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Hi, I've just subscribed to this list since a colleague forwarded some recent discussion about the Arts Council's withdrawal of funding for the Public Gallery in West Bromwich. I heard about this on Radio 4 couple of nights ago. I'm one of the artists, responsible for the interactive 3D sound installation. I'm not here to air any dirty washing, just to give another perspective. We didn't sign any kind of NDA, and since it all seems to be over, it's probably worth making some comments for posterity. (I see Susan and Zach have just commented as well - thanks.) I've just read the analysis by Simon Biggs, and I think his summary is 100% correct. Of course the media will blame the artworks, but that is indeed unfair given that, to my knowledge, none of them were completely working, and the walkway displaying the works was never opened to the public, so it's not clear how they would have been judged (except, perhaps, as "broken"). I think there were two fundamental problems: complexity and engagement. The gallery media system was complicated in realisation: the basic design was sound, and we had the our sound installation coded, running and signed off against backbone systems at least two years ago, but things never worked properly in practice. The RFID sensing system has never worked to our satisfaction, constantly sending incorrect trigger data, which somewhat cripples artworks designed around the concept of tracking visitors' journeys through the space. The media backbone was functional at the server level but suffered numerous connectivity issues, often (it appeared) due to badly maintained cabling and connectivity. None of these issues were unsurmountable. They'd be expected in any installation of this scope, and I've been involved in a number of commercial rollouts of similar complexity with similar initial problems which have succeeded. The big issue here appeared to be a complete lack of engagement. In our four years of off-on involvement with the project, we worked with a rotating succession of technical staff, but never had some of the fundamental problems addressed. I still have bug-report emails from years ago which were never actioned. Despite an air of feverish activity on the site - including one occasion when all the floorboards were taken up around us as we were trying to stabilise parts of the network - crucial operational issues were not addressed. Cables were tested and not reconnected. Servers were powered down or rerouted without obvious reason. Loudspeakers were miswired. Amplifiers broke down and weren't replaced for months. Oh, and on one floor the male and female signs for the toilets were on the wrong doors - how much effort does it take to get that right? A large number of people in hard-hats and hi-vis jackets came and went, and I never understood who was doing what, where, for whom, and why. Some of the staff were, I presume, out of their depth and had no concept of the operational requirements of the site. Others, for whom I have a great deal of respect and some of whom are friends as well as colleagues, battled heroically to get things done, to no avail. There seemed to be little sense of proactive involvement in the day-to-day activities required to make, and keep, a complex installation functional. For example, it seems fairly obvious that we cannot test our installation unless it is actually switched on, but every time were arrived, we had to see that it was done. Most recently we've been working with an external IT consultancy charged with the task of making it all work, and making progress with them, but I guess it's all a bit too late. I am not a curator, so I can't really speak on the wider argument of whether such a gallery in such an area was a wise planning - or artistic - decision. During our frequent "for the last time, really" debugging trips we got to speak to a large number of West Bromwich cabbies who saw the thing as a gigantic white elephant and a complete waste of money, verging on criminal. I was always a little bemused by the imposed structure of the gallery experience: one would enter at ground level, be whisked up to the top floor and the data profiling booths to be photographed and recorded, and then proceed in a totally fixed, predetermined manner down a spiral walkway through the exhibits and into the merchandise area to buy one's digitally customised mugs and T-shirts. I don't know whether that counts as a gallery or a fairground attraction, and I don't know what it says about the nature of artistic engagement. Everything about the Public Gallery had a sense of heirarchical, centralised, large-scale, rigid, symbolic design, in a truly magnificent building planted like 2001's monolith in the middle of an area with no cinema, no theatre, no bookshops. It felt like a curiously colonial approach to art. I feel sorry for those people who poured all their time and effort into trying to make this work; a lot of them will be losing money, and some will lose their jobs, and perhaps some - undeservedly - their reputations. And presumably, the technical infrastructure, hardware and fittings - incorporating some truly beautiful works of design - will be thrown into a skip. It is all such a tragic waste. -- N. Nick Rothwell / Cassiel.com Limited www.cassiel.com www.myspace.com/cassieldotcom www.last.fm/music/cassiel www.reverbnation.com/cassiel www.linkedin.com/in/cassiel www.loadbang.net