On Friday 18 May, Seth Honnor and Hannah Nicklin presented a lunchtime talk on their preliminary research into a uniquely flexible box office system: Digital Hat.

Hannah Nicklin is an artist and an academic, specialising in pervasive performance and what she has coined as first-person theatre.

Seth Honnor is the current director of Kaleider based in Exeter, which takes performance into non-theatre spaces. He is also the former director of Theatre Bristol and the current director of albow.

They began their talk by admitting they were still at the very beginning of a journey with this idea, but that this was the perfect time for them to present their thoughts, start a conversation and lay the idea open to provocations. Their thinking comes from many different places; they have a multitude of different motivations, but feel they can make a system to suit all these and more.

Thinking

Every arts project begins with the question ‘How are we going to make any money?’ To gain funding you need to capture audience data, and to fund yourself you need to sell tickets. Hannah and Seth want an effective, hassle-free, opt-in framework that allows you to effectively capture money and data in an environment without a ticketing system in place.

Theatres run on a 200 year old system that says ‘We are here delivering this to you.’ Hannah and Seth see that the vast majority of people outside the theatre community do not visit theatres. Performance itself is leaving theatres. This means it is imperative to begin a conversation about a digital hat.

They know it is easier to create a trusted brand around data capture than around gifting and fundraising. They know that people will give and give again if they believe in the outcome and know where their money is going. They know that oyster cards, online networks and loyalty schemes like the Tesco Club Card are all models for convenience and trust that could be borrowed from or jumped upon.

Hannah loves music. Yet, until Bandcamp was formed she had never paid for the music she loved. Now there’s a way to listen to DIY music before you buy it, with no limit on how many times you stream it. There is also trust handed to the listener by the musicians who put their work online and say ‘pay what you like for this’. As an artist, Hannah thinks your first enemy is obscurity, and your second enemy is poverty. If you are completely unknown you will never make any money. Bandcamp allows you to gain a name for yourself and make money along the way. Once you are connected to a band through social media and you know what they eat for breakfast and what they think about, your personal connection to their music heightens. You start to really care about the person and the results they get for the art they’ve created.

Following the model of DIY music distribution, Hannah and Seth want to cultivate a 'pay what you like' ethos which provides an audience member with the power to pay what they think a performance is worth, and to go back and add more money if they change their mind.

When Seth and Hannah first sat down to discuss the idea, Hannah pointed out that Theatre Bristol, the very networking site Seth had created before facebook even existed, could be a perfect place to start:

Theatre Bristol is a vast pot of data about performers and their performances: real data created by people opting in. It has 6500 members and 2000 visits a day. This site has already been duplicated to serve further cities, sites that back onto the same framework (albow). Seth wants to open up this model, changing the url to danceandtheatre(dot)net so there could be bristol(dot)danceandtheatre(dot)net or newyork(dot)danceandtheatre(dot)net – a member would be part of a local community, but have the ability to post globally.

The pair are beginning to think about how this model could be adapted into or be used to inform an inventive ticketing system. Imagine subscribing to a friend’s calendar, the friend who always knows about the best shows first. Imagine if every time they booked a show, you got an alert. In an opt-in system, this is entirely possible and even desirable. People naturally curate their lives and being able to share these curations is powerful.

In order to make a system like this work, you need current box offices to talk to eachother and collect the right data. We want last.fm/amazon style recommendations for everything these days, why is theatre so behind? ‘Other audiences also saw this at The Tobacco Factory.’ We need to know how theatre audiences are moving through a city and its arts venues. What are they seeing and where are they going next?

A seemingly huge barrier between conventional box offices and a digital hat is a ticket. People pay money for the experience itself, but they also want to hold a ticket, they want to hold proof they can go in and have proof they were there. Hannah and Seth are working out if it's imperative to have a gesture towards ticketing/giving within this development.

They want to create an alternative to crowd-funding. Hannah believes that crowd-funding makes an audience pay three times: you pay to fund the project, you pay through your taxes and you probably have to buy a ticket too.

However the music scene seems to do crowd-funding better, they start a conversation with their audience. £10 will get you a copy of the album once it’s released. £25 will get you a signed copy. £50 will get you a t-shirt, a signed copy and an on-stage shout-out. £100 will get you a gig in your living room. There is also the option of paying with your own data or with publicity (‘Buy this track for the price of a tweet’). Music has fans, music has merchandise, music has a lot to teach theatre.

Seth closed off their presentation with a final thought. Could this project be led by form and not content? Should the digital hat be created solely for performance, or should it be a platform that can be re-appropriated for other things?

Some closing provocations from the audience included: Will a ‘paying what you think it’s worth’ ethos encourage a populist approach to making art? And a re-emphasis of the fact that there should be a ‘cut through the hassle’ option within the digital hat, for the world-weary, those who want to just pay and not become friends with the artist.

The talk was followed by an open workshop, a ‘rapid-thinking process’ for imagining what form the digital hat might take. This conversation is still very much ongoing.