Wed 09/12/2015 22:53

Hello,

Meeting Thursday 14th Jan @1pm J02 to discuss the 'Criteria

& Discuss Proposals for the Embassy'. Bring your risky ideas.

See you there.

Tue 12/01/2016 13:40 PerhaPs we all meeT for an hour before hand and PeoPle (who have ideas) can PresenT. so we can discuss The ideas and concePTs before The meeTing. ThaT way if There are any issues ThaT we have To discuss or Problems or disagreemenTs iT means ThaT we have a uniTed fronT To PresenT To embassy. also maybe noT everyone needs To have an idea, ThaT is ok! There are oTher ways To conTribuTe, buT if you have an idea you should PresenT iT.

so leT's meeT @1Pm in ProjecT sPace?

Sun 17/01/2016 21:39 PG Meeting Wed 13 Jan 2016: The Embassy: Record of discussions Ideas/ Pitches Timescales for project:11th March – set up14th – 25th March (opening 3 weekends)22nd March – Group Crits

Thu 28/01/2016 11:25 I have a tutorial at 11:30 but will be with you at 12:15ish.

Mon 08/02/2016 09:51 Good morn-ing every-body,

did we in-vite the embassy people to come to ECA?Do we know if the time slot is the same (2-4)?Best

Mon 08/02/2016 22:35 --Update Embassy--

Hello everyone,

We will meet at 2pm, J03. See you all then.

26/02/2016 15:32

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to send you an email to let you know that we will be meeting next Thursday, 10am room TBD to go over Embassy.

If you could save the date and time that would be great!

Thu 03/03/2016 15:13

,Hello everyone

Embassy pres- entation will at

4.15pm, Hunter .Lecture Theatre

.See you all there

ThanksSun 13/03/2016 20:03 WANTED VOLUNTEERS

Sun 06/03/2016 15:44

Hey everyone,Thanks to those of you who made it to the presentation on Thursday. For those of you interested, please submit your proposals or a short description of how you may see yourself getting involved to the following email: info.hcmltd@gmail.com

Remember that there are two strands of potential involvement: 1. Practical support (i.e.: technical, logistical such as research of sponsors, merchandise, distribution, advertising, etc) 2. Performative roles - This will be divided into roles that already exist for the purpose of the launch (i.e.: servers, security, photographers...) and roles which you yourselves may develop as proposals. The latter may well become part of the launch event (before/during) or it may be part of what we are referring to as the "auditioning period"; in this case proposals will be documented and form part of the overall body of work of the project.

Any questions please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Best

Meeting to DeciDe When to have a Meeting,

11@ J05 10

Nic

ol G

uerr

a

Ok, I already knew that work-ing in group is difficult...

What I didn’t know is how much time you can waist trying to be an active part of a project that, in the end, doesn’t belong to you any more!At the beginning we all were en-ergetic and ready to propose ideas about the Embassy project; but, you know, if 30 people are talk-ing at the same time you cannot distinguish between bullshit and great ideas! I think problems have been, mainly, organisational. Thousands of e-mails to decide when to have a meeting, people talking for 30 minutes just repeat-ing what it had been just said, people not coming at the meetings and then complaining about the decisions taken, private meeting and exclusion of a big part of the group.This project has been an energy sucker, this for sure!After our (the Practice students) exclusion from the final phase, everyone seemed more relaxed and most of us just stopped caring about the project.After Theory students presented the project less then one month be-fore the event, we have been asked to help with practice and manual labour. I think most of us felt a bit exploited: working in no time and without any decision-making power!At least I felt a bit like this while a was shooting and editing the HCM promotional video.I ended up serving HCM special drink at the HCM launch, pour-ing gin continuously in my glass, walking home drunk and feeling a zombie the day after.

What’s HCM?!Hyper Contemporary marketing is a marketing company special-ized in creating new audiences in contemporary art. Clients are museums, galleries or Artists Run Initiatives. The marketing target, new groups of audience, is thought as the main contributor to the client’s public and financial success. HCM approaches this task by identifying the group of audienc-es desired, examining their envi-ronment and creating a specific strategy to bring the new group of audience to the institution.An important element of HCM is the appropriation of the hype ele-ment of mass culture and virtual world. By using aesthetic trends they reduce the separation be-tween mass culture and art world, creating general consensus.

Hyper Contemporary Marketing (HCM Ltd) We are excited to announce our launch party on Friday the 25th of March at EMBASSY Gal-

lery, Edinburgh.

