretation” as an alternative to the “visitor centre”, to go “beyond the museum”. We bookend this issue with another piece on building infrastructure in the city of Sydney. Nicholas Richardson interrogates the New South Wales Government’s ‘making it happen’ campaign. This research explores whether the current build-at-any-cost mentality behind ‘making it happen’ is in either the long-term interest of the New South Wales constituency or the short-term interest of a political party.To build is to embark on a multi-disciplinary and multi-faceted project. These articles demonstrate the wide-ranging potential of exploring how different interpretations of, and ways to, build impacts our cultural, emotional, intellectual, private, and public lives. AcknowledgementsOur sincere thanks to our enthusiastic contributors, to those who gave their expertise and time in the blind peer review process, and to Axel Bruns. ReferenceMoore, Rowan. Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture. New York: HarperCollins, 2013.

Image 1: View from Geodha Sgoilt towards the sea stacks, Uig, Isle of Lewis. Image credit: George Jaramillo.IntroductionOver the cliffs of Mangerstadh on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, is a small plot of land called Geodha Sgoilt that overlooks the North Atlantic Ocean (Image 1). On the site is a small dirt gravel road and the remnants of a World War II listening station. Below, sea stacks rise from the waters, orange and green cliff sides stand in defiance to the crashing waves. An older gentleman began to tell me of what he believed could be located here on the site. A place where visitors could learn of the wonders of St Kilda that contained all types of new storytelling technologies to inspire them. He pointed above the ruined buildings, mentioning that a new road for the visitors’ vehicles and coaches would be built. With his explanations, you could almost imagine such a place on these cliffs. Yet, before that new idea could even be built, this gentleman and his group of locals and incomers had to convince themselves and others that this new heritage centre was something desired, necessary and inevitable in the development of the Western Isles.This article explores the developing relationships that come about through design innovation with community organisations. This was done through a partnership between an academic institution and a non-profit heritage community group as part of growing study in how higher education design research can play an active partner in community group development. It argues for the use of design thinking and innovation in improving strategy and organisational processes within non-profit organisations. In this case, it looks at what role it can play in building and enabling organisational confidence in its mission, as well as, building “beyond the museum”. The new approach to this unique relationship casts new light towards working with complexities and strategies rather than trying to resolve issues from the outset of a project. These enabling relationships are divided into three sections of this paper: First it explores the context of the island community group and “building” heritage, followed by a brief history of St Kilda and its current status, and designation as a World Heritage site. Second, it seeks the value of developing strategy and the introduction of the Institute of Design Innovation (INDI). This is followed by a discussion of the six-month relationship and work that was done that elucidates various methods used and ending with its outcomes. The third section reflects upon the impacts at the relationship building between the two groups with some final thoughts on the partnership, where it can lead, and how this can represent new ways of working together within community groups. Building HeritageCurrent community research in Scotland has shown struggles in understanding issues within community capability and development (Barker 11; Cave 20; Jacuniak-Suda, and Mose 23) though most focus on the land tenure and energy (McMorran 21) and not heritage groups. The need to maintain “resilient” (Steiner 17) communities has shown that economic resilience is of primary importance for these rural communities. Heritage as economic regenerator has had a long history in the United Kingdom. Some of these like the regeneration of Wirksworth in the Peak District (Gordon 20) have had great economic results with populations growing, as well as, development in the arts and design. These changes, though positive, have also adversely impacted the local community by estranging and forcing lower income townspeople to move away due to higher property values and lack of work. Furthermore, current trends in heritage tourism have managed to turn many rural regions into places of historic consumption (Ronström 7) termed “heritagisation” (Edensor 35). There is thus a need for critical reflection within a variety of heritage organisations with the increase in heritage tourism.In particular, existing island heritage organisations face a variety of issues that they focus too much on the artefactual or are too focused to strive for anything beyond the remit of their particular heritage (Jacuniak-Suda, and Mose 33; Ronström 4). Though many factors including funding, space, volunteerism and community capability affect the way these groups function they have commonalities that include organisational methods, volunteer fatigue, and limited interest from community groups. It is within this context that the communities of the Outer Hebrides. Currently, projects within the Highlands and islands focus on particular “grassroots” development (Cave 26; Robertson 994) searching for innovative ways to attract, maintain, and sustain healthy levels of heritage and development—one such group is Ionad Hiort. Ionad Hiort Ionad Hiort is a community non-profit organisation founded in 2010 to assist in the development of a new type of heritage centre in the community of Uig on the Isle of Lewis (“Proposal-Ionad Hiort”). As stated in their website, the group strives to develop a centre on the history and contemporary views of St Kilda, as well as, encouraging a much-needed year-round economic impetus for the region. The development of the group and the idea of a heritage centre came about through the creation of the St Kilda Opera, a £1.5 million, five-country project held in 2007, led by Scotland’s Gaelic Arts agency, Proiseact nan Ealan (Mckenzie). This opera, inspired by the cliffs, people, and history of St Kilda used creative techniques to unite five countries in a live performance with cliff aerobatics and Gaelic singing to present the island narrative. From this initial interest, a commission from the Western Isles council (2010), developed by suggestions and commentary from earlier reports (Jura Report 2009; Rebanks 2009) encouraged a fiercely contentious competition, which saw Ionad Hiort receive the right to develop a remote-access heritage centre about the St Kilda archipelago (Maclean). In 2013, the group received a plot of land from the local laird for the establishment of the centre (Urquhart) thereby bringing it closer to its goal of a heritage centre, but before moving onto this notion of remote-heritage, a brief history is needed on the archipelago. Image 2: Location map of Mangerstadh on the Isle of Lewis and St Kilda to the west, with inset of Scotland. Image credit: © Crown Copyright and Database Right (2017). Ordnance Survey (Digimap Licence).St KildaSt Kilda is an archipelago about 80 kilometres off the coast of the Outer Hebrides in the North Atlantic (Image 2). Over 2000 years of habitation show an entanglement between humans and nature including harsh weather, limited resources, but a tenacity and growth to develop a way of living upon a small section of land in the middle of the Atlantic. St Kilda has maintained a tenuous relationship between the sea, the cliffs and the people who have lived within its territory (Geddes, and Gannon 18). Over a period of three centuries beginning in the eighteenth century an outside influence on the island begin to play a major role, with the loss of a large portion of its small (180) population. This population would later decrease to 100 and finally to 34 in 1930, when it was decided to evacuate the final members of the village in what could best be called a forced eviction.Since the evacuation, the island has maintained an important military presence as a listening station during the Second World War and in its modern form a radar station as part of the Hebridean Artillery (Rocket) Range (Geddes 14). The islands in the last thirty years have seen an increase in tourism with the ownership of the island by the National Trust of Scotland. The UNESCO World Heritage Organisation (UNESCO), who designated St Kilda in 1986 and 2004 as having outstanding universal value, has seen its role evolve from not just protecting (or conserving) world heritage sites, but to strategically understand sustainable tourism of its sites (“St Kilda”). In 2012, UNESCO selected St Kilda as a case study for remote access heritage conservation and interpretation (Hebrides News Today; UNESCO 15). This was partly due to the efforts of 3D laser scanning of the islands by a collaboration between The Glasgow School of Art and Historic Environment Scotland called the Centre for Digital Documentation and Visualisation (CDDV) in 2009.The idea of a remote access heritage is an important aspect as to what Ionad Hiort could do with creating a centre at their site away from St Kilda. Remote access heritage is useful in allowing for sites and monuments to be conserved and monitored “from afar”. It allows for 3D visualisations of sites and provides new creative engagements with a variety of different places (Remondino, and Rizzi 86), however, Ionad Hiort was not yet at a point to even imagine how to use the remote access technology. They first needed a strategy and direction, as after many years of moving towards recognition of proposing the centre at their site in Uig, they had lost a bit of that initial drive. This is where INDI was asked to assist by the Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the regional development organisation for most of rural Scotland. Building ConfidenceINDI is a research institute at The Glasgow School of Art. It is a distributed, creative collective of researchers, lecturers and students specialising in design innovation, where design innovation means enabling creative capabilities within communities, groups and individuals. Together, they address complex issues through new design practices and bespoke community engagement to co-produce “preferable futures” (Henchley 25). Preferable futures are a type of future casting that seeks to strive not just for the probable or possible future of a place or idea, but for the most preferred and collectively reached option for a society (McAra-McWilliam 9). INDI researches the design processes that are needed to co-create contexts in which people can flourish: at work, in organisations and businesses, as well as, in public services and government. The task of innovation as an interactive process is an example of the design process. Innovation is defined as “a co-creation process within social and technological networks in which actors integrate their resources to create mutual value” (Russo‐Spena, and Mele 528). Therefore, innovation works outside of standard consultancy practices; rather it engenders a sense of mutual co-created practices that strive to resolve particular problems. Examples include the work that has looked at creating cultures of innovation within small and medium-sized enterprises (Lockwood 4) where the design process was used to alter organisational support (Image 3). These enterprises tend to emulate larger firms and corporations and though useful in places where economies of scale are present, smaller business need adaptable, resilient and integrated networks of innovation within their organisational models. In this way, innovation functioned as a catalyst for altering the existing organisational methods. These innovations are thus a useful alternative to existing means of approaching problems and building resilience within any organisation. Therefore, these ideas of innovation could be transferred and play a role in enabling new ways of approaching non-profit organisational structures, particularly those within heritage. Image 3: Design Council Double Diamond model of the design process. Image credit: Lockwood.Developing the WorkIonad Hiort with INDI’s assistance has worked together to develop a heritage centre that tries to towards a new definition of heritage and identity through this island centre. Much of this work has been done through local community investigations revolving around workshops and one-on-one talks where narratives and ideas are held in “negative capability” (McAra-McWilliam 2) to seek many alternatives that would be able to work for the community. The initial aims of the partnership were to assist the Uig community realise the potential of the St Kilda Centre. Primarily, it would assist in enabling the capabilities of two themes. The first would be, strategy, for Ionad Hiort’s existing multi-page mission brief. The second would be storytelling the narrative of St Kilda as a complex and entangled, however, its common views are limited to the ‘fall from grace’ or ‘noble savage’ story (Macdonald 168). Over the course of six months, the relationship involved two workshops and three site visits of varying degrees of interaction. An initial gathering had InDI staff meet members of Ionad Hiort to introduce members to each other. Afterwards, INDI ran two workshops over two months in Uig to understand, reflect and challenge Ionad Hiort’s focus on what the group desired. The first workshop focused on the group’s strategy statement. In a relaxed and facilitated space in the Uig Community Hall, the groups used pens, markers, and self-adhesive notes to engage in an open dialogue about the group’s desires. This session included reflecting on what their heritage centre could look like, as well as what their strategy needed to get there. These resulted in a series of drawings of their ‘preferred’ centre, with some ideas showing a centre sitting over the edge of the cliffs or one that had the centre be an integral component of the community. In discussing that session, one of members of the group recalled:I remember his [one of INDI’s staff] interrogation of the project was actually pretty – initially – fairly brutal, right? The first formal session we had talking about strategy and so on. To the extent that I think it would be fair to say he pissed everybody off, right? So much so that he actually prompted us to come back with some fairly hard hitting ripostes, which, after a moment’s silence he then said, ‘That’s it, you’ve convinced me’, and at that point we kind of realised that that’s what he’d been trying to do; he’d been trying to really push us to go further in our articulation of what we were doing and … why we were doing it in this particular way than we had done before. (Participant A, 2016).The group through this session found out that their strategy could be refined into a short mission statement giving a clear focus as to what they wanted and how they wanted to go about doing it. In the end, drawings, charts, stories (Image 4) were drawn to reflect on what the community had discussed. These artefacts became a key role-player in the following months of the development of the group. Image 4: View of group working through their strategy workshop session. Image credit: Fergus Fullarton-Pegg (2014). The second set of workshops and visits involved informal discussion with individual members of the group and community. This included a visit to St Kilda with members from INDI, Ionad Hiort and the Digital Design Studio, which allowed for everyone to understand the immensity of the project and its significance to World Heritage values. The initial aims thus evolved into understanding the context of self-governance for distributed communities and how to develop the infrastructure of development. As discussed earlier, existing development processes are useful, though limited to only particular types of projects, and as exemplified in the Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Western Isles Council commission, it tends to put communities against each other for limited pots of money. This existing system can be innovated upon by becoming creative liaisons, sharing and co-creating from existing studies to help develop more effective processes for the future of Ionad Hiort and their ‘preferable future’. Building RelationshipsWhat the relationship with GSA has done, as a dialogue with the team of people that have been involved, has been to consolidate and clarify our own thinking and to get us to question our own thinking across several different aspects of the whole project. (Participant A, 2016)As the quote states, the main notion of using design thinking has allowed Ionad Hiort to question their thinking and challenge preconceptions of what a “heritage centre” is, by being a critical sounding board that is different from what is provided by consultants and other stakeholders. Prior to meeting INDI, Ionad Hiort may have been able to reach their goal of a strategy, however, it would have taken a few more years. The work, which involved structured and unstructured workshops, meetings, planning events, and gatherings, gave them a structured focus to move ahead with their prospectus planning and bidding. INDI enabled the compression and focus of their strategy making and mission strategy statement over the course of six months into a one-page statement that gave direction to the group and provided the impetus for the development of the prospectus briefs. Furthermore, INDI contributed a sense of contemporary content to the historic story, as well as, enable the community to see that this centre would not just become another gallery with café. The most important outcome has been an effective measure in building relationships in the Outer Hebrides, which shows the changing roles between academic and third sector partnerships. Two key points can be deemed from these developing relationships: The first has been to build a research infrastructure in and across the region that engages with local communities about working with the GSA, including groups in North Uist, Barra and South Uist. Of note is a comment made by one of the participants saying: “It’s exciting now, there’s a buzz about it and getting you [INDI] involved, adding a dimension—we’ve got people who have got an artistic bent here but I think your enthusiasm, your skills, very much complement what we’ve got here.” (Participant B, 2016). Second, the academic/non-profit partnership has encouraged younger people to work and study in the area through a developing programme of student research activity. This includes placing taught masters students with local community members on the South Uist, as well as, PhD research being done on Stornoway. These two outcomes then have given rise to interest in not only how heritage is re-developed in a community, but also, encourages future interest, by staff and students to continue the debate and fashion further developments in the region (GSAmediacentre). Today, the cliffs of Mangerstadh continue to receive the pounding of waves, the blowing wind and the ever-present rain on its rocky granite surface. The iterative stages of work that the two groups have done showcase the way that simple actions can carve, change and evolve into innovative outcomes. The research outcomes show that through this new approach to working with communities we move beyond the consultant and towards an ability of generating a preferable future for the community. In this way, the work that has been created together showcases a case study for further island community development. We do not know what the future holds for the group, but with continued support and maintaining an open mind to creative opportunities we will see that the community will develop a space that moves “beyond the museum”. AcknowledgementsThe author would like to thank Ionad Hiort and all the residents of Uig on the Isle of Lewis for their assistance and participation in this partnership. For more information on their work please visit http://www.ionadhiort.org/. The author also thanks the Highlands and Islands Enterprise for financial support in the research and development of the project. Finally, the author thanks the two reviewers who provided critical commentary and critiques to improve this paper. ReferencesBarker, Adam. “Capacity Building for Sustainability: Towards Community Development in Coastal Scotland.” Journal of Environmental Management 75.1 (2005): 11-19. Canavan, Brendan. “Tourism Culture: Nexus, Characteristics, Context and Sustainability.” Tourism Management 53 (2016): 229-43. ———. “The Extent and Role of Domestic Tourism in a Small Island: The Case of the Isle of Man.” Journal of Travel Research 52.3 (2012): 340-52. Cape, Ruth. Exploring Growth and Empowerment of Communities in the Western Isles. Stornoway, 2013. Bullen, Elizabeth, Simon Robb, and Jane Kenway. “‘Creative Destruction’: Knowledge Economy Policy and the Future of the Arts and Humanities in the Academy.” Journal of Education Policy 19.1 (2004): 3–22. Brown, Tim, and Jocelyn Wyatt. “Design Thinking for Social Innovation.” Stanford Social Innovation Review Winter (2010): 30-35. <https://ssir.org/articles/entry/design_thinking_for_social_innovation>.Briscoe, Gerard, and Mark Plumbley. 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Jacuniak-Suda, Marta, and Ingo Mose. “Social Enterprises in the Western Isles (Scotland) – Drivers of Sustainable Rural Development ?” Europa Regional 19.2011.2 (2014): 23-40. Lockwood, Joseph, Madeline Smith, and Irene McAra-McWilliam. “Work-Well: Creating a Culture of Innovation through Design.” International Design Management Research Conference, Boston, 2012. 1-11. McAra-McWilliam, Irene. “Impossible Things? Negative Capability and the Creative Imagination.” Creativity or Conformity Conference, Cardiff, 2007. 1-8. <https://www.academia.edu/1246770/Impossible_things_Negative_Capability>.McKenzie, Steven. "Opera Celebrates St Kilda History." BBC News 23 Jun. 2007. 