THE UNSTOPPABLE THOUGHT

TOBY MCMILLAN, Copywriter



Website / Social Platform



ICA
ART RULES



BRIEF





Once the raw, explosive edge of arts culture in the UK, and a rebellious antidote to the stuffy Royal Academy, the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) had, in recent years, lost a bit of its mojo, and a bit of ground to competitors like Tate Modern and the Saatchi Gallery.


Thus, our brief was to ignite an online debate about art that would cause mass participation, and push the ICA's name back out into the world.



Our IDEA





To set off a debate, we had to find a question that everyone has opinion about, and yet is impossible to answer.


The question was very simple: what is "Art?", or, as we put it, what is your Rule for something to be 'Art'?


We would seed the question out far and wide, and see how people would respond: Consensus? Vulgarity? Fights between factions of artists? Complete indifference?


And so Art Rules was born. A social platform, a living library, kind of an experiment... and kind of a work of art in itself.



A BLANK CANVAS





First off, the Rules would be collected on a microsite that would let anyone register, share their opinion, browse, and vote on the opinions of others.

And to make things more interesting - we limited Rules to 140 characters.





INITIAL OUTLINES



A blank canvas scares people off. So, before going live, we asked famous critics and artists to fill in some of the white space with a Rule of their own. We were banking on some goodies, and of course, there were some.

Over to the BBC's art critic Will Gompertz and artist Tracey Emin.





LAUNCHING A TWITTER FOR ART?



With outlines done, the next stage was outreach. Time for a PR hook - "the ICA intends to replace Twitter for art".

Unrealistic perhaps? Well that's the whole point. The Guardian reported on it. The ICA reached out to the art world and arts students. Thoughts began to appear on Twitter.





The good, the bad, the totally mad



Sure enough, our site began to fill up with Rules. Funny ones. Thoughtful ones. Offensive ones. There wasn't much moderation, and that was a good thing. The ridiculous and spicy Rules counterbalanced the weighty, pretentious ones. Things were looking good.

But there was still one problem - how to order the Rules? Put the most popular ones on top, and disadvantage newcomers, or just order by date, and risk losing people with interesting and provocative thoughts being too few and far between?





ART is taming complexity into extraordinary simplcity



Simplifying the complex is at the heart of technology, and it's where tech-led advertising agency like Sapient Nitro excels; the build team created algorithms to randomly surface Rules from the database to a constantly evolving homepage. The result was an infinite stream of opinion bubbling to the screen, the size and frequency dependent on popularity, but balanced by an in-built randomness quotient.

New, old, popular and unpopular, there would be space in our gallery for every Rule to have its 15 minutes of fame.





Exit through the gift shop. (PLEASE?)



We've collected 100s of Rules, and there are some utter gems. What happens next? Well, for the ICA, the fact of the debate was enough. They had done something that would in fact be impossible for any other art institution to do, and quietly put themselves back on the map.

But for us (we're marketing sell-outs after all) the dollar signs were dancing in our eyes, and we pleaded with them to merch it, merch, it merch it.

We're still waiting.... (Images below are reference)





The experiment is over, but check out the archived version


Visit ART RULES

toby@unstoppablethought.com



+44(0)7862247422