We, HCM Ltd, are an artist-run collective who operate as a company that address and

resolve client needs with a focus on creat-ing new audiences for the contemporary art

world. We will be showcasing our unique busi-ness during a memorable event on Friday the

25th of March.

The launch party will be held at EMBASSY Gal-lery 10B Broughton St Ln, Edinburgh EH1 3LY

Free drinks. Doors open at 8pm.

Featuring DJ: Ni-kü

Make sure to u r there for special vibes at 9pm. We invite all new (and existing) audiences to

our launch event.

“We’ll dance all night to the best show ever” - Harry Styles “PARTYYYY!” - Adore Delano,

RuPaul’s Drag Race

HCM launch 2016, Ana Kapodistra for HCM

From 1998 to 2008, worldwide auction sale of contemporary art increased from $48 million to over $1.3 billion, reaching 15.9% of the global fine art trade.

(sourch: Noah Horowitz, The Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, Princeton University Press,

Princeton, 2011)

According to Simon Ford and Anthony Davies culture became strategically linked to national inward investment since the 1990s. The increase of Governments' schemes to improve culture is a strategic move to consolidate the national position in the global financial market. Indeed, promoting national culture generates higher incomes in terms of tourism and international trade. Consequentially, this results in a position of prestige which increase the financial power of the country within the global market. The exponential growth of the market and the understanding of artworks as analogous to Capital goods results in the art infrastructure in forms of Biennals, Art fairs, commercial galleries and showrooms. The interdependence of these two ecosystems influences art practices by encouraging the creation of commercially attuned works. Many artists, such as Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Damien Hirst, have embraced business models, creating actual business enterprises. For instance, Hirst has his own publishing house, clothing line, restaurants; Koons has a ninety employees studio factory in Manhattan and Murakami runs a corporation in Tokyo and Queens. In these cases, the process of making money has become the main medium of art. The artist-brand winks at the consumers' desire for individuality and distinction but, on

the other hand, it uniforms them under the brand-identity.Business Art adopts the aesthetic of mass culture to create universally pleasant works which do not require a specific education or a specific cultural background to be appreciated and consumed. This process is strictly related to a commodity culture very present in contemporary society. Because of the familiarity with the aesthetic, audiences are not alienated from the artwork, on the contrary, the public recognizes in it its own life and taste. The use of aesthetic trends within the art world makes the tension between fine art and mass culture collapsing. There is, indeed, a convergence of high and low, rare and mass, expensive and cheap, thus a convergence of art and business.

“We are at a point where success

in market terms justifies and validates

anything, replacing all the theories.[...]”

the map and the territoy- michel houellebecq

The lost of interest in the physicality of the work of art during the 60's and the 70's, was sign of the anxiety of the power of market values to distort the aesthetic value (with this term I refer to the value thought as intrinsic to the artwork). Conceptual Art, Land Art, Happening, Body Art, Performance and, generally, Post-Aesthetic Art are mostly considered to be a strategic subversion of the commodification of art objects. However, the negation of the physical object itself is not automatically a challenge for the market. Indeed, dealers have figured