6 Apr. 2017 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/highlands_and_islands/6763371.stm>.McMorran, Rob, and Alister Scott. “Community Landownership: Rediscovering the Road to Sustainability.” Lairds: Scottish Perspectives on Upland Management (2013): 20-31. 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Research and Analysis of the Socio-Economic Impact Potential of UNESCO World Heritage Site Status.” 2009. <http://icomos.fa.utl.pt/documentos/2009/WHSTheEconomicGainFinalReport.pdf>.Robertson, Iain James McPherson. “Hardscrabble Heritage: The Ruined Blackhouse and Crofting Landscape as Heritage from Below.” Landscape Research 40.8 (2015): 993–1009. Ronström, Owe. “Heritage Production in the Island of Gotland.” The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 2.2 (2008): 1-18. Russo‐Spena, Tiziana, and Cristina Mele. “‘Five Co‐s’ in Innovating: A Practice‐Based View.” Ed. Evert Gummesson. Journal of Service Management 23.4 (2012): 527-53. “St Kilda.” World Heritage Centre. 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IntroductionI spent five days on the Arizona Utah border, photographing Monument Valley and the surrounding areas as part of a group of eight undertaking a landscape photography workshop under the direction of a Navajo guide. Observing where our guide was taking us, and watching and talking to other tourist photographers, I was reminded of John Urry’s concept of the “tourist gaze” and the idea that tourists see destinations in terms of the promotional images they are familiar with (Urry 1). It seemed that tourists re-created images drawn from the popular imaginary, inserting themselves into familiar narratives of place. The goal of the research was to look specifically at the tourist gaze, that is, the way that tourists see view destinations and then represent that vision in their images. Circle of Representation Urry explained the tourist gaze as a particular way of seeing the world as a series of images created by the tourism industry; images which were then consumed or collected through tourist photography. He saw this as constituting a “closed circle of representation” where the images employed by the tourism industry to attract tourists to particular destinations were reproduced in tourists’ own holiday snaps, and as more tourists sought out these locations, they were increasingly used to represent the destination. Susan Sontag saw travel employed as “a strategy for accumulating photographs” (9) suggesting that the images were the culmination of the journey. Urry also saw the end point of tourism as travellers to a destination “demonstrating that they have really been there by showing their version of the images that they had seen originally before they set off” (140).Talking to the guide, my group, and other tourists about the images we were recording, and reviewing images tagged Monument Valley on Instagram revealed that digital and network technologies had altered tourists’ photographic practices. Tourist impressions of destinations come from a wide range of popular culture sources. They have, even on smartphones, fairly sophisticated tools for creating images; and they have diverse networks for distributing their images. Increasingly, the images that tourists see as representative of Monument Valley came from popular culture and social media, and not simply from tourism promotions. People are posting their travel images online, and are in turn looking to posts from others in their search for travel information (Akehurst 55). The current circle of representation in tourist photography is not simply a process of capturing promotional imagery, but an interaction between tourists that draws upon films, television, and other popular culture forms. Tourist photographs are less a matter of “consuming places” (Urry 259) and more an identity performance through which they create ongoing personal narratives of place by inserting themselves into pre-existing stories about the destination and circulating the new narratives.Jenkins analysed brochures on Australia available to potential tourists in Vancouver, Canada, and determined that the key photographic images used to promote Australia were Uluru and the Sydney Opera House, followed by sandy beaches alongside tropical blue waters. Interviews with Canadian backpackers travelling around Australia, and an examination of the images these backpackers took with the disposable cameras they were given, found a correlation between the brochure images and the personal photographs. Jenkins concluded that the results supported Urry’s theory of a closed circle of representation, in that the images from the brochures were “tracked down and recaptured, and the resulting photographs displayed upon return home by the backpackers as evidence of the trip” (Jenkins 324).Garrod randomly selected 25 tourists along the seafront of Aberystwyth, Wales, and gave them a single-use camera, a brief socio-demographic questionnaire, a photo log, and a reply-paid envelope in which they could return these items. The tourists were asked to take 12 photos and log the reason they took each photograph and what they tried to capture in terms of their visit to Aberystwyth. Nine females and four males returned their cameras, providing 164 photographs, which were compared with 70 postcards depicting Aberystwyth. While an initial comparison revealed similarities in the content of tourist photographs and the picture postcards of the town, Garrod’s analysis revealed two main differences: postcards featured wide angle or panoramic views, while tourist photos tended to be close up or detail shots and postcards included natural features, particularly bodies of water, while tourist photographs were more often of buildings and man-made structures. Garrod concluded that the relationship between tourism industry images and tourist photographs “might be more subtle and complex than simply for the two protagonists in the relationship to mimic one other” (356).MethodIdentifying a tourist’s motivation for taking a particular photograph, the source of inspiration for the image, and the details of what the photographer was attempting to capture involves the consideration of a range of variables, many of which cannot be controlled. The ability of the photographer and the sophistication of their equipment will have an impact on the type of images captured; for example this may explain the absence of panoramas in Aberystwyth tourist photos. The length of the stay and the level of familiarity with the location may also have an impact; on a first visit a tourist may look for the major landmarks and on subsequent visits photograph the smaller details. The personal history of the tourist, the meaning the location has for them, their reasons for visiting and their mood at the time, will all influence their selection of photo subjects. Giving tourists a camera and then asking them to photograph the destination may influence the choice of subject and the care taken with composition, however this does ensure a direct link between the tourist opinions gathered and the images analysed. An approach that depends on seeing the images taken independently by the tourists who were interviewed has logistical problems that significantly reduce sample size.Fourteen randomly selected tourists at the visitors centre in Monument Valley, a random sampling of 500 Instagram images hash tagged Monument Valley, and photographs taken by seven photographers in the author’s group were studied by the author. The tourists were asked what they wanted to take photographs of while in Monument Valley, and why of those particular subjects. The images taken by these tourists were not available for analysis for logistical reasons, and 500 Instagram images tagged #MonumentValley were collected as generally representative of tourist images. Members of the photography workshop group were all serious amateur photographers with digital SLR cameras, interchangeable lenses, and tripods. Motivations, decisions and the evaluation of images were discussed with this group, and their images reviewed in terms of the extent to which the image was felt to be representative of the location.Monument ValleyMonument Valley can be considered a mythic space in that it is a real place that has taken on mythic meanings that go beyond physical characteristics and lived experiences (Slotkin 11). Located on the Navajo Tribal Park on the Arizona Utah border, it is known by the Navajo as Tse'Bii'Ndzisgaii or “Valley of the Rocks.” Monument Valley is emblematic of the Wild West, the frontier beyond which civilization vanishes, a mythology originally derived from the Western Films of director John Ford. Ford's film, Stagecoach, was shot in Monument Valley and Ford returned nine times to shoot Westerns here, even when films (such as The Searchers, set in Texas) were not set in Arizona or Utah. The spectacular desert scenery with its towering rock formations combine epic grandeur with brutal conditions, providing an appropriate backdrop for dramatic oppositions: civilization versus barbarity, community versus wilderness, freedom versus domestication. The mythological meanings attached to Monument Valley were extended in the films, novels, television programs, and advertising that followed. Footage of Monument Valley is used to represent a blend of freedom and danger in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Easy Rider, Thelma & Louise, Marlborough and Chevrolet advertising, the television series Airwolf and episodes of Doctor Who. Monument Valley was the culmination of Forrest Gump's exhaustive run, and the setting for music videos by Kanye West, Madonna and Michael Jackson, each drawing on the themes of alienation and the displacement of the hero. While Westerns are on one level uniquely American, they are consistent with widely known romantic myths and stories, and the universal narratives evoked by Monument Valley have appeal far outside the USA. The iconic images of Monument Valley have been circulated well beyond tourist informational material, permeating a breadth of popular culture forms.Photographing the ValleyPhotography is intrinsically linked with tourism, fulfilling a number of roles. Travel can have as its purpose the collection of images, and as such, photography can function to structure the travel experience, and to evaluate its success (Schroeder; Sontag). Recognisable images of the location provide evidence that travel was undertaken, places were visited, and the traveller has experienced some form of authentic or exotic experience (Chalfen 435). Sharing images is an essential part of the process. The various roles of photography are to an extent dependent on having a shared mental image of what photographs from the travel location would look like. This mental image is derived, in part, from tourism sources such as postcards, brochures, and websites, but also from popular culture, and increasingly from photographs taken by other tourists. Travel images are shared online on sites such as Trip Advisor and Virtual Tourist, as well as travel blogs and photo sharing sites like Flickr and Instagram. People who post images online are likely to look to the same sites to search for travel information from others (Akehurst 55), reinforcing specific images as representative of the place and the experience.At the beginning of our photography-based tour we were asked which locations we wanted to photograph. There was a general consensus, with people looking for vistas and panoramas, “golden hour” light on the rock formations of buttes and mesas, sunrises and sunsets with silhouetted landscape forms, and close-ups of shadow patterns and textures. Our guide added that one day had been set aside for the iconic images, which were described as the “Forest Gump” shot from Highway 163, the Mittens at sunrise, John Ford Point (as most recently seen in The Lone Ranger movie posters), and the vista from Artist’s Point or North Window. When I asked tourists at the visitor information centre the same question about the images they wanted to capture, the responses were uniform with all of them saying the view of The Mittens, which was immediately before them. Seventy-eight percent (N=11) said that they were after a general panorama with the distinctive landforms, and Highway 163 was named by 57 percent (N=8). Few gave more than these three sites. Forty-two percent (N=6) described the John Ford Point image with the Navajo rider as a goal, and the same number said they would like to take some sunrise or sunset images. Twenty-eight percent (N=4) were looking to take images of themselves or their friends and family, with the distinctive landscape as a backdrop. There was a high level of consistency between the images described by the guide as “iconic” and the photographs that tourists wished to capture.Categorising five hundred Instagram images with the hashtag Monument Valley revealed 195 pictures (39 percent) of the Mittens, 58 of which were taken at sunrise or sunset. There were 88 images (18 percent) taken of Highway 163. John Ford Point featured in 26 images (five percent) of images and Artist’s Point was the location in 20 (four percent). Seventy-nine photographs (16 percent) were of other landmarks such as the Three Sisters, Elephant Butte, and Rain God Mesa, all visible from the self-drive circuit. Landmarks which could only be visited accompanied by a Navajo guide, accounted for 48 (nine percent) of the Instagram images. There were 16 images (three percent) of people, meals, and cars without any recognisable landmarks in the frame. The remaining 28 images (five percent) were of landmarks in the Southwest, but not in Monument Valley, although they were tagged as such.As expected, the photography tour group had a fairly wide range of images, which included close-ups of rocks, images of juniper trees, and images taken in places that were accessible only with a high clearance vehicle and a Navajo guide, such as the Totem Pole and Yei Bi Chei, the Valley of the Gods, and the slickrock formations of Mystery Valley. However, in the images selected at the end of the workshop as representative of their experience of Monument Valley, all participants included the iconic images of Highway 163, the Mittens, and the Artist’s Point vista.Very few images were of the Navajo people. Tourists are requested not to photograph the Navajo unless they were at a sign-posted location where a mechanism was available for paying for the privilege. Here the Navajo posed in traditional dress, engaged in customary activities, or as foreground interest in the desert landscape. The few tourists availing themselves of these opportunities seemed self-conscious, hurriedly taking the snap and paying the fee. Gillespie explains this as the effect of the “reverse gaze” where the photographed positions the photographer “as an ignorant and superficial tourist” (349). At the time, only one of the iconic images was featured on one of the official tourist sites, with the Mittens forming the banner image on the Visit Utah Monument Valley page. The Visit Arizona Monument Valley page had a single image (of the Ear of the Wind natural arch), and the Navajo Nation Parks and Recreation Monument Valley page also had a single image, that of the Three Sisters formation.Image and MeaningThe dominant subject in both tourist and tourism industry images is the Mittens. This image is also prominent in popular culture beginning with John Ford's film Stagecoach, through to Kanye West’s Bound 2 music video. This suggests that there is a closed circle of representation in tourist photography, with visitors capturing the images they have previously seen as representative of the destination. However, there may be an additional, more prosaic, explanation. The Mittens can be photographed from the terrace at the visitors centre, from the rooms at the View Hotel, or they can be captured from the car park, meaning that tourists do not have to leave their cars to attach this image to their travel narrative. The second most photographed landscape was that of Highway 163, an image that can be taken without even having to pay the fee and enter the Navajo Park.Garrod’s study of tourist and professional images of Aberystwyth noted that tourists did not have photographs taken from the top of the hill, and while no explanation for this was given, it could be that ease of access was a consideration. While the number of visitors to America’s national parks and recreation areas is increasing each year, the amount of time each visitor spends at the attraction is in decline. The average visit to Yosemite lasts just under five hours, visitors stay for just under two hours in Saguaro National Park in Arizona, and at the Grand Canyon National Park, most visitors spend just 17 minutes looking at the magnificent landscape (Bernstein; de Graaf). In Yosemite National Park many visitors “simply rolled by slowly in their cars, taking photos out the windows” (de Graaf np). So, ease of access to locations familiar from popular culture images is a factor in tourist representations of their destinations.Our photography tour group stayed five days in Monument Valley and travelled further afield to locations only accessible with a Navajo guide, however the images selected as representative of Monument Valley were of the same easily reached landmarks. This suggests that the process around the perpetuation of iconic tourist images is more complex than simple ease of access, or first impressions.What is apparent in looking at both the Instagram images and those photographs selected as representative by the tour group, is that what is depicted is not necessarily contemporary tourist experience, but rather a way of seeing the experience in terms of personal and cultural stories. Photography involves the selection, structuring and shaping of what is to be captured (Urry 260), so that the image is as much the representation of a perception, as a snapshot of experienced reality. In a guide to photographing the southwest of the USA, Matrés regrets the greater restrictions on movement and the increased commercialisation in Monument Valley (170), which reduce the possibility of photographing under good light conditions, and of capturing images without tourist buses, sales booths, and consequent crowds. However, almost all of the photographs studied avoided these. Photographers seemed to have expended considerable effort to produce an idealised image of a Western landscape that would have been familiar to John Ford, as the photographs were not of a commercialised, crowded tourist destination. When someone paid the horseman to ride out to the end of John Ford Point, groups of tourists would walk out too, fussing over the horse, however having people in the image led to those on the photography tour rejecting the image as representative of Monument Valley. For the most part, the landscape images highlighted the isolation and remoteness, depicting the frontier beyond which civilization ceases to exist.ConclusionPhotography is one of the performances through which people establish personal realities (Crang 245), and the reality for Monument Valley tourists is that it is still a remote destination. It is in the driest and least populated part of the US, and receives only 350,000 visitors a year compared, with the five million people who visit the nearby Grand Canyon. On a prosaic level, tourist photographs verify that the location was visited (Sontag 9), so the images must be able to be readily associated with the destination. They are evidence that the tourist has experienced some form of authentic, exotic, place (Chalfen 435), and so must depict scenes that differ from the everyday landscape. They also play a role in constructing an identity based in being a particular type of tourist, so they need to contribute to the narrative constructed from a blend of mythologies, memories and experiences. The circle of representation in tourist images is still closed, though it has broadened to constitute a narrative derived from a range of sources. By capturing the iconic landmarks of Monument Valley framed to emphasise the grandeur and isolation, tourists insert themselves into a narrative that includes John Wayne and Kanye West at the edge of civilization.References2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.Airwolf. Dir. Donald P. Bellisario, CBS, 1984–1986.Akehurst, Gary. “User Generated Content: The Use of Blogs for Tourism Organisations and Tourism Consumers.” Service Business 3.1 (2009): 51-61.Bernstein, Danny. “The Numbers behind National Park Visitation.” National Parks Traveller, 2010. 5 Aug. 2016 <http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2010/04/numbers-behind-national-park-visitation/>.Kanye West. Bound 2. Nick Knight Good Music, 2013.Chalfen, Richard M. “Photography’s Role in Tourism: Some Unexplored Relationships.” Annals of Tourism Research 6.4 (1979): 435–447Crang, Mike. “Knowing, Tourism and Practices of Vision.” Leisure/Tourism Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge. Ed. David Crouch. London: Routledge, 1999. 238–56.De Graaf, John. “Finding Time for Our Parks.” Earth Island Journal, 2016. 5 Aug. 2016 <http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/finding_time_for_our_parks/>.Doctor Who. Sydney Newman, C. E. Webber, Donald Wilson. BBC One, 1963–present.Easy Rider. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Columbia Pictures, 1969.Garrod, Brian. “Understanding the Relationship between Tourism Destination Imagery and Tourist Photography.” Journal of Travel Research 47.3 (2009): 346-358Gillespie, Alex. "Tourist Photography and the Reverse Gaze." Ethos 34.3 (2006): 343-366.Jenkins, Olivia. “Photography and Travel Brochures: The Circle of Representation.” Tourism Geographies 5.3 (2003): 305-328.Matrés, Laurent. Photographing the Southwest. Alta Loma, CA: Graphie Publishers, 2006.Schroeder, Jonathan E. Visual Consumption. London: Routledge, 2002.Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin Books, 1977 Stagecoach. Dir. John Ford. United Artists, 1937.The Searchers. Dir. John Ford. Warner Bros, 1956.Thelma & Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991.Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage, 1992.

