How Do Practitioners Exhibit and Distribute Their Work in Different Media/Art Forms?

Media has been the largest and most expensive industry in the western world for many years. Along with this there are many different forms and ways of distributing and creating its products. There are countless methods of releasing finished work to the public such as:

Television

Television is probably one of the most revolutionary inventions of the modern(ish) age, alongside cars, phones etc. It's evolution has been followed by millions of people and is possibly the most popular distributor of media products to date. Is is however being quickly over-taken by the internet as a source of distribution and public consumption.

The production of shows on television usually follow certain guidelines. The shows are written before-hand by a writing team. Many show appears to the audience to be live, when actually it isn't. Taking game shows for example, they are performed as if live, often to an audience when re-runs of game shows are often what is playing. Chat shows like Jonathan Ross also have this same appearance. Many fictional shows give the audience a feeling that it is actually happening. They have to be at their television by (for example) 7 o'clock or they will miss the newest episode of their favourite show. This is however, a dying concept. With Sky introducing the ability to record live TV and entire series' of shows automatically using 'series link' and the internet allowing us to download whatever episodes of whatever show we want whenever we want, the whole concept of putting on a show is changing.

Cinema

Cinema and theatre are in many ways one in the same. They are both an experience of show that means if you miss the starting time, you'll miss the beginning of the production. They differ however as with theatre is different every time. The fact that theatre is actually a live performance means that in can never be exactly the same twice. Where as with Cinema the digital video will not change.

Art Galleries

Galleries are a different form of show. They are in one place (sometimes at one time) and people come from all over the wold to visit them. They are generally for a specific audience, which could also be said for cinema and theatre. Which also have such characteristics as people visiting them. However Art Galleries generally contain still images. And whilst people make their ways to cinemas and theatre to view one thing, people tend to go to galleries to get a view of several different, smaller things.

Posters

Posters are one of the many forms of media that cannot be avoided. They are everywhere and a lot of us are effected by them without even realising it. They are everywhere, at the train station, on a billboard near your house, at the cinema. They are that which is ignored by almost everyone, and read when bored.

The way to get a poster noticed is a difficult task that takes knowledge of presentation. Humour is often an important aspect in the design of posters. Or creating something that looks more visually interesting than anything that surrounds it. Posters are 99% of the time a means of promotion of another product. Like the picture shown above.

Graffiti

Graffiti, though often illegal is a very popular form of media. It can be used to 'tag' someone, where someone tags an alias of theirs on an area to show others (mostly other taggers) that they have been there. Other graffiti can be used to convey a message, like the image above.

The definition of media texts can also range from high budget Hollywood films to reclusive artists. But generally it is always necessary to pay for a method to publicly distribute your product to a wide audience. However, more recently up-and-coming directors and actors have been able to get their work public even if there was no budget by using means of the internet. Only in the last few years has the internet been such a popular source of distributing 'virals' and products made by no-budget or low-budget film and video makers. It allows people to almost instantaneously distribute their work to millions, possibly billions of people to view it as they wish. The difference this had made to the creative industry is that now, anyone, everyone can be a creative practitioner. This in itself is changing the definition of a creative practitioner.

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Seventeen years ago, when I was born if someone wanted to make a song and publish it, somebody had to hire a studio and musicians, record a song, press it onto a disk and then manufacture thousands upon thousands of disks where they would be exported into shops and hope that it would be sold. The difference technology has made to this is that more recently, anyone can open up a program like 'GarageBand', record a song and export it to YouTube, instantly receiving millions of potential listeners absolutely free. This means the creative industry is now anyone with access to the internet, and some talent. However, this makes it more difficult to get successful due to the sheer size and quantity of videos on the internet. Therefore, whatever you make has to be good/original enough to get noticed.

