Who Wants to Be?

Workshops at the Talkaoke table in Peckham, 2007

Peckham TV isn’t a TV channel. It was a huge telly (actually a 10m2 LED screen) that we brought to Peckham Square on Saturday, 21st June 2008, and used to help a large group of Peckham residents and visitors to design a collectively envisioned advert for Peckham.

Come to Peckham! One of the Adverts promoting the area.

The idea for a collaborative advert came from a series of workshops we had ran along with artist Harold Offeh‘s ‘Mothership Collective’ project, where we convened public discussions with  passers-by, school children and various groups in the area around the Talkaoke table to discuss what could improve the area. In the end, many people thought that Peckham is great, and what it needed a better public image to entice people to come and find out about the delights of the South.

The day before the event, the think-tank Demos convened a public seminar about Social Change and Contemporary art, where we talked about the project – they made a nice podcast of it here.

To get people involved in the process, we used  a specially adapted version of “Who Wants to Be…?“, our ‘ask the audience’ game show. The goal of the show was to get the audience to collectively design an advert for Peckham by suggesting ideas which were visualised instantly on the giant screen. Then people then voted on their favorite ideas using our computer vision voting system, advised by a panel of experts, community members and local dignitaries, chaired by Harold Offeh.

A local film-making collective produced a short film of the proceedings:

The event was the first public commission of the new Peckham Space arts site under Peckham Library. The Library building was bold and new, and still a very contentious issue with the neighbourhood, so there was plenty to talk about when thinking about how to represent the area.

Quite a few people were unhappy with the process and the spectacle, but they got their say, and the discussion delved into the recent history of the neighbourhood, and how to engage a wider group in this kind of project.

David Lillington wrote about Peckham TV and the discussion that preceded it in an article in A-N.

We wrote this text in the aftermath of the game, reflecting on the process, context and outcome.