Introduction: Artist Villages in Beijing Many of the most renowned sites of Beijing are found in the inner-city districts of Dongcheng and Xicheng: for instance, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Lama Temple, the National Theatre, the Central Opera Academy, the Bell Tower, the Drum Tower, the Imperial College, and the Confucius Temple. However, in the past decade a new attraction has been added to the visitor “must-see” list in Beijing. The 798 Art District originated as an artist village within abandoned factory buildings at Dashanzi, right between the city’s Central Business District and the open outer rural space on Beijing’s north-east. It is arguably the most striking symbol of China’s contemporary art scene. The history of the 798 Art District is by now well known (Keane), so this paper will provide a short summary of its evolution. Of more concern is the relationship between the urban fringe and what Howard Becker has called “art worlds.” By art worlds, Becker refers to the multitude of agents that contribute to a final work of art: for instance, people who provide canvasses, frames, and art supplies; critics and intermediaries; and the people who run exhibition services. To the art-world list in Beijing we need to add government officials and developers. To date there are more than 100 artist communities or villages in Beijing; almost all are located in the city’s outskirts. In particular, a high-powered art centre outside the city of Beijing has recently established a global reputation. Songzhuang is situated in outer Tongzhou District, some 30 kilometres east of Tiananmen Square. The Beijing Municipal Government officially classifies Songzhuang as the Capital Art District (CAD) or “the Songzhuang Original Art Cluster.” The important difference between 798 and Songzhuang is that, whereas the former has become a centre for retail and art galleries, Songzhuang operates as an arts production centre for experimental art, with less focus on commercial art. The destiny of the artistic communities is closely related to urban planning policies that either try to shut them down or protect them. In this paper I will take a close look at three artist villages: Yuanmingyuan, 798, and Songzhuang. In tracing the evolution of the three artist villages, I will shed some light on artists’ lives in city fringes. I argue that these outer districts provide creative industries with a new opportunity for development. This is counter to the conventional wisdom that central urban areas are the ideal locality for creative industries. Accordingly, this argument needs to be qualified: some types of creative work are more suitable to rural and undeveloped areas. The visual art “industry” is one of these. Inner and Outer Worlds Urban historians contend that innovation is more likely to happen in inner urban areas because of intensive interactions between people (Jacobs). City life has been associated with the development of creative industries and economic benefits brought about by the interaction of creative classes. In short, the argument is that cities, or, more specifically, urban areas are primary economic entities (Montgomery) whereas outer suburbs are uncreative and dull (Florida, "Cities"). The conventional wisdom is that talented creative people are attracted to the creative milieu in cities: universities, book shops, cafes, museums, theatres etc. These are both the hard and the soft infrastructure of modern cities. They illustrate diversified built forms, lifestyles and experiences (Lorenzen and Frederiksen; Florida, Rise; Landry; Montgomery; Leadbeater and Oakley). The assumption that inner-city density is the cradle of creative industries has encountered critique. Empirical studies in Australia have shown that creative occupations are found in relatively high densities in urban fringes. The point made in several studies is that suburbia has been neglected by scholars and policy makers and may have potential for future development (Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Commission; Collis, Felton, and Graham). Moreover, some have argued that the practice of constructing inner city enclaves may be leading to homogenized and prescriptive geographies (Collis, Felton, and Graham; Kotkin). As Jane Jacobs has indicated, it is not only density of interactions but diversity that attracts and accommodates economic growth in cities. However, the spatiality of creative industries varies across different sectors. For example, media companies and advertising agencies are more likely to be found in the inner city, whereas most visual artists prefer working in the comparatively quiet and loosely-structured outskirts. Nevertheless, the logic embodied in thinking around the distinctions between “urbanism” and “suburbanism” pays little attention to this issue, although both schools acknowledge the causal relationship between locality and creativity. According to Drake, empirical evidence shows that the function of locality is not only about encouraging interactions between SMEs (small to medium enterprises) within clusters which can generate creativity, but also a catalyst for individual creativity (Drake). Therefore for policy makers in China, the question here is how to plan or prepare a better space to accommodate creative professionals’ needs in different sectors while making the master plan. This question is particularly urgent to the Chinese government, which is undertaking a massive urbanization transition throughout the country. In placing a lens on Beijing, it is important to note the distinctive features of its politics, forms of social structure, and climate. As Zhu has described it, Beijing has spread in a symmetrical structure. The reasons have much to do with ancient history. According to Zhu, the city which was planned in the era of Genghis Khan was constituted by four layers or enclosures, with the emperor at the centre, surrounded by the gentry and other populations distributed outwards according to wealth, status, and occupation. The outer layer accommodated many lower social classes, including itinerant artists, musicians, and merchants. This ”outer city” combined with open rural space. The system of enclosures is carried on in today’s city planning of Beijing. Nowadays Beijing is most commonly described by its ring roads (Mars and Hornsby). However, despite the existing structure, new approaches to urban policy have resulted in a great deal of flux. The emergence of new landscapes such as semi-urbanized villages, rural urban syndicates (chengxiang jiehebu), and villages-within-cities (Mars and Hornsby 290) illustrate this flux. These new types of landscapes, which don’t correspond to the suburban concept that we find in the US or Australia, serve to represent and mediate the urban-rural relationship in China. The outer villages also reflect an old tradition of “recluse” (yin shi), which since the Wei and Jin Dynasties allowed intellectuals to withdraw themselves from the temporal world of the city and live freely in the mountains. The Lost Artistic Utopia: Yuanmingyuan Artist Village Yuanmingyuan, also known as the Ming Dynasty summer palace, is located in Haidian District in the north-west of Beijing. Haidian has transformed from an outer district of Beijing into one of its flourishing urban districts since the mid-1980s. Haidian’s success is largely due to the electronics industry which developed from spin-offs from Peking University, Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the 1980s. This led to the rapid emergence of Zhongguancun, sometimes referred to as China’s Silicon Valley. However there is another side of Haidian’s transformation. As the first graduates came out of Chinese Academies of the Arts following the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), creative lifestyles became available. Some people quit jobs at state-owned institutions and chose to go freelance, which was unimaginable in China under the former regime of Mao Zedong. By 1990, the earliest “artist village” emerged around the Yuanmingyuan accommodating artists from around China. The first site was Fuyuanmen village. Artists living and working there proudly called their village “West Village” in China, comparing it to the Greenwich Village in New York. At that time they were labelled as “vagabonds” (mangliu) since they had no family in Beijing, and no stable job or income. Despite financial difficulties, the Yuanmingyuan artist village was a haven for artists. They were able to enjoy a liberating and vigorous environment by being close to the top universities in Beijing[1]. Access to ideas was limited in China at that time so this proximity was a key ingredient. According to an interview by He Lu, the Yuanmingyuan artist village gave artists a sense of belonging which went far beyond geographic identification as a marginal group unwelcomed by conservative urban society. Many issues arose along with the growth of the artist village. The non-traditional lifestyle and look of these artists were deemed abnormal by many of the general public; the way of their expression and behaviour was too extreme to be accepted by the mainstream in what was ultimately a political district; they were a headache for local police who saw them as troublemakers; moreover, their contact with the western world was a sensitive issue for the government at that time. Suddenly, the village was closed by the government in 1993. Although the Yuanmingyuan artist village existed for only a few years, it is of significance in China’s contemporary art history. It is the birth place of the cynical realism movement as well as the genesis of Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Mingjun, now among the most successful Chinese contemporary artists in global art market. The Starting Point of Art Industry: 798 and Songzhuang After the Yuanmingyuan artist village was shut down in 1993, artists moved to two locations in the east of Beijing to escape from the government and embrace the free space they longed for. One was 798, an abandoned electronic switching factory in Beijing’s north-east urban fringe area; the other was Songzhuang in Tongzhou District, a further twenty kilometres east. Both of these sites would be included in the first ten official creative clusters by Beijing municipal government in 2006. But instead of simply being substitutes for the Yuanmingyuan artist village, both have developed their own cultures, functioning and influencing artists’ lives in different ways. Songzhuang is located in Tongzhou which is an outer district in Beijing’s east. Songzhuang was initially a rural location; its livelihood was agriculture and industry. Just before the closing down of the Yuanmingyuan village, several artists including Fang Lijun moved to this remote quiet village. Through word of mouth, more artists followed their steps. There are about four thousand registered artists currently living in Songzhuang now; it is already the biggest visual art community in Beijing. An artistic milieu and a local sense of place have grown with the increasing number of artists. The local district government invests in building impressive exhibition spaces and promoting art in order to bring in more tourists, investors and artists. Compared with Songzhuang, 798 enjoys a favourable location along the airport expressway, between the capital airport and the CBD of Beijing. The unused electronics plant was initially rented as classrooms by the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s. Then several artists moved their studios and workshops to the area upon eviction from the Yuanmingyuan village. Until 2002 the site was just a space to rent cheap work space, a factor that has stimulated many art districts globally (Zukin). From that time the resident artists began to plan how to establish a contemporary art district in China. Led by Huang Rui, a leading visual artist, the “798 collective” launched arts events and festivals, notably a “rebuilding 798” project of 2003. More galleries, cafés, bars, and restaurants began to set up, culminating in a management takeover by the Chaoyang District government with the Seven Stars Group[2] prior to the Beijing Olympics. The area now provides massive tax revenue to the local and national government. Nonetheless, both 798 and Songzhuang face problems which reflect the conflict between artists’ attachment to fringe areas and the government’s urbanization approach. 798 can hardly be called an artist production village now due to the local government’s determination to exploit cultural tourism. Over 50 percent of enterprises and people working in 798 now identify 798 as a tourism area rather than an art or “creative” cluster (Liu). Heavy commercialization has greatly disappointed many leading artists. The price for renting space has gone beyond the affordability of artists, and many have chosen to leave. In Songzhuang, the story is similar. In addition to rising prices, a legal dispute between artists and local residents regarding land property rights in 2008 drove some artists out of Songzhuang because they didn’t feel it was stable anymore (Smith). The district’s future as a centre of original art runs up against the aspirations of local officials for more tax revenue and tourist dollars. In the Songzhuang Cultural Creative Industries Cluster Design Plan (cited in Yang), which was developed by J.A.O Design International Architects and Planners Limited and sponsored by the Songzhuang local government in 2007, Songzhuang is designed as an “arts capital incorporated with culture, commerce and tourism.” The down side of this aspiration is that more museums, galleries, shopping centres, hotels, and recreation infrastructure will inevitably be developed in order to capitalise on Songzhuang’s global reputation. Concluding Reflections In reflecting on the recent history of artist villages in Beijing, we might conclude that rural locations are not only a cheap place for artists to live but also a space to showcase their works. More importantly, the relation of artists and outlying district has evolved into a symbiotic relationship. They interact and grow together. The existence of artists transforms the locale and the locale in turn reinforces the identity of artists. In Yuanmingyuan the artists appreciated the old “recluse” tradition and therefore sought spiritual liberation after decades of suppression. The outlying location symbolized freedom to them and provided distance from the world of noisy interaction. But isolation of artists from the local community and the associated constant conflict with local villagers deepened estrangement; these events brought about the end of the dream. In contrast, at 798 and Songzhuang, artists not only regarded the place as their worksite but also engaged with the local community. They communicated with local people and co-developed projects to transform the local landscape. Local communities changed; they started to learn about the artistic world while gaining economic benefits in many ways, such as house renting, running small grocery stores, providing art supplies and even modelling. Their participation into the “art worlds” (Becker) contributed to a changing cultural environment, in turn strengthening the brand of these artist villages. In many regards there were positive externalities for both artists and the district, although as I mentioned in relation to Songzhuang, tensions about land use have never completely been resolved. Today, the fine arts in China have gone far beyond the traditional modes of classics, aesthetics, liberation or rebellion. Art is also a business which requires the access to the material world in order to produce incomes and make profits. It appears that many contemporary artists are not part of a movement of rebellion (except several artists, such as Ai Weiwei), adopting the pure spirit of art as their life-time mission, as in the Yuanmingyuan artist village. They still long for recognition, but they are also concerned with success and producing a livelihood. The boundary between inner urban and outer urban areas is not as significant to them as it once was for artists from a former period. While many artists enjoy the quiet and space of the fringe and rural areas to work; they also require urban space to exhibit their works and earn money. This factor explains the recent emergence of Caochangdi and other artist villages in the neighbouring area around the 798. These latest artist villages in the urban fringe still have open and peaceful spaces and can be accessed easily due to convenient transportation. Unfortunately, the coalition of business and government leads to rapid commercialization of place which is not aligned with the basic need of artists, which is not only a free or affordable place but also a space for creativity. As mentioned above, 798 is now so commercialized that it is too crowded and expensive for artists due to the government’s overdevelopment; whereas the government’s original intention was to facilitate the development of 798. Furthermore, although artists are a key stakeholder in the government’s agenda for visual art industry, it is always the government’s call when artists’ attachment to rural space comes into conflict with Beijing government’s urbanization plan. Hence the government decides which artist villages should be sacrificed to give way to urban development and which direction the reserved artist villages or art clusters should be developed. The logic of government policy causes an absolute distinction between cities and outlying districts. And the government’s enthusiasm for “urbanization” leads to urbanized artist villages, such as the 798. A vicious circle is formed: the government continuously attempts to have selected artist villages commercialized and transformed into urbanized or quasi-urbanized area and closes other artist villages. One of the outcomes of this policy is that in the government created creative clusters, many artists do not stay, and move away into rural and outlying areas because they prefer to work in non-urban spaces. To resolve this dilemma, greater attention is required to understand artists needs and ways to combine urban convenience and rural tranquillity into their development plans. This may be a bridge too far, however. Reference Becker, Howard Saul. Art Worlds. 25th anniversary, updated and expanded ed. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2008. Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. "Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice." The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12. Commission, Outer London. The Mayor's Outer London Commission: Report. London: Great London Authority, 2010. Drake, Graham. "'This Place Gives Me Space': Place and Creativity in the Creative Industries." Geoforum 34.4 (2003): 511–24. Florida, Richard. "Cities and the Creative Class." The Urban Sociology Reader. Eds. Jan Lin and Christopher Mele. London: Routledge, 2005. 290–301. ———. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. "Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research." Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Jacobs, Jane. The Economy of Cities. New York: Random House, 1969. Keane, Michael. "The Capital Complex: Beijing's New Creative Clusters." Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives. Ed. Lily Kong and Justin O'Connor. London: Springer, 2009. 77–95. Kotkin, Joel. "The Protean Future of American Cities." New Geographer 7 Mar. 2011. 27 Mar. 2011 ‹http://blogs.forbes.com/joelkotkin/2011/03/07/the-protean-future-of-american-cities/›. Landry, Charles. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan Publications, 2000. Leadbeater, Charles, and Kate Oakley. The Independents: Britain's New Cultural Entrepreneurs. London: Demos, 1999. Liu, Mingliang. "Beijing 798 Art Zone: Field Study and Follow-Up Study in the Context of Market." Chinese National Academy of Arts, 2010. Lorenzen, Mark, and Lars Frederiksen. "Why Do Cultural Industries Cluster? Localization, Urbanization, Products and Projects." Creative Cities, Cultural Clusters and Local Economic Development. Ed. Philip Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2008. 155-79. Mars, Neville, and Adrian Hornsby. The Chinese Dream: A Society under Construction. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2008. Montgomery, John. The New Wealth of Cities: City Dynamics and the Fifth Wave. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Smith, Karen. "Heart of the Art." Beijing: Portrait of a City. Ed. Alexandra Pearson and Lucy Cavender. Hong Kong: The Middle Kingdom Bookworm, 2008. 106–19. Yang, Wei, ed. Songzhuang Arts 2006. Beijing: Hunan Fine Arts Press, 2007. Zhu, Jianfei. Chinese Spatial Strategies Imperial Beijing, 1420-1911. Routledge Curzon, 2004. Zukin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995. [1] Most prestigious Chinese universities are located in the Haidian District of Beijing, such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, etc. [2] Seven Star Group is the landholder of the area where 798 is based.

Introduction The recent AOL/Time-Warner merger invites us to re-think the relationships amongst content producers, distributors, and audiences. Worth an estimated $300 billion (US), the largest Internet transaction of all time, the deal is 45 times larger than the AOL/Netscape merger of November 1998 (Ledbetter). Additionally, the Time Warner/EMI merger, which followed hard on the heels of the AOL/Time-Warner deal and is itself worth $28 billion (US), created the largest content rights organisation in the music industry. The joining of the Internet giant (AOL) with what was already the world's largest media corporation (Time-Warner-EMI) has inspired some exuberant reactions. An Infoworld column proclaimed: The AOL/Time-Warner merger signals the demise of traditional media companies and the ascendancy of 'new economy' media companies that will force any industry hesitant to adopt a complete electronic-commerce strategy to rethink and put itself on Internet time. (Saap & Schwarrtz) This comment identifies the distribution channel as the dominant component of the "new economy" media. But this might not really be much of an innovation. Indeed, the assumption of all industry observers is that Time-Warner will provide broadband distribution (through its extensive cable holdings) as well as proprietary content for AOL. It is also expected that Time-Warner will adopt AOL's strategy of seeking sponsorship for development projects as well as for content. However, both of these phenomena -- merger and sponsorship -- are at least as old as radio. It seems that the Internet is merely repeating an old industrial strategy. Nonetheless, one important difference distinguishes the Internet from earlier media: its characterisation of the audience. Internet companies such as AOL and Microsoft tend towards a simple and simplistic media- centred view of the audience as market. I will show, however, that as the Internet assumes more of the traditional mass media functions, it will be forced to adopt a more sophisticated notion of the mass audience. Indeed, the Internet is currently the site in which audience definitions borrowed from broadcasting are encountering and merging with definitions borrowed from marketing. The Internet apparently lends itself to both models. As a result, definitions of what the Internet does or is, and of how we should understand the audience, are suitably confused and opaque. And the behaviour of big Internet players, such as AOL and MSN, perfectly reflects this confusion as they seem to careen between a view of the Internet as the new television and a contrasting view of the Internet as the new shopping mall. Meanwhile, Internet users move in ways that most observers fail to capture. For example, Baran and Davis characterise mass communication as a process involving (1) an organized sender, (2) engaged in the distribution of messages, (3) directed toward a large audience. They argue that broadcasting fits this model whereas a LISTSERV does not because, even though the LISTSERV may have very many subscribers, its content is filtered through a single person or Webmaster. But why is the Webmaster suddenly more determining than a network programmer or magazine editor? The distinction seems to grow out of the Internet's technological characteristics: it is an interactive pipeline, therefore its use necessarily excludes the possibility of "broadcasting" which in turn causes us to reject "traditional" notions of the audience. However, if a media organisation were to establish an AOL discussion group in order to promote Warner TV shows, for example, would not the resulting communication suddenly fall under the definition as set out by Baran and Davis? It was precisely the confusion around such definitions that caused the CRTC (Canada's broadcasting and telecommunications regulator) to hold hearings in 1999 to determine what kind of medium the Internet is. Unlike traditional broadcasting, Internet communication does indeed include the possibility of interactivity and niche communities. In this sense, it is closer to narrowcasting than to broadcasting even while maintaining the possibility of broadcasting. Hence, the nature of the audience using the Internet quickly becomes muddy. While such muddiness might have led us to sharpen our definitions of the audience, it seems instead to have led many to focus on the medium itself. For example, Morris & Ogan define the Internet as a mass medium because it addresses a mass audience mediated through technology (Morris & Ogan 39). They divide producers and audiences on the Internet into four groups: One-to-one asynchronous communication (e-mail); Many-to-many asynchronous communication (Usenet and News Groups); One-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many synchronous communication (topic groups, construction of an object, role-playing games, IRC chats, chat rooms); Asynchronous communication (searches, many-to-one, one-to-one, one to- many, source-receiver relations (Morris & Ogan 42-3) Thus, some Internet communication qualifies as mass communication while some does not. However, the focus remains firmly anchored on either the sender or the medium because the receiver --the audience -- is apparently too slippery to define. When definitions do address the content distributed over the Net, they make a distinction between passive reception and interactive participation. As the World Wide Web makes pre-packaged content the norm, the Internet increasingly resembles a traditional mass medium. Timothy Roscoe argues that the main focus of the World Wide Web is not the production of content (and, hence, the fulfilment of the Internet's democratic potential) but rather the presentation of already produced material: "the dominant activity in relation to the Web is not producing your own content but surfing for content" (Rosco 680). He concludes that if the emphasis is on viewing material, the Internet will become a medium similar to television. Within media studies, several models of the audience compete for dominance in the "new media" economy. Denis McQuail recalls how historically, the electronic media furthered the view of the audience as a "public". The audience was an aggregate of common interests. With broadcasting, the electronic audience was delocalised and socially decomposed (McQuail, Mass 212). According to McQuail, it was not a great step to move from understanding the audience as a dispersed "public" to thinking about the audience as itself a market, both for products and as a commodity to be sold to advertisers. McQuail defines this conception of the audience as an "aggregate of potential customers with a known social- economic profile at which a medium or message is directed" (McQuail, Mass 