Subsequently, the best way to get noticed (quickly) is to do something new. This is achieved very rarely by any practitioners. However, every now and then work is distributed in such a way that it is very impressive and completely original. Jamie Hewlett is just such a practitioner. Hewlett was one of the first people on the planet to do an entirely animated 3D live performance for his band the 'Gorillaz'. It revolutionised the future of animated gigs and put his name in many newspapers. He used clever lighting effects to create 3D figures of the bands cartoon members. Hewlett has been very lucky (or just very creative) when it comes to getting attention through distributing something 'new'. His comic Tank Girl (how he became famous) was controversial and was said to 'turn other comic conventions on their heads.' as well as his band Gorillaz being one of the first entirely animated bands in existence.

Here is the front cover of his Tank Girl comic:

Marketing is vital when producing a media product, the marketing in itself is a media product, and has to be distributed to ensure the product it is relating to gets distributed as well. Billboards, posters and screened advertisements were, until recently, the most popular way of getting a product known to the public. Now it is far easier, rather than buying a position on a billboard anyone can simply upload information about their product to the internet. Television shows have even started to show the most popular internet virals, so the makers of them have been paid for uploading these videos (which cost them nothing).

On the subject of things that are free to the public, one of the new techniques being used by film makers and production companies such as Fox are free time-windowed screenings. For James Cameron's new film Avatar Fox decided they would help distribute it by having screenings at over one hundred Imax cinemas. These screenings would be only 16 minutes long, but they would be free. This is a remarkably innovative method of distributing as it showed the public what to expect from the film itself and keeping their attention whilst giving a bit of it away. Avatar is also advertised by the sheer amount of time James Cameron has spent on it, it is also the first feature film he has brought out since the movie Titanic, one of the most popular films in history. This entices audiences to go and watch his new 'masterpiece' and is a clever method of getting publicity.

Just by looking at stills anyone can see the sheer time and effort that has gone into creating Avatar. Something that impressive never goes unnoticed.

The band the 'Arctic Monkeys' rocked the musical world when they brought out a song called 'Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor'. They were one of the first band who gave their record away for free. Instead of publishing their song and paying money to get it out to the world they simply placed it on the internet and it made it to number one. This completely bypassed the production companies and proved the point that you don't need to use 'barriers to entry' anymore. People can completely bypass all of the normal distribution channels. More recently as proof of this the UK charts rate their chart lists in accordance to number of downloads when this was previously measured using the quantity of purchased disks.

Other media branches delve into areas and promote themselves by combining different media forms. An example of this is the new and very popular TV show Glee. It uses a combination of live action footage and music to bring itself into the horizon of a wide audience. It sells itself not only as a TV show, but as a band as well. The original idea of this enabled it to appeal to a great number of people, this method of distribution was well thought out.

Comedians have a very different method of having their work exhibited. They very rarely start out having their own stage and an enormous crowd of people laughing at their every gag. Most start off doing small shows in small venues, often such as pubs. They then might move on to appearing in/presenting small television programs such as comedy quiz shows that feature comedians. After an audience sees them and how they perform they may very well be offered a larger audience and a larger stage, and be invited onto more popular quiz shows/comedy sitcoms etc. The chain goes on. However, the introduction of the internet and such sites as YouTube means that these people can make their own cheap comedy sitcoms and get word of themselves out for free. A delegate may come across this and straight out offer them a job.

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This has been the reason for the increasingly destroyed media industries, it first happened with printed text. Sites like Wikipedia and news websites have almost completely removed the need for newspapers, magazines etc. Then the same thing happened to the music industry. It has crippled the art industry, rather than going to an art exhibition people can now just type in an artists name into Google Images and it will instantly present them with most if not all of the artists paintings. Now it is slowly happening to the film and the video game industry. It is interesting to speculate what industries will be next to go. The possibilities are stretching, what if someone uses YouTube to win an Oscar?

It is clear that the use of the internet is slowly dictating how media texts are being created. It is possible that in a few years micro-series like the one we will be making will be the main source on entertainment and income.