What if I told you that audiences for the arts has grown 2000% in the past four decades? Take for example, galleries specializing in the sale of Contemporary Art, they’ve gone from under 30 galleries in the UK in the 1970s to over 5000 to date. Museums have become tourists attractions to the point that travelling agencies market their cities by the number of star-archi-tect designed museums, like Frank Ghery’s Guggenheim, the Louvre franchise in Abu Dhabi or Tate’s recent expansion from the hands of Olympic extraordinaire Herzog and De Meuron - they cater to both the common traveller and the private jet-set-ter. Even governments have taken the initiative to harness the cultural capital inherent in these institutions, developing schemes to develop art for everybody whilst at the same time profiting from the industry’s rapid global expansion. it is within this context that we, as Hyper Contemporary Marketing, have identified an opportunity..a chance to take things further (hand thrusting gesture) and to really exert our influence on existing forces at play and to bring it all to a whole new level of realization. Let us start from the beginning. Audiences have been a hot topic of discussion in the art-world since PoMo (Postmodernism) They constitute a dialogue that has circled the industry with shifting conclusions.Institutions, artists and curators are constantly addressing the existence of an other with whom he/she should or should not have a relationship with.It is in the process of acknowledgement, negotiation and constant flux between separation and proximity that the values of the audience development ideology are constantly being formed and redefined. Now..audiences shifted from being an irrelevant other, to becoming acknowledged and ‘transformed’ by art to then being seen as a key element in the art world’s ecosystem. Our universe just keeps on growing and expanding - but you, you are our stars, you are the stars in our sky encompassing the light that inhabits the divine. Each audience collective is considered a profitable and significant contributor to the institution’s financial and public success.It is through these lines of life that we, HCM, recover the knowledge which is hidden within our bodies and earth; it raises us to a new state of consciousness. Hyper Contemporary Marketing aims to reach even more people by broadening you, the existing audience group, and by creat-ing new ones. Sourcing data from information networks, we apply research from narrow fields of inquiry to a generalised experience that resembles and reflects the illegibility of the hyperreal consciousness of info-capitalism. Implementing our cutting edge research and practice methodology we’ve developed a three pronged approach: Step one, Product development - the client, perhaps an international museum, a gallery, an art non-profit, even Artist Run Initiatives, identifies what group of audiences they want or have to create. Maybe it’s middle-aged men. Recently re-settled refugees.Teenage girls, Newtown and stockbridge and dean village residents Or MP’s. whoever they are, they need them, they want them - we’ll give it to them. Step two - Market penetration (text that shows on screen) - once we know what our client wants and needs, we satisfy them by inserting ourselves into their desired audiences environment, deepening our understanding of such groups which allows us to protect and target them effectively. And that’s not even the best part. Step three, implementing our S-M-A-R-T objectives we tailor a strategy for action that addresses the particular audience group,Essentially, fulfilling our client’s desires and goals. This is what makes HCM a company that will revolutionise the way we understand the task of creating new audiences. WE ARE EFFECTIVE,WE ARE RUTHLESS AND WE ARE INDISCRIMINATE. We will do anything, for anyone, anytime; (text on screen: prices and terms and conditions apply).As a company that deals with audiences it would be foolish for us to ignore that the world is dominated by the rule of mass culture. And, while it is true that the art scene is growing with record number crowds, there is an overall erosion of the museum audi-ence. Mass culture, broadly defined as hollywood, television and Netflix, have grown with prominence and with great speed, saturat-ing the media landscape and creating a divergence with the art market. We want to appropriate this hype element of mass culture and incorporate it as one of the ethos of HCM;Providing the now. This means that we’re putting the internet to work for us. Think of it as a super curator that can see more than ordinary humans and artists. By scanning, identifying and extracting the world of culture online, HCM generates data that speculates on aesthetic trends that can be used to amalgamate a consensus for a generalised audience. With HCM future audiences will be closer than ever before. And at the end of the day that is what we all want… For institutions to be bigger, greater and richer than ever before. Join us Join us in this revolution. HCM Providing the now.

Script of the HCM promotional video

out solutions to sell dematerialised art; for instance in form of performance's documentation and instructions . The shift of art as product/object to art as idea corresponds to the change in the economy in the late 60's. Indeed, since that period, immaterial and invisible goods such as services,informations and experiences have become a new form of profit.

“[...]the radicality, or the intelligence,

of such art does not merely lie in its non-

object status;[...] i would argue that of greater significance

is the fact that many works from the 60's and 70's and later

[…] attempt to install alternative

models of exchange that counter,

complicate or parody the dominant

market- and profit-based system of

exchange.”

Miwon Kwon, Exchange Rate: On Obligation and Reciprocity in Some Art of the 1960s and After; 2003

The exchanges we are talking about here are not monetary exchange, but social exchanges that mainly deal with the interaction and the participation of the audience. relational aestHetiCs is a term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in the 90's to describe the tendency to make art based on human relations.One of many examples is Yves Klein's event called The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilzed Pictorial Sensibility, The Void (1958). Klein showed an empty gallery painted in white; blue cocktails where served. He staged an elaborate entrance procedure for the opening. The presence of guards and people queuing to gain admittance generated excitement and sense of exclusiveness.

tHe launCH of HCm was st ruct ured in t he same way. The massive advertisement, the queue outside, the fancy purple cocktails, photographers, dancers and the launch as a just one night party created exclusiveness and excitement. myth around the HCM company.The company is made of nothing more than the myth created around it: advertisement, Facebook and Instagram pages, promotional video, gadgets and promises about financial

and public success of contemporary art institutions. One of the aims of HCM, as it has been for Participatory Art since the late '50s, was to create an environment in which people come together, share time and engage activities. Therefore, the meaning of the artwork/event was created just when the audience was present.In the HCM launch case the activities to engage with were pleasant and entertaining. How could we measure the success of this project? Have we brought new audiences to the contemporary art?The answer is no, however we could measure the success of this project by the happiness of audience. After all, a party with free drinks, music, visuals and dancing can not be anything else but successful. Giving people what they want, in terms of consumption and entertainment, is an easy (and, I don't deny, amusing) way to “buy” people consent and happiness.