221). Oddly though, in light of the emancipatory claims made for the Internet, this is precisely the dominant view of the audience in the "new media economy". Media Audience as Market How does the marketing model characterise the relationship between audience and producer? According to McQuail, the marketing model links sender and receiver in a cash transaction between producer and consumer rather than in a communicative relationship between equal interlocutors. Such a model ignores the relationships amongst consumers. Indeed, neither the effectiveness of the communication nor the quality of the communicative experience matters. This model, explicitly calculating and implicitly manipulative, is characteristically a "view from the media" (McQuail, Audience 9). Some scholars, when discussing new media, no longer even refer to audiences. They speak of users or consumers (Pavick & Dennis). The logic of the marketing model lies in the changing revenue base for media industries. Advertising-supported media revenues have been dropping since the early 1990s while user-supported media such as cable, satellite, online services, and pay-per-view, have been steadily growing (Pavlik & Dennis 19). In the Internet-based media landscape, the audience is a revenue stream and a source of consumer information. As Bill Gates says, it is all about "eyeballs". In keeping with this view, AOL hopes to attract consumers with its "one-stop shopping and billing". And Internet providers such as MSN do not even consider their subscribers as "audiences". Instead, they work from a consumer model derived from the computer software industry: individuals make purchases without the seller providing content or thematising the likely use of the software. The analogy extends well beyond the transactional moment. The common practice of prototyping products and beta-testing software requires the participation of potential customers in the product development cycle not as a potential audience sharing meanings but as recalcitrant individuals able to uncover bugs. Hence, media companies like MTV now use the Internet as a source of sophisticated demographic research. Recently, MTV Asia established a Website as a marketing tool to collect preferences and audience profiles (Slater 50). The MTV audience is now part of the product development cycle. Another method for getting information involves the "cookie" file that automatically provides a Website with information about the user who logs on to a site (Pavick & Dennis). Simultaneously, though, both Microsoft and AOL have consciously shifted from user-subscription revenues to advertising in an effort to make online services more like television (Gomery; Darlin). For example, AOL has long tried to produce content through its own studios to generate sufficiently heavy traffic on its Internet service in order to garner profitable advertising fees (Young). However, AOL and Microsoft have had little success in providing content (Krantz; Manes). In fact, faced with the AOL/Time-Warner merger, Microsoft declared that it was in the software rather than the content business (Trott). In short, they are caught between a broadcasting model and a consumer model and their behaviour is characteristically erratic. Similarly, media companies such as Time-Warner have failed to establish their own portals. Indeed, Time-Warner even abandoned attempts to create large Websites to compete with other Internet services when it shut down its Pathfinder site (Egan). Instead it refocussed its Websites so as to blur the line between pitching products and covering them (Reid; Lyons). Since one strategy for gaining large audiences is the creation of portals - - large Websites that keep surfers within the confines of a single company's site by providing content -- this is the logic behind the AOL/Time-Warner merger though both companies have clearly been unsuccessful at precisely such attempts. AOL seems to hope that Time- Warner will act as its content specialist, providing the type of compelling material that will make users want to use AOL, whereas Time- Warner seems to hope that AOL will become its privileged pipeline to the hearts and minds of untold millions. Neither has a coherent view of the audience, how it behaves, or should behave. Consequently, their efforts have a distinctly "unmanaged" and slighly inexplicable air to them, as though everyone were simultaneously hopeful and clueless. While one might argue that the stage is set to capitalise on the audience as commodity, there are indications that the success of such an approach is far from guaranteed. First, the AOL/Time-Warner/EMI transaction, merely by existing, has sparked conflicts over proprietary rights. For example, the Recording Industry Association of America, representing Sony, Universal, BMG, Warner and EMI, recently launched a $6.8 billion lawsuit against MP3.com -- an AOL subsidiary -- for alleged copyright violations. Specifically, MP3.com is being sued for selling digitized music over the Internet without paying royalties to the record companies (Anderson). A similar lawsuit has recently been launched over the issue of re- broadcasting television programs over the Internet. The major US networks have joined together against Canadian Internet company iCravetv for the unlawful distribution of content. Both the iCravetv and the MP3.com cases show how dominant media players can marshal their forces to protect proprietary rights in both content and distribution. Since software and media industries have failed to recreate the Internet in the image of traditional broadcasting, the merger of the dominant players in each industry makes sense. However, their simultaneous failure to secure proprietary rights reflects both the competitive nature of the "new media economy" and the weakness of the marketing view of the audience. Media Audience as Public It is often said that communication produces social cohesion. From such cohesion communities emerge on which political or social orders can be constructed. The power of social cohesion and attachment to group symbols can even create a sense of belonging to a "people" or nation (Deutsch). Sociologist Daniel Bell described how the mass media helped create an American culture simply by addressing a large enough audience. He suggested that on the evening of 7 March 1955, when one out of every two Americans could see Mary Martin as Peter Pan on television, a kind of social revolution occurred and a new American public was born. "It was the first time in history that a single individual was seen and heard at the same time by such a broad public" (Bell, quoted in Mattelart 72). One could easily substitute the 1953 World Series or the birth of little Ricky on I Love Lucy. The desire to document such a process recurs with the Internet. Internet communities are based on the assumption that a common experience "creates" group cohesion (Rheingold; Jones). However, as a mass medium, the Internet has yet to find its originary moment, that event to which all could credibly point as the birth of something genuine and meaningful. A recent contender was the appearance of Paul McCartney at the refurbished Cavern Club in Liverpool. On Tuesday, 14 December 1999, McCartney played to a packed club of 300 fans, while another 150,000 watched on an outdoor screen nearby. MSN arranged to broadcast the concert live over the Internet. It advertised an anticipated global audience of 500 million. Unfortunately, there was such heavy Internet traffic that the system was unable to accommodate more than 3 million people. Servers in the United Kingdom were so congested that many could only watch the choppy video stream via an American link. The concert raises a number of questions about "virtual" events. We can draw several conclusions about measuring Internet audiences. While 3 million is a sizeable audience for a 20 minute transmission, by advertising a potential audience of 500 million, MSN showed remarkably poor judgment of its inherent appeal. The Internet is the first medium that allows access to unprocessed material or information about events to be delivered to an audience with neither the time constraints of broadcast media nor the space limitations of the traditional press. This is often cited as one of the characteristics that sets the Internet apart from other media. This feeds the idea of the Internet audience as a participatory, democratic public. For example, it is often claimed that the Internet can foster democratic participation by providing voters with uninterpreted information about candidates and issues (Selnow). However, as James Curran argues, the very process of distributing uninterrupted, unfiltered information, at least in the case of traditional mass media, represents an abdication of a central democratic function -- that of watchdog to power (Curran). In the end, publics are created and maintained through active and continuous participation on the part of communicators and audiences. The Internet holds together potentially conflicting communicative relationships within the same technological medium (Merrill & Ogan). Viewing the audience as co-participant in a communicative relationship makes more sense than simply focussing on the Internet audience as either an aggregate of consumers or a passively constructed symbolic public. Audience as Relationship Many scholars have shifted attention from the producer to the audience as an active participant in the communication process (Ang; McQuail, Audience). Virginia Nightingale goes further to describe the audience as part of a communicative relationship. Nightingale identifies four factors in the relationship between audiences and producers that emphasize their co-dependency. The audience and producer are engaged in a symbiotic relationship in which consumption and use are necessary but not sufficient explanations of audience relations. The notion of the audience invokes, at least potentially, a greater range of activities than simply use or consumption. Further, the audience actively, if not always consciously, enters relationships with content producers and the institutions that govern the creation, distribution and exhibition of content (Nightingale 149-50). Others have demonstrated how this relationship between audiences and producers is no longer the one-sided affair characterised by the marketing model or the model of the audience as public. A global culture is emerging based on critical viewing skills. Kavoori calls this a reflexive mode born of an increasing familiarity with the narrative conventions of news and an awareness of the institutional imperatives of media industries (Kavoori). Given the sophistication of the emergent global audience, a theory that reduces new media audiences to a set of consumer preferences or behaviours will inevitably prove inadequate, just as it has for understanding audience behavior in old media. Similarly, by ignoring those elements of audience behavior that will be easily transported to the Web, we run the risk of idealising the Internet as a medium that will create an illusory, pre-technological public. Conclusion There is an understandable confusion between the two models of the audience that appear in the examples above. The "new economy" will have to come to terms with sophisticated audiences. Contrary to IBM's claim that they want to "get to know all about you", Internet users do not seem particularly interested in becoming a perpetual source of market information. The fragmented, autonomous audience resists attempts to lock it into proprietary relationships. Internet hypesters talk about creating publics and argue that the Internet recreates the intimacy of community as a corrective to the atomisation and alienation characteristic of mass society. This faith in the power of a medium to create social cohesion recalls the view of the television audience as a public constructed by the common experience of watching an important event. However, MSN's McCartney concert indicates that creating a public from spectacle it is not a simple process. In fact, what the Internet media conglomerates seem to want more than anything is to create consumer bases. Audiences exist for pleasure and by the desire to be entertained. As Internet media institutions are established, the cynical view of the audience as a source of consumer behavior and preferences will inevitably give way, to some extent, to a view of the audience as participant in communication. Audiences will be seen, as they have been by other media, as groups whose attention must be courted and rewarded. Who knows, maybe the AOL/Time-Warner merger might, indeed, signal the new medium's coming of age. References Anderson, Lessley. "To Beam or Not to Beam. MP3.com Is Being Sued by the Major Record Labels. Does the Digital Download Site Stand a Chance?" Industry Standard 31 Jan. 2000. <http://www.thestandard.com>. Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Methuen, 1985. Baran, Stanley, and Dennis Davis. Mass Communication Theory: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. 2nd ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth 2000. Curran, James. "Mass Media and Democracy Revisited." Mass Media and Society. Eds. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch. New York: Hodder Headline Group, 1996. Darlin, Damon. "He Wants Your Eyeballs." Forbes 159 (16 June 1997): 114-6. Egan, Jack, "Pathfinder, Rest in Peace: Time-Warner Pulls the Plug on Site." US News and World Report 126.18 (10 May 1999): 50. Gomery, Douglas. "Making the Web Look like Television (American Online and Microsoft)." American Journalism Review 19 (March 1997): 46. Jones, Steve, ed. CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995. Kavoori, Amandam P. "Discursive Texts, Reflexive Audiences: Global Trends in Television News Texts and Audience Reception." Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 43.3 (Summer 1999): 386-98. Krantz, Michael. "Is MSN on the Block?" Time 150 (20 Oct. 1997): 82. Ledbetter, James. "AOL-Time-Warner Make It Big." Industry Standard 11 Jan. 2000. <http://www.thestandard.com>. Lyons, Daniel. "Desparate.com (Media Companies Losing Millions on the Web Turn to Electronic Commerce)." Forbes 163.6 (22 March 1999): 50-1. Manes, Stephen. "The New MSN as Prehistoric TV." New York Times 4 Feb. 1997: C6. McQuail, Denis. Audience Analysis. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997. ---. Mass Communication Theory. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 1987. Mattelart, Armand. Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture. Trans. Susan Emanuel and James A. Cohen. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Morris, Merrill, and Christine Ogan. "The Internet as Mass Medium." Journal of Communications 46 (Winter 1996): 39-50. Nightingale, Virginia. Studying Audience: The Shock of the Real. London: Routledge, 1996. Pavlik, John V., and Everette E. Dennis. New Media Technology: Cultural and Commercial Perspectives. 2nd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998. Reid, Calvin. "Time-Warner Seeks Electronic Synergy, Profits on the Web (Pathfinder Site)." Publisher's Weekly 242 (4 Dec. 1995): 12. Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper, 1993. Roscoe, Timothy. "The Construction of the World Wide Web Audience." Media, Culture and Society 21.5 (1999): 673-84. Saap, Geneva, and Ephraim Schwarrtz. "AOL-Time-Warner Deal to Impact Commerce, Content, and Access Markets." Infoworld 11 January 2000. <http://infoworld.com/articles/ic/xml/00/01/11/000111icimpact.xml>. Slater, Joanna. "Cool Customers: Music Channels Hope New Web Sites Tap into Teen Spirit." Far Eastern Economic Review 162.9 (4 March 1999): 50. Trott, Bob. "Microsoft Views AOL-Time-Warner as Confirmation of Its Own Strategy." Infoworld 11 Jan. 2000. <http://infoworld.com/articles/pi/xml/00/01/11/000111pimsaoltw.xml>. Yan, Catherine. "A Major Studio Called AOL?" Business Week 1 Dec. 1997: 1773-4. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Daniel M. Downes. "The Medium Vanishes? The Resurrection of the Mass Audience in the New Media Economy." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/mass.php>. Chicago style: Daniel M. Downes, "The Medium Vanishes? The Resurrection of the Mass Audience in the New Media Economy," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/mass.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Daniel M. Downes. (2000) The Medium Vanishes? The Resurrection of the Mass Audience in the New Media Economy. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/mass.php> ([your date of access]).

The Harry Potter (HP) Fan Fiction (FF) phenomenon offers an opportunity to explore the nature of fame and the work of fans (including the second author, a participant observer) in creating and circulating cultural products within fan communities. Matt Hills comments (xi) that “fandom is not simply a ‘thing’ that can be picked over analytically. It is also always performative; by which I mean that it is an identity which is (dis-)claimed, and which performs cultural work”. This paper explores the cultural work of fandom in relation to FF and fame. The global HP phenomenon – in which FF lists are a small part – has made creator J K Rowling richer than the Queen of England, according to the 2003 ‘Sunday Times Rich List’. The books (five so far) and the films (three) continue to accelerate the growth in Rowling’s fortune, which quadrupled from 2001-3: an incredible success for an author unknown before the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997. Even the on-screen HP lead actor, Daniel Radcliffe, is now Britain’s second wealthiest teenager (after England’s Prince Harry). There are other globally successful books, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Narnia collection, but neither of these series has experienced the momentum of the HP rise to fame. (See Endnote for an indication of the scale of fan involvement with HP FF, compared with Lord of the Rings.) Contemporary ‘Fame’ has been critically defined in relation to the western mass media’s requirement for ‘entertaining’ content, and the production and circulation of celebrity as opposed to ‘hard news’(Turner, Bonner and Marshall). The current perception is that an army of publicists and spin doctors are usually necessary, but not sufficient, to create and nurture global fame. Yet the HP phenomenon started out with no greater publicity investment than that garnered by any other promising first novelist: and given the status of HP as children’s publishing, it was probably less hyped than equivalent adult-audience publications. So are there particular characteristics of HP and his creator that predisposed the series and its author to become famous? And how does the fame status relate to fans’ incorporation of these cultural materials into their lives? Accepting that it is no more possible to predict the future fame of an author or (fictional) character than it is to predict the future financial success of a book, film or album, there is a range of features of the HP phenomenon that, in hindsight, helped accelerate the fame momentum, creating what has become in hindsight an unparalleled global media property. J K Rowling’s personal story – in the hands of her publicity machine – itself constituted a magical myth: the struggling single mother writing away (in longhand) in a Scottish café, snatching odd moments to construct the first book while her infant daughter slept. (Comparatively little attention was paid by the marketers to the author’s professional training and status as a teacher, or to Rowling’s own admission that the first book, and the outline for the series, took five years to write.) Rowling’s name itself, with no self-evident gender attribution, was also indicative of ambiguity and mystery. The back-story to HP, therefore, became one of a quintessentially romantic endeavour – the struggle to write against the odds. Publicity relating to the ‘starving in a garret’ background is not sufficient to explain the HP/Rowling grip on the popular imagination, however. Instead it is arguable that the growth of HP fame and fandom is directly related to the growth of the Internet and to the middle class readers’ Internet access. If the production of celebrity is a major project of the conventional mass media, the HP phenomenon is a harbinger of the hyper-fame that can be generated through the combined efforts of the mass media and online fan communities. The implication of this – evident in new online viral marketing techniques (Kirby), is that publicists need to pique cyber-interest as well as work with the mass media in the construction of celebrity. As the cheer-leaders for online viral marketing make the argument, the technique “provides the missing link between the [bottom-up] word-of-mouth approach and the top-down, advertainment approach”. Which is not to say that the initial HP success was a function of online viral marketing: rather, the marketers learned their trade by analysing the magnifier impact that the online fan communities had upon the exponential growth of the HP phenomenon. This cyber-impact is based both on enhanced connectivity – the bottom-up, word-of-mouth dynamic, and on the individual’s need to assume an identity (albeit fluid) to participate effectively in online community. Critiquing the notion that the computer is an identity machine, Streeter focuses upon (649) “identities that people have brought to computers from the culture at large”. He does not deal in any depth with FF, but suggests (651) that “what the Internet is and will come to be, then, is partly a matter of who we expect to be when we sit down to use it”. What happens when fans sit down to use the Internet, and is there a particular reason why the Internet should be of importance to the rise and rise of HP fame? From the point of view of one of us, HP was born at more or less the same time as she was. Eleven years old in the first book, published in 1997, Potter’s putative birth year might be set in 1986 – in line with many of the original HP readership, and the publisher’s target market. At the point that this cohort was first spellbound by Potter, 1998-9, they were also on the brink of discovering the Internet. In Australia and many western nations, over half of (two-parent) families with school-aged children were online by the end of 2000 (ABS). Potter would notionally have been 14: his fans a little younger but well primed for the ‘teeny-bopper’ years. Arguably, the only thing more famous than HP for that age-group, at that time, was the Internet itself. As knowledge of the Internet grew stories about it constituted both news and entertainment and circulated widely in the mass media: the uncertainty concerning new media, and their impact upon existing social structures, has – over time – precipitated a succession of moral panics … Established commercial media are not noted for their generosity to competitors, and it is unsurprising that many of the moral panics circulating about pornography on the Net, Internet stalking, Web addiction, hate sites etc are promulgated in the older media. (Green xxvii) Although the mass media may have successfully scared the impressionable, the Internet was not solely constructed as a site of moral panic. Prior to the general pervasiveness of the Internet in domestic space, P. David Marshall discusses multiple constructions of the computer – seen by parents as an educational tool which could help future-proof their children; but which their children were more like to conceptualise as a games machine, or (this was the greater fear) use for hacking. As the computer was to become a site for the battle ground between education, entertainment and power, so too the Internet was poised to be colonised by teenagers for a variety of purposes their parents would have preferred to prevent: chat, pornography, game-playing (among others). Fan communities thrive on the power of the individual fan to project themselves and their fan identity as part of an ongoing conversation. Further, in constructing the reasons behind what has happened in the HP narrative, and in speculating what is to come, fans are presenting themselves as identities with whom others might agree (positive affirmation) or disagree (offering the chance for engagement through exchange). The genuinely insightful fans, who apparently predict the plots before they’re published, may even be credited in their communities with inspiring J K Rowling’s muse. (The FF mythology is that J K Rowling dare not look at the FF sites in case she finds herself influenced.) Nancy Baym, commenting on a soap opera fan Usenet group (Usenet was an early 1990s precursor to discussion groups) notes that: The viewers’ relationship with characters, the viewers’ understanding of socioemotional experience, and soap opera’s narrative structure, in which moments of maximal suspense are always followed by temporal gaps, work together to ensure that fans will use the gaps during and between shows to discuss with one another possible outcomes and possible interpretations of what has been seen. (143) In HP terms the The Philosopher’s Stone constructed a fan knowledge that J K Rowling’s project entailed at least seven books (one for each year at Hogwarts School) and this offered plentiful opportunities to speculate upon the future direction and evolution of the HP characters. With each speculation, each posting, the individual fan can refine and extend their identity as a member of the FF community. The temporal gaps between the books and the films – coupled with the expanding possibilities of Internet communication – mean that fans can feel both creative and connected while circulating the cultural materials derived from their engagement with the HP ‘canon’. Canon is used to describe the HP oeuvre as approved by Rowling, her publishers, and her copyright assignees (for example, Warner Bros). In contrast, ‘fanon’ is the name used by fans to refer the body of work that results from their creative/subversive interactions with the core texts, such as “slash” (homo-erotic/romance) fiction. Differentiation between the two terms acknowledges the likelihood that J K Rowling or her assignees might not approve of fanon. The constructed identities of fans who deal solely with canon differ significantly from those who are engaged in fanon. The implicit (romantic) or explicit (full-action descriptions) sexualisation of HP FF is part of a complex identity play on behalf of both the writers and readers of FF. Further, given that the online communities are often nurtured and enriched by offline face to face exchanges with other participants, what an individual is prepared to read or not to read, or write or not write, says as much about that person’s public persona as does another’s overt consumption of pornography; or diet of art house films, in contrast to someone else’s enthusiasm for Friends. Hearn, Mandeville and Anthony argue that a “central assertion of postmodern views of consumption is that social identity can be interpreted as a function of consumption” (106), and few would disagree with them: herein lies the power of the brand. Noting that consumer culture centrally focuses upon harnessing ‘the desire to desire’, Streeter’s work (654, on the opening up of Internet connectivity) suggests a continuum from ‘desire provoked’; through anticipation, ‘excitement based on what people imagined would happen’; to a sense of ‘possibility’. All this was made more tantalising in terms of the ‘unpredictability’ of how cyberspace would eventually resolve itself (657). Thus a progression is posited from desire through to the thrill of comparing future possibilities with eventual outcomes. These forces clearly influence the HP FF phenomenon, where a section of HP fans have become impatient with the pace of