ANDY ROSS takes a personal view of the crucial role of the Internet and other technologies in delivery of the arts in a rural community.

LIVING ON AN ISLAND in the rural north of Shetland, it is quite difficult to access international performances of the more esoteric types of art such as opera and recital. The local arts trust and other parties do bring opera and the like up to the islands but new music and less well-known art pieces are few and far between.

It struck me while I was watching Channel 4’s recent broadcast of John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghofer that television and other forms of technology, in playing a major role in bringing works such as this to a broader audience, have had a disproportionate impact on people’s lives in the isolated parts of the country.

The corollary to that of course, is that the technology becomes vitally important to those of us who rely on it for our regular fix of culture, and that the benefits of such technology have a greater effect on those of us who have no other live access to these experiences than those that do.

In the last few months I have listened to opera on radio, a recital by Dame Janet Baker on vinyl record, Britten operas on CD, taken part in an internet chat about the state of the operatic art, worked on proposals for the arts in Shetland via telephone and internet, researched, typed and texted, all the while listening to broadcasts about arts on Radio Three and Four, and all from my home in the north of Yell.

I am currently talking to people in London, Chicago and New York about a new opera piece that has been written and we are sharing information using the Web and file formats that are increasingly compatible between PCs and iMacs.

There are many advantages to using the Internet as a medium through which to communicate and exchange ideas and information. In the days before instant communication, ideas were discussed in coffee houses and bars. Today, the arts world has access to arts from around the world and can exchange ideas with people anywhere there are telephones, computers, or a mail service.

This will be especially important to those of us who live in places where we have these potentials and can use them; in fact, coming from Africa where such technology is expensive and not always available, I would venture to say that we have a responsibility to exploit this capability.

There are also disadvantages to new technology, one of which is that using the Web to broadcast events can distort the  live aspect of the performance. Broadband is one way of optimising the experience but it is expensive for rural communities to install, and it is not always available in any case.

I was recently told that Shetland in the Eighties was party to a discussion that ended in an agreement that live music events could be broadcast via CB radio free of royalties or fees. Such innovation has always been useful to places away from arts centres and I believe that more and more we will come to rely and adopt new technologies to further the arts message.

One of the more unusual projects that took place here a week or so ago was a series of workshops with schools where singing and composition was interspersed with images taken on a digital camera and projected onto a screen behind the performers. There is no reason why such events could not be broadened to stream to the Internet-using public.

I believe that the technology that exists now has a unique impact on rural communities and that now is the ideal time to use this hi-tech world in which we live to create a new way of working in the arts, a new way of looking at things and a new way of exploring our worlds and viewpoints.

Andy Ross is a Contributing Editor to the Arts Journal.

© Andy Ross, 2003