Consequences

The consequences game on axis has faced a number of problems.

- underadvertised. I have a banner link on the frontpage of the BD site, did some promotion on facebook, Andy did a LVAF mailout and there has apparently been a lot of word-of-mouth promotion by ourselves.  However, because promotion has tailed off, so have the users. I’m not sure how much promotion Axis have done themselves.

- teething problems with the game itself.  When people have visited the site to play the game, more often than not they have been greeted with “try again later”.  Whilst this has been rectified to some extent, the current version of the game allows people to play as much as they want, but their contributions will be ignored – only the first post gets through to us.  Ideally we would be able to choose the best contribution at each stage of the game.

- people getting the wrong end of the stick, doing very literal descriptions etc – partly our fault as the example in the on-site instructions is quite literal.

Today I  spent several hours waiting around in court before finding out around 3pm that the case would not begin today because of some teething problems.  I sent the client home and went to the Baltic library, did some photocopying of essays about the museum space and the Chapman Brothers.  Unfocused research, but sure to come in handy at some point, and preferable to going back to the office to kill off the afternoon.  Other projects need to push on, Eleanor is going to use the university facilities to experiment with some ways to cut vinyl records (hopefully without shattering them or scratching them beyond all use).  Working on text for BD “how to” publication – how to support music and download for free, how to be discharged from the Mental Health Act, how to get divorced, how to make a podcast, etc.

Black Dogs meeting 14.03.08

Lots of discussions at the latest meeting, a good deal of conversation and debate about how the group should progress, promote itself and the “idea” of BD, centring on the website as the first port of call to newcomers.

Andy and Dave in particular felt that there were a number of ways we can suggest to people that BD is more than just us six people, and thus promote the understanding that it goes beyond our individual work. We agreed to change the “about” page of the site (and to make this the index, for the time being at least). Other redesigns were suggested including how to make the agenda page more readable. The site needs a major overhaul but until I have a chance to sit down and work it all out it’ll have to be minor changes here and there.

The Consequences game on the Axis site www.axisweb.org/consequences is working fine although there are a number of changes necessary – the main criticism being that we seem to be losing participants because of the “try again later” message which comes up when an image or text is waiting approval. These problems will hopefully be rectified before the next game.

First post

First post in this blog. Hopefully this will allow me to make more frequent and anecdotal updates about my work, Black Dogs, and art in general.