the ‘official’/canon HP text. J K Rowling’s writing has slowed down to the point that Harry’s initial readership has overtaken him by several years. He’s about to enter his sixth year (of seven) at secondary school – his erstwhile-contemporaries have already left school or are about to graduate to University. HP is yet to have ‘a relationship’: his fans are engaged in some well-informed speculation as to a range of sexual possibilities which would likely take J K Rowling some light years from her marketers’ core readership. So the story is progressing more slowly than many fans would choose and with less spice than many would like (from the evidence of the web, at least). As indicated in the Endnote, the productivity of the fans, as they ‘fill in the gaps’ while waiting for the official narrative to resume, is prodigious. It may be that as the fans outstrip HP in their own social and emotional development they find his reactions in later books increasingly unbelievable, and/or out of character with the HP they felt they knew. Thus they develop an alternative ‘Harry’ in fanon. Some FF authors identify in advance which books they accept as canon, and which they have decided to ignore. For example, popular FF author Midnight Blue gives the setting of her evolving FF The Mirror of Maybe as “after Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and as an alternative to the events detailed in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, [this] is a Slash story involving Harry Potter and Severus Snape”. Some fans, tired of waiting for Rowling to get Harry grown up, ‘are doin’ it for themselves’. Alternatively, it may be that as they get older the first groups of HP fans are unwilling to relinquish their investment in the HP phenomenon, but are equally unwilling to align themselves uncritically with the anodyne story of the canon. Harry Potter, as Warner Bros licensed him, may be OK for pre-teens, but less cool for the older adolescent. The range of identities that can be constructed using the many online HP FF genres, however, permits wide scope for FF members to identify with dissident constructions of the HP narrative and helps to add to the momentum with which his fame increases. Latterly there is evidence that custodians of canon may be making subtle overtures to creators of fanon. Here, the viral marketers have a particular challenge – to embrace the huge market represented by fanon, while not disturbing those whose HP fandom is based upon the purity of canon. Some elements of fanon feel their discourses have been recognised within the evolving approved narrative . This sense within the fan community – that the holders of the canon have complimented them through an intertextual reference – is much prized and builds the momentum of the fame engagement (as has been demonstrated by Watson, with respect to the band ‘phish’). Specifically, Harry/Draco slash fans have delighted in the hint of a blown kiss from Draco Malfoy to Harry (as Draco sends Harry an origami bird/graffiti message in a Defence against the Dark Arts Class in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) as an acknowledgement of their cultural contribution to the development of the HP phenomenon. Streeter credits Raymond’s essay ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ as offering a model for the incorporation of voluntary labour into the marketplace. Although Streeter’s example concerns the Open Source movement, derived from hacker culture, it has parallels with the prodigious creativity (and productivity) of the HP FF communities. Discussing the decision by Netscape to throw open the source code of its software in 1998, allowing those who use it to modify and improve it, Streeter comments that (659) “the core trope is to portray Linux-style software development like a bazaar, a real-life competitive marketplace”. The bazaar features a world of competing, yet complementary, small traders each displaying their skills and their wares for evaluation in terms of the product on offer. In contrast, “Microsoft-style software production is portrayed as hierarchical and centralised – and thus inefficient – like a cathedral”. Raymond identifies “ego satisfaction and reputation among other [peers]” as a specific socio-emotional benefit for volunteer participants (in Open Source development), going on to note: “Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon [… for example] science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized ‘egoboo’ (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity”. This may also be a prime mover for FF engagement. Where fans have outgrown the anodyne canon they get added value through using the raw materials of the HP stories to construct fanon: establishing and building individual identities and communities through HP consumption practices in parallel with, but different from, those deemed acceptable for younger, more innocent, fans. The fame implicit in HP fandom is not only that of HP, the HP lead actor Daniel Radcliffe and HP’s creator J K Rowling; for some fans the famed ‘state or quality of being widely honoured and acclaimed’ can be realised through their participation in online fan culture – fans become famous and recognised within their own community for the quality of their work and the generosity of their sharing with others. The cultural capital circulated on the FF sites is both canon and fanon, a matter of some anxiety for the corporations that typically buy into and foster these mega-media products. As Jim Ward, Vice-President of Marketing for Lucasfilm comments about Star Wars fans (cited in Murray 11): “We love our fans. We want them to have fun. But if in fact someone is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that’s not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.” Slash fans would beg to differ, and for many FF readers and writers, the joy of engagement, and a significant engine for the growth of HP fame, is partly located in the creativity offered for readers and writers to fill in the gaps. Endnote HP FF ranges from posts on general FF sites (such as fanfiction.net >> books, where HP has 147,067 stories [on 4,490 pages of hotlinks] posted, compared with its nearest ‘rival’ Lord of the rings: with 33,189 FF stories). General FF sites exclude adult content, much of which is corralled into 18+ FF sites, such as Restrictedsection.org, set up when core material was expelled from general sites. As an example of one adult site, the Potter Slash Archive is selective (unlike fanfiction.net, for example) which means that only stories liked by the site team are displayed. Authors submitting work are asked to abide by a list of ‘compulsory parameters’, but ‘warnings’ fall under the category of ‘optional parameters’: “Please put a warning if your story contains content that may be offensive to some authors [sic], such as m/m sex, graphic sex or violence, violent sex, character death, major angst, BDSM, non-con (rape) etc”. Adult-content FF readers/writers embrace a range of unexpected genres – such as Twincest (incest within either of the two sets of twin characters in HP) and Weasleycest (incest within the Weasley clan) – in addition to mainstream romance/homo-erotica pairings, such as that between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. (NB: within the time frame 16 August – 4 October, Harry Potter FF writers had posted an additional 9,196 stories on the fanfiction.net site alone.) References ABS. 8147.0 Use of the Internet by Householders, Australia. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/ e8ae5488b598839cca25682000131612/ ae8e67619446db22ca2568a9001393f8!OpenDocument, 2001, 2001>. Baym, Nancy. “The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communication.” CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed. S. Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. 138-63. Blue, Midnight. “The Mirror of Maybe.” http://www.greyblue.net/MidnightBlue/Mirror/default.htm>. Coates, Laura. “Muggle Kids Battle for Domain Name Rights. Irish Computer. http://www.irishcomputer.com/domaingame2.html>. Fanfiction.net. “Category: Books” http://www.fanfiction.net/cat/202/>. Green, Lelia. Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hearn, Greg, Tom Mandeville and David Anthony. The Communication Superhighway: Social and Economic Change in the Digital Age. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. Houghton Mifflin. “Potlatch.” Encyclopedia of North American Indians. http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/ na_030900_potlatch.htm>. Kirby, Justin. “Brand Papers: Getting the Bug.” Brand Strategy July-August 2004. http://www.dmc.co.uk/pdf/BrandStrategy07-0804.pdf>. Marshall, P. David. “Technophobia: Video Games, Computer Hacks and Cybernetics.” Media International Australia 85 (Nov. 1997): 70-8. Murray, Simone. “Celebrating the Story the Way It Is: Cultural Studies, Corporate Media and the Contested Utility of Fandom.” Continuum 18.1 (2004): 7-25. Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 2000. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html>. Streeter, Thomas. The Romantic Self and the Politics of Internet Commercialization. Cultural Studies 17.5 (2003): 648-68. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge UP. Watson, Nessim. “Why We Argue about Virtual Community: A Case Study of the Phish.net Fan Community.” Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety. Ed. Steven G. Jones. London: Sage, 1997. 102-32. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia, and Carmen Guinery. "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php>. APA Style Green, L., and C. Guinery. (Nov. 2004) "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php>.

This article explores the role of authenticity in televisual teaching and learning based on a case study of Who Do You Think You Are?, a documentary series in which celebrities go on a journey to retrace their family tree. Originally broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation, this series has been adapted in eighteen countries, including Australia. The Australian version is produced locally and has been airing on the public channel Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) since 2008. According to its producers, Who Do You Think You Are? teaches history and promotes multiculturalism:We like making a broad range of programs about history and telling our own Australian stories and particularly the multicultural basis of our history […] A lot of people know the broad Australian stroke, English, British history but they don’t really know as much about the migratory history […] It’s a way of saying this is our country now, this is where it came from, here’s some stories, which you might not be aware of, and what’s happened to people along the way. (Producer 1) In this article, I examine Who Do You Think You Are? as an educational text and I investigate its pedagogy. Starting with the assumption that it aims to teach, my intention is to explain how it teaches. In particular, I want to demonstrate that authenticity is a key feature of its pedagogy. Applied to the televisual text, the term “authentic” refers to the quality of being true or based on facts. In this sense, authenticity implies actuality, accuracy and reliability. Applied to media personae, “authentic” must be understood in its more modern sense of “genuine”. From this perspective, to be “authentic” requires displaying “one’s inner truths” (McCarthy 242). Based on my textual analysis and reception study, I show that these two forms of authenticity play a crucial role in the pedagogy of Who Do You Think You Are? Signifying Authenticity One of the pedagogical techniques of Who Do You Think You Are? is to persuade viewers that it authentically represents actual events by using some of the codes and conventions of the documentary. According to Michael Renov, the persuasive modality is intrinsic to all documentary forms and it is linked to their truth claim: “the documentary ‘truth claim’ (which says, at the very least: ‘Believe me, I’m of the world’) is the baseline for persuasion for all of nonfiction, from propaganda to rock doc” (30). Who Do You Think You Are? signifies actuality by using some of the codes and conventions of the observational documentary. As Bill Nichols explains, observational documentaries give the impression that they spontaneously and faithfully record actual events as they happen. Nichols compares this mode of documentary to Italian Neorealism: “we look in on life as it is lived. Social actors engage with one another, ignoring the filmmakers” (111). In Who Do You Think You Are? the celebrities and other social actors often engage with one another without acknowledging the camera’s presence. In those observational scenes, various textual features signify actuality: natural sounds, natural light or shaky hand-held camera, for example, are often used to connote the unprepared recording of reality. This is usually reinforced by the congruence between the duration of the scene and the diegetic time (the duration of the action that is represented). Furthermore, Who Do You Think You Are? emphasises authenticity by showing famous Australians as ordinary people in ordinary settings or doing mundane activities. As one of the SBS programmers pointed out during our interview: “It shows personalities or stars that you can never get to as real people and it makes you realise that those people, actually, they’re the same as you and I!” (SBS programmer). Celebrities are “real” in the sense that they exist in the profilmic world; but in this context showing celebrities “as real people” means showing them as ordinary individuals whom the audience can relate to and identify with. Instead of representing “stars” through their usual manufactured public personae, the program offers glimpses into their real lives and authentic selves, thus giving “backstage access to the famous” (Marwick and boyd 144). In this regard, the series aligns with other media texts, including “celebreality” programs and social networking sites like Twitter, whose appeal lies in the construction of more authentic and intimate presentations of celebrities (Marwick and boyd; Ellcessor; Thomas). This rhetoric of authenticity is enhanced by the celebrity’s genealogical journey, which is depicted both as a quest for historical knowledge and for self-knowledge. Indeed, as its title suggests, the program links ancestry to personal identity. In every episode, the genealogical investigation reveals similarities between the celebrity and their ancestors, thus uncovering personality traits that seem to have been transmitted from generation to generation. Thus, the series does more than simply showing celebrities as ordinary people “stripped of PR artifice and management” (Marwick and boyd 149): by unveiling those transgenerational traits, it discloses innermost aspects of the celebrities’ authentic selves—a backstage beyond the backstage. Who Do You Think You Are? communicates authenticity in these different ways in order to invite viewers’ trust. As Louise Spence and Vinicius Navarro observe, this is characteristic of most documentaries: Whereas fiction films may allude to actual events, documentaries usually claim that those events did take place in such and such a way, and that the images and sounds on the screen are accurate and reliable […] Most documentaries—if not all of them—have something to say about the world and, in one way or another, they want to be trusted by their audience. (Spence and Navarro 13) Similarly, Nichols writes that as documentary viewers, “we uphold our belief in the authenticity of the historical world represented on screen […] we assume that documentary sounds and images have the authenticity of evidence” (36). This is supported by Thomas Austin’s reception study of documentary films in the United Kingdom, which shows that most viewers expect documentaries to give them “access to the real.” According to Austin, these generic expectations about authenticity contribute to the pedagogic authority of documentaries. Therefore, the implied audience (Barker and Austin) of Who Do You Think You Are? must trust that it authentically represents actual events and individuals and they must perceive it as an accurate and reliable source of knowledge about the historical world in order to “attain a meaningful encounter” (48) with it. The implied audience in no way predicts actual audiences’ responses (which I will examine in the remainder of this article) but it is an important aspect of the program’s pedagogy: for the text to be read as a “history lesson” (Nichols 39) viewers must be persuaded by the program’s rhetoric of authenticity. Perceiving Authenticity My reception study confirms that in order to learn, viewers must be persuaded by this rhetoric of authenticity, which promises “information and knowledge, insight and awareness” (Nichols 40). This is illustrated by the responses of five viewers who participated in a screening and focus group discussion. Arya, Marnie, Junior, Lec and Krista all say that they have learnt from Who Do You Think You Are? either at home or from the episode that was screened before our discussion. They all agree that the program teaches about history, multiculturalism and other aspects that were not predicted by the producers (such as human nature, relationships and social issues). More importantly, these viewers learn from the program because they trust that it authentically represents actual events and because they perceive the personae as “natural”, “relaxed” and “being themselves” and their emotions as “genuine”: Krista: It felt genuine to me.Lec: Me also […]Marnie: I felt like he seemed more natural, even with the interpreter there, talking with his aunty. He seemed more himself, he was more emotional […]Arya: I don’t think that they’re acting. To go outside of this session, I mean, I’ve seen the show before and I think it is really genuine. As Austin notes, what matters from the viewers’ perspective is not “the critically scrutinised indexical guarantee of documentary, but rather a less well defined and nebulous sense of qualities such as the 'humanity', 'honesty', 'sincerity'.” This does not mean that viewers naively believe that the text gives a transparent, unmediated access to the truth (Austin). Trust (or in Austin’s words “willing abandonment”) can be combined with scepticism (Buckingham; Ang; Liebes and Katz). Marnie, for example, oscillates between these two modalities of response: Marnie: If something seems quite artificial, it stands out, you start thinking about well, why did they do that? But while they’re just sitting down, having a conversation, there’s not anything really that you have to think about. Obviously all those transition shots, sitting on the rock, opening a letter in the square, they also have, you know, the violins playing and everything. Everything builds to feel a bit more contrived, whereas when they’re having the conversation, I wasn’t aware of the music. Maybe I was listening to what they were saying more. But I think you sort of engage a bit more in listening to what they’re saying when they’re having a conversation. Whereas the filling, you’re not really thinking about his emotions so much as…why is he wearing that shirt? Interestingly, the scenes that Marnie perceives as authentic and that she engages with are the “conversations” scenes, which use the codes and conventions of the observational documentary. The scenes that she views with scepticism are the more dramatised sequences, which do not use the codes and conventions of the observational documentary. Marnie is the only viewer in my focus groups who clearly oscillates between trust and scepticism. She is also the most ambivalent about what she has learnt and about the quality of the knowledge that she gains from Who Do You Think You Are? Authenticity and Emotional Responses Because they believe that the personae and emotions in the program are genuine, these viewers are emotionally engaged. As the producers explain, learning from Who Do You Think You Are? is not a purely cognitive process but is fundamentally an emotional and empathetic experience: There are lots of programs on television where you can learn about history. I think what’s so powerful about this show is because it has a very strong emotional arc […] You can learn a lot of dates, and you can pass a test, just on knowing the year that the Blue Mountains were first crossed or the Magna Carta was signed. But what Who Do You Think You Are? does is that it takes you on a journey where you get to really feel the experiences of those people who were fighting the battle or climbing the mast. (Producer 2) The producers invite viewer empathy in two ways: they design the program so that viewers are encouraged to share the emotions of people who lived in the past; and they design it so that viewers are encouraged to share the emotions of the celebrities who participate in the program. This is illustrated by the participants’ responses to one scene in which the actor Don Hany sees an old photograph of his pregnant mother: Lec: I was touched! I was like “aw!”Ms Goldblum: I didn’t buy it.Krista: You didn’t feel like that, Lec?Lec: Not at all! Like, yeah, I got a bit touched.Junior: Yeah. And those looked like genuine tears, they weren’t crocodile tears.Ms Goldblum: I didn’t think so. There was a [sniffing], pause, pose, camera moment.Junior: I had a little moment…Krista: Aw!Interviewer: You had a moment?Junior: Yeah, there was a little moment there.Ms Goldblum: Got a little teary?Junior: When he’s looking at the photos, yeah. Because I think everyone’s done that, gone back and looked through old photos, you know what that feeling is. As this discussion suggests, authenticity is a crucial aspect of the program’s pedagogy, not only because the viewers must trust it in order to learn from it, but also because it facilitates empathy and emotional engagement. Distrust and Cynicism In contrast, the viewers who do not learn from Who Do You Think You Are? perceive the program as contrived and the celebrity’s emotions as inauthentic: Wolfgang: I don’t think they taught me much that I didn’t already know in regards to history.Naomi: Yeah, me neither […] I kind of look at these shows and think it’s a bit contrived […]Wolfgang: I hate all that. They’re constructing a show purely for money, that’s all bullshit. That annoys me […]Ms Goldblum: But for me the show is just about, I don’t know, they try to find something to be sentimental and it’s not. Like, they try to force it […] I didn’t buy it […] Because they are aware of the constructed nature of the program and because they perceive it as contrived, these viewers do not engage emotionally with the content: Naomi: When I see someone on this show looking at photos, I find it really difficult to stop thinking he’s got a camera on his face.Wolfgang: Yeah.Naomi: He’s looking at photos, and that’s a beautiful moment, but there’s a camera right there, looking at him, and I can’t help but think that when I see those things […] There are other people in the room that we don’t see and there’s a camera that’s pointing at him […] This intellectual distance is sometimes expressed through mockery and laughter (Buckingham). Because they distrust the program and make fun of it, Wolfgang and Ms Goldblum (who were not in the same focus group) are both described as “cynics”: Ms Goldblum: He gets all teary and I think oh he’s an actor he’s just putting that shit on, trying to make it look interesting. Whereas if it were just a normal person, I’d find it more believable. But I think the whole premise of the show is they take famous people, like actors and all those people in the spotlight, I think because they put on good shows. I would be more interested in someone who wasn’t famous. I’d find it more genuine.Junior: You are such a cynic! […]Wolfgang: And look, maybe I’m a big cynic about this, and that’s why I haven’t watched it. But it’s this emotionally padded, scripted, prompted kind of thing, which makes it more palatable for people to watch. Unlike most participants, who identify the program as “educational” and “documentary”, Wolfgang classifies it as pure entertainment. His cynicism and scepticism can be linked to his generic labelling of the program as “reality TV”: Wolfgang: I don’t watch commercial TV, I can’t stand it. And it’s for that reason. It’s all contrived. It’s all based on selling something as opposed to looking into this guy’s family and history and perhaps learning something from it. Like, it’s entertainment, it’s not educational […] It’s a reality TV sort of thing, I just got no interest in it really. As Annette Hill shows in her reception study of the reality game program Big Brother, most viewers are cynical about the authenticity of reality television. Despite the generic label of “reality”, most interpret reality programs as inauthentic. Indeed, as John Corner points out, reality television is characterised by display and performance, even though it adopts some of the codes and conventions of the documentary. Hill’s research also reveals that viewers often look for moments of authenticity within the unreal context of reality television: “the ‘game’ is to find the ‘truth’ in the spectacle/performance environment” (337). Interestingly, this describes Naomi and Wolfgang’s attitude towards Who Do You Think You Are?: Naomi: The conversation with his mum seemed a bit more relaxed, maybe. Or a bit more...I don’t know, I kind of look at these shows and think it’s a bit contrived. Whereas that seemed a bit more natural […]Wolfgang: Often he’s just sitting there and I suppose those are filling shots. But I found that when he was chatting to his aunty and seeing the photos that he hadn’t seen before, when he was a child, he was tearing up […] That’s probably the one time I didn’t notice, like, didn’t think about the cameras because I found it quite powerful, when he was tearing up, that was a kind of an emotional moment. According to Austin, viewers’ discourses about authenticity in relation to documentaries and reality television serve as markers of cultural distinction: Often underpinning expressions of the appeal of 'the real', the use of a discourse of authenticity frequently revealed taste markers and a set of cultural distinctions deployed by these cinemagoers, notably between the veracity and 'honesty' of Etre et Avoir [a French documentary] and the contrasting 'fakery' and 'inauthenticity' of reality television. Describing documentaries as authentic and educational and reality television as fake entertainment can be a way for some (middle-class) viewers to assert their socio-cultural status. By performing as the sceptical and cynical viewer and criticising lower cultural forms, research participants distinguish themselves from the imagined mass of unsophisticated and uneducated (working class?) viewers (Buckingham; Austin). Conclusion Some scholars suggest that viewers learn when they compare what they watch on television to their own experiences or when they identify with television characters or personae (Noble and Noble; Tulloch and Lupton; Tulloch and Moran; Buckingham and Bragg). My study contributes to this field of inquiry by showing that viewers learn when they perceive televisual content as authentic and as a reliable source of knowledge. More importantly, the results reveal how some televisual texts signify authenticity to invite trust and learning. This study raises questions about the role of trust and authenticity in televisual learning and it would be fruitful to pursue further research to determine whether these findings apply to genres that are not factual. Examining the production, textual features and reception of fictional programs to understand how they convey authenticity and how this sense of truthfulness influences viewers’ learning would be useful to draw more general conclusions about televisual pedagogy, and perhaps more broadly about the role of trust and authenticity in education. References Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Methuen, 1985. Austin, Thomas. "Seeing, Feeling, Knowing: A Case Study of Audience Perspectives on Screen Documentary." Participations 2.1 (2005). 