HCM Instagram page, 2016

ReFeRenceS:-Noah Horowitz, The Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, Princeton Univer-sity Press, Princeton, 2011;

-Natasha Degen, The Market, Documents of Contemporary Art, London, Whitechapel Galley; MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2013;

-Miwon Kwon, Exchange Rate: On Obligation and Reciprocity in Some Art of the 1960’s and After, 2003;Hal Foster, The Medium is the Market, 2008;

-Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, 2011;

-Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Les Presse Du Reel, Paris, 1998;

-Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, Routledge, 1995;

-www.e-flux.com/announcements/invisible-art-about-the-unseen-at-hayward-gallery-southbank-centre/

-William Davies, The Happiness Industry, How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, Verso, London, 2015

Mon 11/01/2016 12:04,Hi EvEryonE

!Happy nEw yEar Has anyonE found out

wHat tiME tHE first EMbassy sEssion 1 is on wEdnEsday

?plEasE

Tue 12/01/2016 14:58 Sure, see you then - J02 again? If several people have strong feelings about taking forward any one of the ideas from the last meeting its also a start. We can make a success of any idea really.

Tue 12/01/2016 15:15 1 person likes thislet's keep the hour tomorrow pre embassy focused on the presenta-tions (if time is short). we could still keep the meeting on thursday to further unpack, discuss, organise, how we move forward, if we feel it is necessary. terri had a really good structure that we could perhaps use, smaller groups would definitely be more productive.

Fri 15/01/2016 10:35 1 person likes thisWhen shall we have the next group meeting? I'm thinking next Wednesday (20th January)? Also if anyone would like to float new ideas but isn't confident in speaking in front of large groups feel free to tell me and I will bring them up.

Fri 15/01/2016 12:28 Sounds good, I will email out the notes from the last session at the weekend.Is it possible to meet in the morning? 11?Thanks

Fri 15/01/2016 14:19 Hi all,Wednesday 11am sounds good and hopefully most people can make it?

Fri 15/01/2016 17:04 Hi. I'm sorry I can't make that , :-( I have work then. But maybe if we moved it to later in the day? Like after 3? But if not don't worry.

Sun 17/01/2016 20:12 3pm on Wednesday 20th in J.02? Sun 17/01/2016 20:27 Apologies wont be able to make 3pm, notes coming out shortly and can catch up on discussions after Wednesday.Cheers

Sun 17/01/2016 21:05 I'm really sorry, I won't be able to make it at 3pm on Wednesday. I'll be working every Wednesday afternoon, until March.

Sun 17/01/2016 21:07 1 person likes thisHi all, I can't make 3pm either. If most people can do it then no worries but if it looks like morning might be best then should we say 11am?

Sun 17/01/2016 22:21 Okay let's meet at 11am and if anyone can't make it they can just let me know if there was anything they wanted to say and then we'll circulate notes from the meeting anyway so it should be fine.

Tue 26/01/2016 21:21

Hiya,

Are others meeting before going

over to the Gallery?thu 28/01/2016 09:45 sHey!

I have informed John we will meet on Monday when everyone is around to finalise ideas and will then let embassy know what these are. Shall we meet over lunch @12 on Monday????? It might be good to come to the meeting with suggestions that have already happened in smaller groups. Self-organise. Theme audience..

Thu 28/01/2016 16:29 John has confirmed to Jake that Monday is our dead-line.@12 J02 for everyone?

Wed 03/02/2016 11:26

Hi,

We have the use of room H01 (down-

stairs, opposite project space)

between 1pm and 3pm.

Wed 03/02/2016 11:47 I'm sorry, I can't attend at 13.30. I have to work. I will be in next meeting for sure.

Thu 04/02/2016 16:40 hello again everyone,

i’m getting in touch because it has become apparent that we weren’t very clear about the structure of the concept for embassy project. This email hopes to make that more clear in vision of tomorrow’s meeting being a productive one.