Wednesday, August 15, 2007

And TINA is underway


With just over two months to go until TINA gets underway, the placement has begun with things in full swing.

I have been given some major responsibilities to do with the festival in terms of media and promotion and also the formulation of the new website.

I have also been given the responsibility of organising the 'Bike Corral' - a combination of the Bike Library and Bike Workshops. More on this later.

During TINA, there are four major sections of the festival - and they each have sponsors/supporters. These are:

Electrofringe: a festival of experimental electronic arts and culture dedicated to skills development and artistic exchange. It focuses on uncovering emergent forms and places a particular emphasis on encouraging exchange between emerging and established artists

National Young Writers Festival: Australia's premier event for emerging writers, publishers, performers and trouble-makers. Several thousand of the country's most challenging and original young minds descend upon Newcastle for a five day creative bender.

Critical Animals: an event where creative research forums will play with concepts of obscurity and obsession, academic art/institution battles, literal literary journeys and much more.

Sound Summit: an annual conference for independent artists, labels and people interested in working and playing in electronica and hip-hop. Sound Summit exists to explore and support brilliant, independent electronic music and hip-hop from Australia and abroad.

These four sections are sponsored and supported by a range of different organisations from national and local level - and an integral part of this sponsorship is the inclusion of their logos on all promotional material. This is part of a heavy media relations campaign, and as TINA is a non-for-profit festival and rely on sponsors and supporters to keep going every year, this is essential.

So, I have been working furiously on this and making a brand, spanking new website for TINA 2007. Other activities which will be coming up in the future for me to work on include the organisation and coordination of the Bike Corral, which is a sub event of TINA.

The Bike Corral is a joint festival of This is Not Art (TINA) and the Newcastle Bike Ecology Centre (NBEC), which will feature DIY Bike Repair Workshops and the Bike Library. More on this later, but basically, it is going to be a place where people can come and fix up old bikes through the workshop and then use the bikes to travel around the festival. As organiser and coordinator of this event, there is obviously a lot to think about. But as I said, more on this when I immerse myself in it.

Until then, it's all guns blazing.

Allyson.