20 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.participations.org/volume%202/issue%201/2_01_austin.htm›. Barker, Martin, and Thomas Austin. From Antz to Titanic: Reinventing Film Analysis. London: Pluto Press, 2000. Big Brother. Exec. Prod. John de Mol. Channel 4. 2000. Buckingham, David. Children Talking Television: The Making of Television Literacy. London: The Falmer Press, 1993. Buckingham, David, and Sara Bragg. Young People, Media and Personal Relationships. London: The Independent Television Commission, 2003. Corner, John. "Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions." Television & New Media 3.3 (2002): 255—69. "Don Hany." Who Do You Think You Are? Series 5, Episode 3. SBS. 16 Apr. 2013. Ellcessor, Elizabeth. "Tweeting @feliciaday: Online Social Media, Convergence, and Subcultural Stardom." Cinema Journal 51.2 (2012): 46-66. Hill, Annette. "Big Brother: The Real Audience." Television & New Media 3.3 (2002): 323-40. Liebes, Tamar, and Elihu Katz. The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Marwick, Alice, and danah boyd. "To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17.2 (2011): 139-58. McCarthy, E. Doyle. “Emotional Performances as Dramas of Authenticity.” Authenticity in Culture, Self, and Society. Eds. Phillip Vannini & J. Patrick Williams. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. 241-55. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary, Second Edition. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. Noble, Grant, and Elizabeth Noble. "A Study of Teenagers' Uses and Gratifications of the Happy Days Shows." Media Information Australia 11 (1979): 17-24. Producer 1. Personal Interview. 29 Sept. 2013. Producer 2. Personal Interview. 10 Oct. 2013. Renov, Michael. Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge, 1993. SBS Programmer. Personal Interview. 22 Nov. 2013. Spence, Louise, and Vinicius Navarro. Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2011. Thomas, Sarah. "Celebrity in the ‘Twitterverse’: History, Authenticity and the Multiplicity of Stardom Situating the ‘Newness’ of Twitter." Celebrity Studies 5.3 (2014): 242-55. Tulloch, John, and Deborah Lupton. Television, Aids and Risk: A Cultural Studies Approach to Health Communication. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Tulloch, John, and Albert Moran. 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IntroductionIn regional Australia and New Zealand, museums and art galleries are increasingly becoming primary sites of cultural engagement. They are one of the key tourist attractions for regional towns and expected to generate much needed tourism revenue. In 2017 in New South Wales alone, there were three million visitors to regional galleries and museums (MGNSW 13). However, apart from those (partially) funded by local councils, they are often run on donations, good will, and the enthusiasm of volunteers. Regional museums and galleries provide some paid, and more unpaid, employment for ageing populations. While two-thirds of Australia’s population lives in capital cities, the remainder who live in regional towns are likely to be in the 60+ age cohort because people are choosing to retire away from the bustling, growing cities (ABS). At last count, there were about 3000 museums and galleries in Australia with about 80% of them located in regional areas (Scott). Over the last 40 years, this figure has tripled from the 1000 regional and provincial museums estimated by Peter Piggott in his 1975 report (24). According to a 2014 survey (Shaw and Davidson), New Zealand has about 470 museums and galleries and about 70% are located outside capital cities. The vast majority, 85%, have less than five, full-time paid staff, and more than half of these were run entirely by ageing volunteers. They are entrusted with managing the vast majority of the history and heritage collections of Australia and New Zealand. These ageing volunteers need a diverse range of skills and experience to care for and interpret collections. How do you find the time and budget for professional development for both paid staff and volunteers? Many professional development events are held in capital cities, which are often a significant distance from the regional museum—this adds substantially to the costs of attending and the time commitment required to get there. In addition, it is not uncommon for people working in regional museums to be responsible for everything—from security, collection management, conservation, research, interpretation and public programs to changing the light bulbs. While there are a large number of resources available online, following a manual is often more difficult than learning from other colleagues or learning in a more formal educational or vocational environment where you can receive timely feedback on your work. Further, a foundational level of prior knowledge and experience is often required to follow written instructions. This article will suggest some strategies for low cost professional development and networking. It involves planning, thinking strategically and forming partnerships with others in the region. It is time to harness the power of modern communications technology and use it as a tool for professional development. Some models of professional development in regional areas that have been implemented in the past will also be reviewed. The focus for this article is on training and professional development for workers in regional museums, heritage sites and keeping places. Regional art galleries have not been included because they tend to have separate regional networks and training opportunities. For example, there are professional development opportunities provided through the Art Galleries Association of Australia and their state branches. Regional galleries are also far more likely to have one or more paid staff members (Winkworth, “Fixing the Slums” 2). Regional Museums, Volunteers, and Social CapitalIt is widely accepted that regional museums and galleries enhance social capital and reduce social isolation (Kelly 32; Burton and Griffin 328). However, while working in a regional museum or gallery can help to build friendship networks, it can also be professionally isolating. How do you benchmark what you do against other places if you are two or more hours drive from those places? How do you learn from other colleagues if all your colleagues are also isolated by the ‘tyranny of distance’ and struggling with the same lack of access to training? In 2017 in New South Wales alone, there were 8,629 active volunteers working in regional museums and galleries giving almost five million hours, which Museums and Galleries NSW calculated was worth over $150 million per annum in unpaid labour (MGNSW 1). Providing training and professional development to this group is an investment in Australia’s social and cultural capital.Unlike other community-run groups, the museums and heritage places which have emerged in regional Australia and New Zealand are not part of a national or state branch network. Volunteers who work for the Red Cross, Scouts or Landcare benefit from being part of a national organisation which provides funding, support workers, a website, governance structure, marketing, political advocacy and training (Winkworth, “Let a Thousand Flowers” 11). In Australia and New Zealand, this role is undertaken by the Australian Museums and Galleries Association AMaGA (formerly Museums Australia) and Museums Aotearoa respectively. However, both of these groups operate at the macro policy level, for example organising annual conferences, publishing a journal and developing Indigenous policy frameworks, rather than the local, practical level. In 1995, due to their advocacy work, Landcare Australia received $500 million over five years from the federal government to fund 5000 Landcare groups, which are run by 120,000 volunteers (Oppenheimer 177). They argued successfully that the sustainable development of land resources started at the local level. What do we need to do to convince government of the need for sustainable development of our local and regional museum and heritage resources?Training for Volunteers Working in Regional Museums: The Current SituationAnother barrier to training for regional museum workers is the assumption that the 70:20:10 model of professional development should apply. That is, 70% of one’s professional development is done ‘on the job’ by completing tasks and problem-solving; 20% is achieved by learning from mentors, coaches and role models and 10% is learnt from attending conferences and symposia and enrolling in formal courses of study. However, this model pre-supposes that there are people in your workplace whom you can learn from and who can show you how to complete a task, and that you are not destroying or damaging a precious, unique object if you happen to make a mistake.Some museum volunteers come with skills in research, marketing, administration, customer service or photography, but very few come with specific museum skills like writing exhibition text, registering an acquisition or conserving artefacts. These skills need to be taught. As Kylie Winkworth has written, museum management now requires a [...] skills set, which is not so readily found in small communities, and which in many ways is less rewarding for the available volunteers, who may have left school at 15. We do not expect volunteer librarians to catalogue books, which are in any case of low intrinsic value, but we still expect volunteers in their 70s and 80s to catalogue irreplaceable heritage collections and meet ever more onerous museum standards. That so many volunteers manage to do this is extraordinary. (“Let a Thousand Flowers” 13)Workers in regional museums are constantly required to step outside their comfort zones and learn new skills with minimal professional support. While these challenging experiences can be very rewarding, they are also potentially damaging for our irreplaceable material cultural heritage.Training for museum professionals has been on the agenda of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) since 1947 (Boylan 62). However, until 1996, their work focused on recommending curricula for new museum professionals and did not include life-long learning and on-going professional development. ICOM’s International Committee for the Training of Personnel (ICTOP) and the ICOM Executive has responded to this in their new curricula—ICOM Curricula Guidelines for Professional Museum Development, but this does not address the difficulties staff or volunteers working in regional areas face in accessing training.In some parts of Australia, there are regional support and professional development programs in place. For example, in Queensland, there is the Museum Development Officer (MDO) network. However, because of the geographic size of the state and the spread of the museums, these five regionally based staff often have 60-80 museums or keeping places in their region needing support and so their time and expertise is spread very thinly. It is also predominantly a fee-for-service arrangement. That is, the museums have to pay for the MDO to come and deliver training. Usually this is done by the MDO working with a local museum to apply for a Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF) grant. In Victoria there is a roving curator program where eligible regional museums can apply to have a professional curator come and work with them for a few days to help the volunteers curate exhibitions. The roving curator can also provide advice on “develop[ing] high quality exhibitions for diverse audiences” via email, telephone and networking events. Tasmania operates a similar scheme but their two roving curators are available for up to 25 days of work each year with eligible museums, provided the local council makes a financial contribution. The New South Wales government supports the museum advisor program through which a museum professional will come to your museum for up to 20 days/year to give advice and hands-on training—provided your local council pays $7000, an amount that is matched by the state government—for this service. In 2010, in response to recommendations in the Dunn Report (2007), the Collections Council of Australia (CCA) established a pilot project with the City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in Western Australia and $120,000 in funding from the Myer Foundation to trial the provision of a paid Collections Care Coordinator who would provide free training, expertise and support to local museums in the region. Tragically, CCA was de-funded by the Cultural Ministers Council the same year and the roll-out of a hub and spoke regional model was not supported by government due to the lack of an evidence base (Winkworth, “Let a Thousand Flowers” 18). An evaluation of the trial project would have tested a different model of regional training and added to the evidence base.All these state-based models (except the aborted Collections Care hub in Western Australia) require small regional museums to compete with each other for access to a museum professional and to successfully apply for funding, usually from their local council or state government. If they are successful, the training that is delivered is a one-off, as they are unlikely to get a second slice of the regional pie.An alternative to this competitive, fly-in fly-out, one-off model of professional development is to harness the technology and resources of local libraries and other cultural facilities in regional areas. This is what the Sydney Opera House Trust did in March 2019 to deliver their All about Women program of speakers via live streaming to 37 satellite sites throughout Australia and New Zealand.Harnessing Technology and Using Regional Library Infrastructure to Provide Training: ScenarioImagine the following scenario. It is a Monday morning in a regional library in Dubbo, New South Wales. Dubbo is 391 km or five hours drive by car from the nearest capital city (Sydney) and there are 50 regional museums within a 100 km radius. Ten people are gathered in a meeting room at the library watching a live stream of the keynote speakers who are presenting at their national museums conference. They are from five regional museums where they work as volunteers or part-time paid staff. They cannot afford to pay $2000, or more, to attend the conference, but they are happy to self-fund to drive for an hour or two to link up with other colleagues to listen to the presentations. They make notes and tweet in their questions using the conference twitter handle and hashtag. They have not been exposed to international speakers in the industry before and the ideas presented are fresh and stimulating. When the conference breaks for morning tea, they take a break too and get to know each other over a cuppa (provided free of charge by the library). Just as the networking sessions at conferences are vitally important for the delegates, they are even more important to address social isolation amongst this group. When they reconvene, they discuss their questions and agree to email the presenters with the questions that are unresolved. After the conference keynote sessions finish, the main conference (in the capital city) disperses into parallel sessions, which are no longer available via live stream.To make the two-hour drive more worthwhile and continue their professional development, they have arranged to hold a significance assessment workshop as well. Each museum worker has brought along photographs of one item in their collection that they want to do more research on. Some of them have also brought the object, if it is small and robust enough to travel. They have downloaded copies of Significance 2.0 and read it before they arrived. They started to write significance reports but could not fully understand how to apply some of the criteria. They cannot afford to pay for professional workshop facilitators, but they have arranged for the local studies librarian to give them an hour of free training on using the library’s resources (online and onsite) to do research on the local area and local families. They learn more about Trove, Papers Past and other research tools which are available online. This is hands-on and computer-based skills training using their own laptops/tablets or the ones provided by the library. After the training with the librarian, they break into two groups and read each other’s significance reports and make suggestions. The day finishes with a cuppa at 2.30pm giving them time to drive home before the sun sets. They agree to exchange email addresses so they can keep in touch. All the volunteers and staff who attended these sessions in regional areas feel energised after these meetings. They no longer feel so isolated and like they are working in the dark. They feel supported just knowing that there are other people who are struggling with the same issues and constraints as they are. They are sick of talking about the lack of budget, expertise, training and resources and want to do something with what they have.Bert (fictional name) decides that it is worth capitalising on this success. He emails the people who came to the session in Dubbo to ask them if they would like to do it again but focus on some different training needs. He asks them to choose two of the following three professional development options. First, they can choose to watch and discuss a recording of the keynote presentations from day two of the recent national conference. The conference organisers have uploaded digital recordings of the speakers’ presentations and the question time to the AMaGA website. This is an option for local libraries that do not have sufficient bandwidth to live stream video. The local library technician will help them cast the videos to a large screen. Second, they can each bring an object from their museum collection that they think needs conservation work. If the item is too fragile or big to move, they will bring digital photographs of it instead. Bert consulted their state-based museum and found some specialist conservators who have agreed to Skype or Facetime them in Dubbo free of charge, to give them expert advice about how to care for their objects, and most importantly, what not to do. The IT technician at Dubbo Library can set up their meeting room so that they can cast the Skype session onto a large smart screen TV. One week before the event, they will send a list of their objects and photographs of them to the conservator so that she can prepare, and they can make best use of her time. After this session, they will feel more confident about undertaking small cleaning and flattening treatments and know when they should not attempt a treatment themselves and need to call on the experts. Third, they could choose to have a training session with the council’s grants officer on writing grant applications. As he assesses grant applications, he can tell them what local councils look for in a successful grant application. He can also inform them about some of the grants that might be relevant to them. After the formal training, there will be an opportunity for them to exchange information about the grants they have applied for in the past—sometimes finding out what’s available can be difficult—and work in small groups to critique each other’s grant applications.The group chooses options two and three, as they want more practical skills development. They take a break in the middle of the day for lunch, which gives them the opportunity to exchange anecdotes from their volunteer work and listen to and support each other. They feel validated and affirmed. They have gained new skills and don’t feel so isolated. Before they leave, Alice agrees to get in touch with everyone to organise their next regional training day.Harnessing Technology and Using Regional Library Infrastructure to Provide Training: BenefitsThese scenarios need not be futuristic. The training needs are real, as is the desire to learn and the capacity of libraries to support regional groups. While funding for regional museums has stagnated or declined in recent years, libraries have been surging ahead. In August 2018, the New South Wales Government announced an “historic investment” of $60 million into all 370 public libraries that would “transform the way NSW’s public libraries deliver much-needed services, especially in regional areas” (Smith). Libraries are equipped and charged with the responsibility of enabling local community groups to make best use of their resources. Most state and national museum workers are keen to share their expertise with their regional colleagues: funding and distance are often the only barriers. These scenarios allow national conference keynote speakers to reach a much larger audience than the conference attendees. While this strategy might reduce the number of workers from regional areas who pay to attend conferences, the reality is that due to distance, other volunteer commitments, expense and family responsibilities, they probably would not attend anyway. Most regional museums and galleries and their staff might be asset-rich, but they are cash-poor, and the only way their workers get to attend conferences is if they win a bursary or grant. In 2005, Winkworth said: “the future for community museums is to locate them within local government as an integral part of the cultural, educational and economic infrastructure of the community, just like libraries and galleries” (“Fixing the Slums” 7). Fourteen years on, very little progress has been made in this direction. Those museums which have been integrated into the local council infrastructure, such as at Orange and Wagga Wagga in western New South Wales, are doing much better than those that are still stuck in ‘cultural poverty’ and trying to operate independently.However, the co-location and convergence of museums, libraries and archives is only successful if it is well managed. Helena Robinson has examined the impact on museum collection management and interpretation of five local government funded, converged collecting institutions in Australia and New Zealand and found that the process is complex and does not necessarily result in “optimal” cross-disciplinary expertise or best practice outcomes (14158).ConclusionRobinson’s research, however, did not consider community-based collecting institutions using regional libraries as sites for training and networking. By harnessing local library resources and making better use of existing communications technology it is possible to create regional hubs for professional development and collegiate support, which are not reliant on grants. If the current competitive, fly-in fly-out, self-funded model of providing professional development and support to regional museums continues, then the future for our cultural heritage collections and the dedicated volunteers who care for them is bleak. Alternatively, the scenarios I have described give regional museum workers agency to address their own professional development needs. This in no way removes the need for leadership, advocacy and coordination by national representative bodies such as AMaGA and Museums Aotearoa. If AMaGA partnered with the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) to stream their conference keynote sessions to strategically located regional libraries and used some of their annual funding from the Department of Communication and the Arts to pay for museum professionals to travel to some of those sites to deliver training, they would be investing in the nation’s social and cultural capital and addressing the professional development needs of regional museum workers. This would also increase the sustainability of our cultural heritage collections, which are valuable economic assets.ReferencesAustralian Bureau of Statistics. “2071.0—Census of Population and Housing: Reflecting Australia—Snapshot of Australia, 2016”. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071.0~2016~Main%20Features~Snapshot%20of%20Australia,%202016~2>.Boylan, Patrick. “The Intangible Heritage: A Challenge and an Opportunity for Museums and Museum Professional Training.” International Journal of Intangible Heritage 1 (2006): 53–65.Burton, Christine, and Jane Griffin. “More than a Museum? Understanding How Small Museums Contribute to Social Capital in Regional Communities.” Asia Pacific Journal of Arts & Cultural Management 5.1 (2008): 314–32. 17 Mar. 2019 <http://apjacm.arts.unimelb.edu.au/article/view/32>.Dunn, Anne. The Dunn Report: A Report on the Concept of Regional Collections Jobs. Adelaide: Collections Council of Australia, 2007.ICOM Curricula Guidelines for Professional Museum Development. 2000. <http://museumstudies.si.edu/ICOM-ICTOP/comp.htm>.Kelly, Lynda. “Measuring the Impact of Museums on Their Communities: The Role of the 21st Century Museum.” New Roles and Issues of Museums INTERCOM Symposium (2006): 25–34. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://media.australianmuseum.net.au/media/dd/Uploads/Documents/9355/impact+paper+INTERCOM+2006.bb50ba1.pdf>.Museums and Galleries New South Wales (MGNSW). 2018 NSW Museums and Galleries Sector Census. Museums and Galleries of New South Wales. Data and Insights—Culture Counts. Sydney: MGNSW, 2019. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2018-NSW-Museum-Gallery-Sector-Census.pdf>Oppenheimer, Melanie. Volunteering: Why We Can’t Survive without It. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2008.Pigott, Peter. Museums in Australia 1975. Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections Including the Report of the Planning Committee on the Gallery of Aboriginal Australia. Canberra: Australian Government Printing Service, 1975. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://apo.org.au/node/35268>.Public Sector Commission, Western Australia. 70:20:10 Framework Learning Philosophy. Perth: Government of Western Australia, 2018. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://publicsector.wa.gov.au/centre-public-sector-excellence/about-centre/702010-framework>.Robinson, Helena. “‘A Lot of People Going That Extra Mile’: Professional Collaboration and Cross-Disciplinarity in Converged Collecting Institutions.” Museum Management and Curatorship 31 (2016): 141–58.Scott, Lee. National Operations Manager, Museums Australia, Personal Communication. 22 Oct. 2018.Shaw, Iain, and Lee Davidson, Museums Aotearoa 2014 Sector Survey Report. Wellington: Victoria U, 2014. 17 Mar. 2019 <http://www.museumsaotearoa.org.nz/sites/default/files/documents/museums_aotearoa_sector_survey_2014_report_-_final_draft_oct_2015.pdf>.Smith, Alexandra. “NSW Libraries to Benefit from $60 Million Boost.” Sydney Morning Herald 24 Aug. 2018. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/nsw-libraries-to-benefit-from-60-million-boost-20180823-p4zzdj.html>. Winkworth, Kylie. “Fixing the Slums of Australian Museums; or Sustaining Heritage Collections in Regional Australia.” Museums Australia Conference Paper. Canberra: Museums Australia, 2005. ———. “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom: Museums in Regional Australia.” Understanding Museums—Australian Museums and Museology. Eds. Des Griffin and Leon Paroissien. Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2011. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://nma.gov.au/research/understanding-museums/KWinkworth_2011.html>.

In the 2019 documentary Chasing Happiness, recording artist/musician Joe Jonas tells audiences that the band was “living the dream”. Similarly, in the 2012 documentary Artifact, lead singer Jared Leto remarks that at the height of Thirty Seconds to Mars’s success, they “were living the dream”. However, for both the Jonas Brothers and Thirty Seconds to Mars, their experiences of the music industry (much like other commercially successful recording artists) soon transformed into nightmares. Similar to other commercially successful recording artists, the Jonas Brothers and Thirty Seconds to Mars, came up against the constraints of the industry which inevitably led to a forfeiting of authenticity, a loss of creative control, increased exploitation, and unequal remuneration. This work will consider how working in the music industry is not always a dream come true and can instead be viewed as a proverbial nightmare. Living the DreamIn his book Dreams, Carl Gustav Jung discusses how that which is experienced in sleep, speaks of a person’s wishes: that which might be desired in reality but may not actually happen. In his earlier work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argued that the dream is representative of fulfilling a repressed wish. However, the creative industries suggest that a dream need not be a repressed wish; it can become a reality. Jon Bon Jovi believes that his success in the music industry has surpassed his wildest dreams (Atkinson). Jennifer Lopez considers the fact that she held big dreams, had a focussed passion, and strong aspirations the reason why she pursued a creative career that took her out of the Bronx (Thomas). In a Twitter post from 23 April 2018, Bruno Mars declared that he “use [sic] to dream of this shit,” in referring to a picture of him performing for a sold out arena, while in 2019 Shawn Mendes informed his 24.4 million Twitter followers that his “life is a dream”. These are but a few examples of successful music industry artists who are seeing their ‘wishes’ come true and living the American Dream.Endemic to the American culture (and a characteristic of the identity of the country) is the “American Dream”. It centres on “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability and achievement” (Adams, 404). Although initially used to describe having a nice house, money, stability and a reasonable standard of living, the American Dream has since evolved to what the scholar Florida believes is the new ‘aspiration of people’: doing work that is enjoyable and relies on human creativity. At its core, the original American Dream required striving to meet individual goals, and was promoted as possible for anyone regardless of their cultural, socio-economic and political background (Samuel), because it encourages the celebrating of the self and personal uniqueness (Gamson). Florida’s conceptualisation of the New American dream, however, tends to emphasise obtaining success, fame and fortune in what Neff, Wissinger, and Zukin (310) consider “hot”, “creative” industries where “the jobs are cool”.Whether old or new, the American Dream has perpetuated and reinforced celebrity culture, with many of the young generation reporting that fame and fortune were their priorities, as they sought to emulate the success of their famous role models (Florida). The rag to riches stories of iconic recording artists can inevitably glorify and make appealing the struggle that permits achieving one’s dream, with celebrities offering young, aspiring creative people a means of identification for helping them to aspire to meet their dreams (Florida; Samuel). For example, a young Demi Lovato spoke of how she idolised and looked up to singer Beyonce Knowles, describing Knowles as a role model because of the way she carries herself (Tishgart). Similarly, American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson cited Aretha Franklin as her musical inspiration and the reason that she sings from a place deep within (Nilles). It is unsurprising then, that popular media has tended to portray artists working in the creative industries and being paid to follow their passions as “a much-vaunted career dream” (Duffy and Wissinger, 4656). Movies such as A Star Is Born (2018), The Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), Dreamgirls (2006), Begin Again (2013) and La La Land (2016) exalt the perception that creativity, talent, sacrifice and determination will mean dreams come true (Nicolaou). In concert with the American dream is the drive among creative people pursuing creative success to achieve their dreams because of the perceived autonomy they will gain, the chance of self-actualisation and social rewards, and the opportunity to fulfil intrinsic motivations (Amabile; Auger and Woodman; Cohen). For these workers, the love of creation and the happiness that accompanies new discoveries (Csikszentmihalyi) can offset the tight budgets and timelines, precarious labour (Blair, Grey, and Randle; Hesmondhalgh and Baker), uncertain demand (Caves; Shultz), sacrifice of personal relationships (Eikhof and Haunschild), the demand for high quality products (Gil & Spiller), and the tense relationships with administrators (Bilton) which are known to plague these industries. In some cases, young, up and coming creative people overlook these pitfalls, instead romanticising creative careers as ideal and worthwhile. They willingly take on roles and cede control to big corporations to “realize their passions [and] uncover their personal talent” (Bill, 50). Of course, as Ursell argues in discussing television employees, such idealisation can mean creatives, especially those who are young and unfamiliar with the constraints of the industry, end up immersed in and victims of the “vampiric” industry that exploits workers (816). They are socialised towards believing, in this case, that the record label is a necessary component to obtain fame and fortune and whether willing or unwilling, creative workers become complicit in their own exploitation (Cohen). Loss of Control and No CompensationThe music industry itself has been considered by some to typify the cultural industries (Chambers). Popular music has potency in that it is perceived as speaking a universal language (Burnett), engaging the emotions and thoughts of listeners, and assisting in their identity construction (Burnett; Gardikiotis and Baltzis). Given the place of music within society, it is not surprising that in 2018, the global music industry was worth US$19.1billion (IFPI). The music industry is necessarily underpinned by a commercial agenda. At present, six major recording companies exist and between them, they own between 70-80 per cent of the recordings produced globally (Konsor). They also act as gatekeepers, setting trends by defining what and who is worth following and listening to (Csikszentmihalyi; Jones, Anand, and Alvarez). In essence, to be successful in the music industry is to be affiliated with a record label. This is because the highly competitive nature and cluttered environment makes it harder to gain traction in the market without worthwhile representation (Moiso and Rockman). In the 2012 documentary about Thirty Seconds to Mars, Artifact, front man Jared Leto even questions whether it is possible to have “success without a label”. The recording company, he determines, “deal with the crappy jobs”. In a financially uncertain industry that makes money from subjective or experience-based goods (Caves), having a label affords an artist access to “economic capital for production and promotion” that enables “wider recognition” of creative work (Scott, 239). With the support of a record label, creative entrepreneurs are given the chance to be promoted and distributed in the creative marketplace (Scott; Shultz). To have a record label, then, is to be perceived as legitimate and credible (Shultz).However, the commercial music industry is just that, commercial. Accordingly, the desire to make money can see the intrinsic desires of musicians forfeited in favour of standardised products and a lack of remuneration for artists (Negus). To see this standardisation in practice, one need not look further than those contestants appearing on shows such as American Idol or The Voice. Nowhere is the standardisation of the music industry more evident than in Holmes’s 2004 article on Pop Idol. Pop Idol first aired in Britain from 2001-2003 and paved the way for a slew of similar shows around the world such as Australia’s Popstars Live in 2004 and the global Idol phenomena. According to Holmes, audiences are divested of the illusion of talent and stardom when they witness the obvious manufacturing of musical talent. The contestants receive training, are dressed according to a prescribed image, and the show emphasises those melodramatic moments that are commercially enticing to audiences. Her sentiments suggest these shows emphasise the artifice of the music industry by undermining artistic authenticity in favour of generating celebrities. The standardisation is typified in the post Idol careers of Kelly Clarkson and Adam Lambert. Kelly Clarkson parted with the recording company RCA when her manager and producer Clive Davis told her that her album My December (2007) was “not commercial enough” and that Clarkson, who had written most of the songs, was a “shitty writer… who should just shut up and sing” (Nied). Adam Lambert left RCA because they wanted him to make a full length 80s album comprised of covers. Lambert commented that, “while there are lots of great songs from that decade, my heart is simply not in doing a covers album” (Lee). In these instances, winning the show and signing contracts led to both Clarkson and Lambert forfeiting a degree of creative control over their work in favour of formulaic songs that ultimately left both artists unsatisfied. The standardisation and lack of remuneration is notable when signing recording artists to 360° contracts. These 360° contracts have become commonplace in the music industry (Gulchardaz, Bach, and Penin) and see both the material and immaterial labour (such as personal identities) of recording artists become controlled by record labels (Stahl and Meier). These labels determine the aesthetics of the musicians as well as where and how frequently they tour. Furthermore, the labels become owners of any intellectual property generated by an artist during the tenure of the contract (Sanders; Stahl and Meier). For example, in their documentary Show Em What You’re Made Of (2015), the Backstreet Boys lament their affiliation with manager Lou Pearlman. Not only did Pearlman manufacture the group in a way that prevented creative exploration by the members (Sanders), but he withheld profits to the point that the Backstreet Boys had to sue Pearlman in order to gain access to money they deserved. In 2002 the members of the Backstreet Boys had stated that “it wasn’t our destinies that we had to worry about in the past, it was our souls” (Sanders, 541). They were not writing their own music, which came across in the documentary Show Em What You’re Made Of when singer Howie Dorough demanded that if they were to collaborate as a group again in 2013, that everything was to be produced, managed and created by the five group members. Such a demand speaks to creative individuals being tied to their work both personally and emotionally (Bain). The angst encountered by music artists also signals the identity dissonance and conflict felt when they are betraying their true or authentic creative selves (Ashforth and Mael; Ashforth and Humphrey). Performing and abiding by the rules and regulations of others led to frustration because the members felt they were “being passed off as something we aren’t” (Sanders 539). The Backstreet Boys were not the only musicians who were intensely controlled and not adequately compensated by Pearlman. In the documentary The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story 2019, Lance Bass of N*Sync and recording artist Aaron Carter admitted that the experience of working with Pearlman became a nightmare when they too, were receiving cheques that were so small that Bass describes them as making his heart sink. For these groups, the dream of making music was undone by contracts that stifled creativity and paid a pittance.In a similar vein, Thirty Seconds to Mars sought to cut ties with their record label when they felt that they were not being adequately compensated for their work. In retaliation EMI issued Mars with a US$30 million lawsuit for breach of contract. The tense renegotiations that followed took a toll on the creative drive of the group. At one point in the documentary Artifact (2012), Leto claims “I can’t sing it right now… You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to sing this song the way it needs to be sung right now. I’m not ready”. The contract subordination (Phillips; Stahl and Meier) that had led to the need to renegotiate financial terms came at not only a financial cost to the band, but also a physical and emotional one. The negativity impacted the development of the songs for the new album. To make music requires evoking necessary and appropriate emotions in the recording studio (Wood, Duffy, and Smith), so Leto being unable to deliver the song proved problematic. Essentially, the stress of the lawsuit and negotiations damaged the motivation of the band (Amabile; Elsbach and Hargadon; Hallowell) and interfered with their creative approach, which could have produced standardised and poor quality work (Farr and Ford). The dream of making music was almost lost because of the EMI lawsuit. Young creatives often lack bargaining power when entering into contracts with corporations, which can prove disadvantaging when it comes to retaining control over their lives (Phillips; Stahl and Meier). Singer Demi Lovato’s big break came in the 2008 Disney film Camp Rock. As her then manager Phil McIntyre states in the documentary Simply Complicated (2017), Camp Rock was “perceived as the vehicle to becoming a superstar … overnight she became a household name”. However, as “authentic and believable” as Lovato’s edginess appeared, the speed with which her success came took a toll on Lovato. The pressure she experienced having to tour, write songs that were approved by others, star in Disney channel shows and movies, and look a certain way, became too much and to compensate, Lovato engaged in regular drug use to feel free. Accordingly, she developed a hybrid identity to ensure that the squeaky clean image required by the moral clauses of her contract, was not tarnished by her out-of-control lifestyle. The nightmare came from becoming famous at a young age and not being able to handle the expectations that accompanied it, coupled with a stringent contract that exploited her creative talent. Lovato’s is not a unique story. Research has found that musicians are more inclined than those in other workforces to use psychotherapy and psychotropic drugs (Vaag, Bjørngaard, and Bjerkeset) and that fame and money can provide musicians more opportunities to take risks, including drug-use that leads to mortality (Bellis, Hughes, Sharples, Hennell, and Hardcastle). For Lovato, living the dream at a young age ultimately became overwhelming with drugs her only means of escape. AuthenticityThe challenges then for music artists is that the dream of pursuing music can come at the cost of a musician’s authentic self. According to Hughes, “to be authentic is to be in some sense real and true to something ... It is not simply an imitation, but it is sincere, real, true, and original expression of its creator, and is believable or credible representations or example of what it appears to be” (190). For Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers, being in the spotlight and abiding by the demands of Disney was “non-stop” and prevented his personal and musical growth (Chasing Happiness). As Kevin Jonas put it, Nick “wanted the Jonas Brothers to be no more”. The extensive promotion that accompanies success and fame, which is designed to drive celebrity culture and financial motivations (Currid-Halkett and Scott; King), can lead to cynical performances and dissatisfaction (Hughes) if the identity work of the creative creates a disjoin between their perceived self and aspirational self (Beech, Gilmore, Cochrane, and Greig). Promoting the band (and having to film a television show and movies he was not invested in all because of contractual obligations) impacted on Nick’s authentic self to the point that the Jonas Brothers made him feel deeply upset and anxious. For Nick, being stifled creatively led to feeling inauthentic, thereby resulting in the demise of the band as his only recourse.In her documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two (2017), Lady Gaga discusses the extent she had to go to maintain a sense of authenticity in response to producer control. As she puts it, “when producers wanted me to be sexy, I always put some absurd spin on it, that made me feel like I was still in control”. Her words reaffirm the perception amongst scholars (Currid-Halkett and Scott; King; Meyers) that in playing the information game, industry leaders will construct an artist’s persona in ways that are most beneficial for, in this case, the record label. That will mean, for example, establishing a coherent life story for musicians that endears them to audiences and engaging recording artists in co-branding opportunities to raise their profile and to legitimise them in the marketplace. Such behaviour can potentially influence the preferences and purchases of audiences and fans, can create favourability, originality and clarity around artists (Loroz and Braig), and can establish competitive advantage that leads to producers being able to charge higher prices for the artists’ work (Hernando and Campo). But what impact does that have on the musician? Lady Gaga could not continue living someone else’s dream. She found herself needing to make changes in order to avoid quitting music altogether. As Gaga told a class of university students at the Emotion Revolution Summit hosted by Yale University:I don’t like being used to make people money. It feels sad when I am overworked and that I have just become a money-making machine and that my passion and creativity take a backseat. That makes me unhappy.According to Eikof and Haunschild, economic necessity can threaten creative motivation. Gaga’s reaction to the commercial demands of the music industry signal an identity conflict because her desire to create, clashed with the need to be commercial, with the outcome imposing “inconsistent demands upon” her (Ashforth and Mael, 29). Therefore, to reduce what could be considered feelings of dissonance and inconsistency (Ashforth and Mael; Ashforth and Humphrey) Gaga started saying “no” to prevent further loss of her identity and sense of authentic self. Taking back control could be seen as a means of reorienting her dream and overcoming what had become dissatisfaction with the commercial processes of the music industry. ConclusionsFor many creatives working in the creative industries – and specifically the music industry – is constructed as a dream come true; the working conditions and expectations experienced by recording artists are far from liberating and instead can become nightmares to which they want to escape. The case studies above, although likely ‘constructed’ retellings of the unfortunate circumstances encountered working in the music industry, nevertheless offer an inside account that contradicts the prevailing ideology that pursuing creative passions leads to a dream career (Florida; Samuel). If anything, the case studies explored above involving 30 Seconds to Mars, the Jonas Brothers, Lady Gaga, Kelly Clarkson, Adam Lambert and the Backstreet Boys, acknowledge what many scholars writing in the creative industries have already identified; that exploitation, subordination, identity conflict and loss of control are the unspoken or lesser known consequences of pursuing the creative dream. That said, the conundrum for creatives is that for success in the industry big “creative” businesses, such as recording labels, are still considered necessary in order to break into the market and to have prolonged success. This is simply because their resources far exceed those at the disposal of independent and up-and-coming creative entrepreneurs. Therefore, it can be argued that this friction of need between creative industry business versus artists will be on-going leading to more of these ‘dream to nightmare’ stories. The struggle will continue manifesting in the relationship between business and artist for long as the recording artists fight for greater equality, independence of creativity and respect for their work, image and identities. 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The usual postmodern suspicions about diligently deciphering authorial intent or stridently seeking fixed meaning/s and/or binary distinctions in an artistic work aside, this self-indulgent essay pushes the boundaries regarding normative academic research, for it focusses on my own (minimally celebrated) published creative writing’s status as a literary innovation. Dedicated to illuminating some of the less common denominators at play in Australian horror, my paper recalls the creative writing process involved when I set upon the (arrogant?) goal of creating a new genre of creative writing: that of the ‘Aboriginal Fantastic’. I compare my work to the literary output of a small but significant group (2.5% of the population), of which I am a member: Aboriginal Australians. I narrow my focus even further by examining that creative writing known as Aboriginal horror. And I reduce the sample size of my study to an exceptionally small number by restricting my view to one type of Aboriginal horror literature only: the Aboriginal vampire novel, a genre to which I have contributed professionally with the 2011 paperback and 2012 e-book publication of That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! However, as this paper hopefully demonstrates, and despite what may be interpreted by some cynical commentators as the faux sincerity of my taxonomic fervour, Aboriginal horror is a genre noteworthy for its instability and worthy of further academic interrogation.Surprising to many, Aboriginal Australian mythology includes at least one truly vampire-like entity, despite Althans’ confident assertion that the Bunyip is “Australia’s only monster” (16) which followed McKee’s equally fearless claim that “there is no blackfella tradition of zombies or vampires” (201). Gelder’s Ghost Stories anthology also only mentions the Bunyip, in a tale narrated by Indigenous man Percy Mumbulla (250). Certainly, neither of these academics claim Indigeneity in their ethnicity and most Aboriginal Australian scholars will happily agree that our heterogeneous Indigenous cultures and traditions are devoid of opera-cape wearing Counts who sleep in coffins or are repelled by crucifix-wielding Catholics. Nevertheless, there are fascinating stories--handed down orally from one generation to the next (Australian Aborigines, of course, have no ancestral writing system)--informing wide-eyed youngsters of bloodsucking, supernatural entities that return from the grave to feed upon still living blackfellas: hence Unaipon describes the red-skinned, fig tree-dwelling monster, the “Yara Ma Yha Who […] which sucks the blood from the victim and leaves him helpless upon the ground” (218). Like most vampires, this monster imparts a similarly monstrous existence upon his prey, which it drains of blood through the suckers on its fingers, not its teeth. Additionally, Reed warns: “Little children, beware of the Yara-ma-yha-who! If you do not behave yourselves and do as you are told, they will come and eat you!” (410), but no-one suggests this horrible creature is actually an undead human.For the purposes of this paper at least, the defining characteristics of a vampire are firstly that it must have once been an ordinary, living human. Secondly, it must have an appetite for human blood. Thirdly, it must have a ghoulish inability to undergo a permanent death (note, zombies, unlike vampires it seems, are fonder of brains than fresh hemoglobin and are particularly easy to dispatch). Thus, according to my criteria, an arguably genuine Aboriginal Australian vampire is referred to when Bunson writes of the Mrart being an improperly buried member of the tribe who has returned after death to feed upon the living (13) and when Cheung notes “a number of vampire-like creatures were feared, most especially the mrart, the ghost of a dead person who attacked victims at night and dragged them away from campsites” (40). Unfortunately, details regarding this “number of vampire-like creatures” have not been collated, nor I fear, in this era of rapidly extinguishing Aboriginal Australian language use, are they ever likely to be.Perhaps the best hope for preservation of these little known treasures of our mythology lies not with anthropologists but with the nation’s Indigenous creative writers. Yet no blackfella novelist, apparently, has been interested in the monstrous, bloodsucking, Aboriginal Undead. Despite being described as dominating the “Black Australian novel” (Shoemaker 1), writer Mudrooroo--who has authored three vampire novels--reveals nothing of Aboriginal Australian vampirology in his texts. Significantly, however, Mudrooroo states that Aboriginal Australian novelists such as he “are devoting their words to the Indigenous existential being” (Indigenous 3). Existentiality, of course, has to do with questions of life, death and dying and, for we Aboriginal Australians, such questions inevitably lead to us addressing the terrible consequences of British invasion and genocide upon our cultural identity, and this is reflected in Mudrooroo’s effective use of the vampire trope in his three ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels, as they are also known. Mudrooroo’s bloodsuckers, however, are the invading British and Europeans in his extended ‘white man as ghost’ metaphor: they are not sourced from Aboriginal Australian mythology.Mudrooroo does, notably, intertwine his story of colonising vampires in Australia with characters created by Bram Stoker in his classic novel Dracula (1897). He calls his first Aborigine to become a familiar “Renfield” (Undying 93), and even includes a soft-porn re-imagining of an encounter between characters he has inter-textually named “Lucy” and “Mina” (Promised 3). This potential for a contemporary transplantation of Stoker’s European characters to Australia was another aspect I sought to explore in my novel, especially regarding semi-autobiographical writing by mixed-race Aboriginal Australians such as Mudrooroo and myself. I wanted to meta-fictionally insert my self-styled anti-hero into a Stoker-inspired milieu. Thus my work features a protagonist who is confused and occasionally ambivalent about his Aboriginal identity. Brought up as Catholic, as I was, he succumbs to an Australian re-incarnation of Stoker’s Dracula as Anti-Christ and finds himself battling the true-believers of the Catholic Church, including a Moroccan version of Professor Van Helsing and a Buffy-like, quasi-Islamic vampire slayer.Despite his once revered status, Mudrooroo is now exiled from the Australian literary scene as a result of his claim to Indigeneity being (apparently) disproven (see Clark). Illness and old age prevent him from defending the charges, hence it is unlikely that Mudrooroo (or Colin Johnson as he was formerly known) will further develop the Aboriginal Australian vampire trope in his writing. Which situation leaves me to cautiously identify myself as the sole Aboriginal Australian novelist exploring Indigenous vampires in his/her creative writing, as evidenced by my 312 page novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance!, which was a prescribed text in a 2014 Indiana University course on World Literature (Halloran).Set in a contemporary Australia where disparate existential explanations including the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Catholicism, vampirism and atheism all co-exist, the writing of my novel was motivated by the question: ‘How can such incongruent ideologies be reconciled or bridged?’ My personal worldview is influenced by all four of these explanations for the mysteries of life and death: I was brought up in Catholicism but schooled in scientific methodology, which evolved into an insipid atheism. Culturally I was drawn to the gothic novel and developed an intellectual interest in Stoker’sDracula and its significance as a pro-Catholic, covert mission of proselytization (see Starrs 2004), whilst simultaneously learning more of my totem, Garrawi (the Sulphur-crested White Cockatoo), and the Aboriginal Dreamtime legends of my ancestral forebears. Much of my novel concerns questions of identity for a relatively light-complexioned, mixed ancestry Aboriginal Australian such as myself, and the place such individuals occupy in the post-colonial world. Mudrooroo, perhaps, was right in surmising that we Aboriginal Australian authors are devoted to writing about “the Indigenous existential being” for my Aboriginal vampire novel is at least semi-autobiographical and fixated on the protagonist’s attempts to reconcile his atheism with his Dreamtime teachings and Catholicism. But Mudrooroo’s writing differs markedly from my own when it comes to the expectations he has regarding the audience’s acceptance of supernatural themes. He apparently fully believed in the possibility of such unearthly spirits existing, and wrote of the “Maban Reality” whereby supernatural events are entirely tenable in the Aboriginal Australian world-view, and the way these matters are presented suggests he expects the reader to be similarly convinced. With this Zeitgeist, Mudrooroo’s ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels can be accurately described as Aboriginal Gothic. In this genre, Chanady explains, “the supernatural, as well as highly improbable events, are presented without any comment by the magical realist narrator” ("Magic Realism" 431).What, then, is the meaning of Aboriginal Gothic, given we Aboriginal peoples have no haunted castles or mist-shrouded graveyards? Again according to Chanady, as she set out in her groundbreaking monograph of 1985, in a work of Magical Realism the author unquestioningly accepts the supernatural as credible (10-12), even as, according to Althans, it combines “the magical and realist, into a new perspective of the world, thus offering alternative ways and new approaches to reality” (26). From this general categorisation, Althans proposes, comes the specific genre of Aboriginal Gothic, which is Magical Realism in an Indigenous context that creates a “cultural matrix foreign to a European audience [...] through blending the Gothic mode in its European tradition with the myths and customs of Aboriginal culture” (28-29). She relates the Aboriginal Gothic to Mudrooroo’s Maban Reality due to its acting “as counter-reality, grounded in the earth or country, to a rational worldview and the demands of a European realism” (28). Within this category sit not only the works of Aboriginal Australian novelists such as Mudrooroo, but also more recent novels by Aboriginal Australian writers Kim Scott and Alexis Wright, who occasionally indulge in improbable narratives informed by supernatural beings (while steering disappointingly clear of vampires).But there is more to the Aboriginal Gothic than a naïve acceptance of Maban Reality, or, for that matter, any other Magical Realist treatments of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Typically, the work of Aboriginal Gothic writers speaks to the historical horrors of colonisation. In contrast to the usually white-authored Australian Gothic, in which the land down under was seen as terrifying by the awestruck colonisers, and the Aborigine was portrayed as “more frightening than any European demon” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10), the Aboriginal Gothic sometimes reverses roles and makes the invading white man the monster. The Australian Gothic was for Aborigines, “a disabling, rather than enabling, discourse” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10) whilst colonial Gothic texts egregiously portrayed the colonised subject as a fearsome and savage Other. Ostensibly sub-human, from a psychoanalytic point of view, the Aborigine may even have symbolised the dark side of the British settler, but who, in the very act of his being subjugated, assures the white invader of his racial superiority, moral integrity and righteous identity. However, when Aboriginal Australian authors reiterate, when we subjugated savages wrestle the keyboard away, readers witness the Other writing back, critically. Receivers of our words see the distorted and silencing master discourse subverted and, indeed, inverted. Our audiences are subjectively repositioned to see the British Crown as the monster. The previously presumed civil coloniser is instead depicted as the author and perpetrator of a violently racist, criminal discourse, until, eventually, s/he is ultimately ‘Gothicised’: eroded and made into the Other, the villainous, predatory savage. In this style of vicious literary retaliation Mudrooroo excelled. Furthermore, as a mixed ancestry Aborigine, like myself, Mudrooroo represented in his very existence, the personification of Aboriginal Gothic, for as Idilko Riendes writes, “The half caste is reminiscent of the Gothic monstrous, as the half caste is something that seems unnatural at first, evoking fears” (107). Perhaps therein lies a source of the vehemency with which some commentators have pilloried Mudrooroo after the somewhat unconvincing evidence of his non-Indigeneity? But I digress from my goal of explicating the meaning of the term Aboriginal Gothic.The boundaries of any genre are slippery and one of the features of postmodern literature is its deliberate blurring of boundaries, hence defining genres is not easy. Perhaps the Gothic can be better understood when the meaning of its polar opposite, the Fantastic, is better understood. Ethnic authorial controversies aside and returning to the equally shady subject of authorial intent, in contrast to the Aboriginal Gothic of novelists Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright, and their accepting of the supernatural as plausible, the Fantastic in literature is characterised by an enlightened rationality in which the supernatural is introduced but ultimately rejected by the author, a literary approach that certainly sits better with my existential atheism. Chanady defined and illustrated the genre as follows: “the fantastic […] reaffirmed hegemonic Western rational paradigms by portraying the supernatural in a contradictory manner as both terrifying and logically impossible […] My examples of the fantastic were drawn from the work of major French writers such as Merimee and Maupassant” ("Magic Realism" 430). Unfortunately, Chanady was unable to illustrate her concept of the Fantastic with examples of Aboriginal horror writing. Why? Because none existed until my novel was published. Whereas Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright incorporated the Magical Realism of Aboriginal Australian mythology into their novels, and asked their readers to accept it as not only plausible but realistic and even factual, I wanted to create a style that blends Aboriginal mythology with the European tradition of vampires, but ultimately rejects this “cultural matrix” due to enlightened rationality, as I deliberately and cynically denounce it all as fanciful superstition.Certainly, the adjective “fantastic” is liberally applied to much of what we call Gothic horror literature, and the sub-genre of Indigenous vampire literature is not immune to this confusion, with non-Australian Indigenous author Aaron Carr’s 1995 Native American vampire novel, The Eye Killers, unhelpfully described in terms of the “fantastic nature of the genre” (Tillett 149). In this novel,Carr exposes contemporary Native American political concerns by skillfully weaving multiple interactive dialogues with horror literature and film, contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations, postmodern philosophies, traditional vampire lore, contemporary Native literature, and Native oral traditions. (Tillett 150)It must be noted, however, that Carr does not denounce the supernatural vampire and its associated folklore, be it European or Laguna/Kerasan/Navajo, as illogical or fanciful. This despite his “dialogues with […] contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations [and] postmodern philosophies”. Indeed, the character “Diana” at one stage pretends to pragmatically denounce the supernatural whilst her interior monologue strenuously defends her irrational beliefs: the novel reads: “‘Of course there aren’t any ghosts,’ Diana said sharply, thinking: Of course there were ghosts. In this room. Everywhere” (197). In taking this stock-standard approach of expecting the reader to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the Undead, Carr locates his work firmly in the Aboriginal Gothic camp and renders commentators such as Tillett liable to be called ignorant and uninformed when they label his work fantastic.The Aboriginal Gothic would leave the reader convinced a belief in the supernatural is non-problematic, whereas the Aboriginal Fantastic novel, where it exists, would, while enjoying the temporary departure from the restraints of reality, eventually conclude there are no such things as ghosts or vampires. Thus, my Aboriginal Fantastic novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! was intended from the very beginning of the creative writing process to be an existentially diametric alternative to Magical Realism and the Aboriginal Gothic (at least in its climactic denouement). The narrative features a protagonist who, in his defeat, realises the danger in superstitious devotion and in doing so his interior monologue introduces to the literary world the new Aboriginal Fantastic genre. Despite a Foucauldian emphasis in most of my critical analysis in which an awareness of the constructed status and nature of the subject/focus of knowledge undermines the foundations of any reductive typology, I am unhesitant in my claim to having invented a new genre of literature here. Unless there is, undiscovered by my research, a yet-to-be heralded work of Aboriginal horror that recognises the impossibility of its subject, my novel is unique even while my attitude might be decried as hubristic. I am also cognizant of the potential for angry feedback from my Aboriginal Australian kin, for my innovative genre is ultimately denigrating of all supernatural devotion, be it vampiric or Dreamtime. Aboriginal Fantastic writing rejects such mythologies as dangerous, fanciful superstition, but I make the (probably) too-little-too-late defence that it rejects the Indigenous existential rationale somewhat less vigorously than it rejects the existential superstitions of Catholicism and/or vampirism.This potential criticism I will forbear, perhaps sullenly and hopefully silently, but I am likely to be goaded to defensiveness by those who argue that like any Indigenous literature, Aboriginal Australian writing is inherently Magical Realist, and that I forsake my culture when I appeal to the rational. Chanady sees “magic realism as a mode that expresses important points of view, often related to marginality and subalternity” ("Magic Realism" 442). She is not alone in seeing it as the generic cultural expression of Indigenous peoples everywhere, for Bhabha writes of it as being the literature of the postcolonial world (6) whilst Rushdie sees it as the expression of a third world consciousness (301). But am I truly betraying my ancestral culture when I dismiss the Mrart as mere superstition? Just because it has colour should we revere ‘black magic’ over other (white or colourless) superstitions? Should we not suspect, as we do when seated before stage show illusionists, some sleight of (writing) hand? Some hidden/sub-textual agenda meant to entertain not educate? Our world has many previously declared mysteries now easily explained by science, and the notion of Earth being created by a Rainbow Serpent is as farcical to me as the notion it was created a few thousand years ago in seven days by an omniscient human-like being called God. If, in expressing this dubiousness, I am betraying my ancestors, I can only offer detractors the feeble defence that I sincerely respect their beliefs whilst not personally sharing them. I attempt no delegitimising of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Indeed, I celebrate different cultural imaginaries for they make our quotidian existence more colourful and enjoyable. There is much pleasure to be had in such excursions from the pedantry of the rational.Another criticism I might hear out--intellectually--would be: “Most successful literature is Magical Realist, and supernatural stories are irresistible”, a truism most commercially successful authors recognise. But my work was never about sales, indeed, the improbability of my (irresistible?) fiction is didactically yoked to a somewhat sanctimonious moral. My protagonist realises the folly and danger in superstitious devotion, although his atheistic epiphany occurs only during his last seconds of life. Thus, whilst pushing this barrow of enlightened rationality, my novel makes a somewhat original contribution to contemporary Australian culture, presenting in a creative writing form rather than anthropological report, an understanding of the potential for melding Aboriginal mythology with Catholicism, the “competing Dreamtimes, white and black” as Turcotte writes ("Re-mastering" 132), if only at the level of ultimately accepting, atheistically, that all are fanciful examples of self-created beyond-death identity, as real--or unreal--as any other religious meme. Whatever vampire literature people read, most such consumers do not believe in the otherworldly antagonists, although there is profound enjoyment to be had in temporarily suspending disbelief and even perpetuating the meme into the mindsets of others. Perhaps, somewhere in the sub-conscious, pre-rational recesses of our caveman-like brains, we still wonder if such supernatural entities reflect a symbolic truth we can’t quite apprehend. Instead, we use a totemic figure like the sultry but terrifying Count Dracula as a proxy for other kinds of primordial anxieties we cannot easily articulate, whether that fear is the child rapist on the loose or impending financial ruin or just the overwhelming sense that our contemporary lifestyles contain the very seeds of our own destruction, and we are actively watering them with our insouciance.In other words, there is little that is new in horror. Yes, That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! is an example of what I call the new genre of Aboriginal Fantastic but that claim is not much of an original contribution to knowledge, other than being the invention of an extra label in an unnecessarily formalist/idealist lexicon of literary taxonomy. Certainly, it will not create a legion of fans. But these days it is difficult for a novelist to find anything really new to write about, genre-wise, and if there is a reader prepared to pay hard-earned money for a copy, then I sincerely hope they do not feel they have purchased yet another example of what the HBO television show Californication’s creative writing tutor Hank Moody (David Duchovny) derides as “lame vampire fiction” (episode 2, 2007). I like to think my Aboriginal Fantastic novel has legs as well as fangs. References Althans, Katrin. Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film. Bonn: Bonn UP, 2010. Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Bunson, Matthew. The Vampire Encyclopedia. New York: Gramercy Books, 1993. Carr, Aaron A. Eye Killers. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1995. Chanady, Amaryll. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. Chanady, Amaryll. “Magic Realism Revisited: The Deconstruction of Antinomies.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (June 2003): 428-444. Cheung, Theresa. The Element Encyclopaedia of Vampires. London: Harper Collins, 2009. Clark, Maureen. Mudrooroo: A Likely Story: Identity and Belonging in Postcolonial Australia. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007. Gelder, Ken. The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Halloran, Vivien. “L224: Introduction to World Literatures in English.” Department of English, Indiana University, 2014. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.indiana.edu/~engweb/undergradCourses_spring.shtml›. McKee, Alan. “White Stories, Black Magic: Australian Horror Films of the Aboriginal.”Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia. Eds. Dieter Riemenschneider and Geoffrey V. Davis. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (1997): 193-210. Mudrooroo. The Indigenous Literature of Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997. Mudrooroo. The Undying. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1998. Mudrooroo. The Promised Land. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2000. Reed, Alexander W. Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables. Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1999. Riendes, Ildiko. “The Use of Gothic Elements as Manifestations of Regaining Aboriginal Identity in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart.” Topos 1.1 (2012): 100-114. Rushdie, Salman. “Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta and Penguin Books, 1991. Shoemaker, Adam. Mudrooroo. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1993. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Keeping the Faith: Catholicism in Dracula and its Adaptations.” Journal of Dracula Studies 6 (2004): 13-18. Starrs, D. Bruno. That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! Saarbrücken, Germany: Just Fiction Edition (paperback), 2011; Starrs via Smashwords (e-book), 2012. Tillett, Rebecca. “‘Your Story Reminds Me of Something’: Spectacle and Speculation in Aaron Carr’s Eye Killers.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 33.1 (2002): 149-73. Turcotte, Gerry. “Australian Gothic.” Faculty of Arts — Papers, University of Wollongong, 1998. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/60/›. Turcotte, Gerry. “Re-mastering the Ghosts: Mudrooroo and Gothic Refigurations.” Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo. Ed. Annalisa Oboe. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (2003): 129-151. Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Eds. Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press, 2006.