60 Years in 60 Poems

• Matthew de Ville - Digital Marketing Manager, Faber and Faber

June 18th, 2012

Launched to coincide with the Diamond Jubilee, ‘60 Years in 60 Poems’ lifts the poems off the pages of Carol Ann Duffy’s bestselling anthology Jubilee Lines and interprets them using actors’ recordings, sound-based generative design and archive film footage to create an exciting new way to enjoy poetry. With a poem for each year of the Queen’s reign, Jubilee Lines offers both a unique portrayal of the times in which we have lived and an essential portrait of today.

‘60 Years in 60 Poems’ was commissioned for The Space, the new free and on-demand digital platform (available via the internet, smartphones, tablets and some smart TVs) launched in May for a six-month trial period by the Arts Council in partnership with the BBC. It’s a nationwide initiative aimed at building digital skills – editorial, curatorial, technical etc – and capacity across the Arts sector, featuring a broad range of organisations in the UK spanning many disciplines.

Already The Space has featured gems from the BFI Archive (first films from the likes of Ridley Scott and Stephen Frears), the hugely ambitious Globe to Globe Shakespeare season, weekly instalments digitally recreating John Peel’s Record Collection, a retracing of Arthur Seaton’s footsteps in his Nottingham stomping ground, Will Self tackling Kafka and reinventing the literary essay, Penny Woolcock’s stunning, British Sea Power-scored film ‘From the Sea to the Land Beyond’ for the Sheffield Doc Fest … the list keeps growing, but you have until the end of October to take it all in. It’s a very exciting project for Faber to be a part of, and it’s encouraging to see poetry taking its place amongst it all and not feeling in any way out of place.

Organisations were encouraged to experiment and to be bold – to explore beyond the constraints usually imposed on them. In some cases the Arts Council’s funding enabled ambitious, already planned projects to have lift off. In other cases like ours, it meant being able to imagine and develop something completely from scratch. So here was a chance to work with people we wouldn’t normally work with (producers, interactive designers, archivists, sound engineers, film editors etc), and learn something along the way.
Collaboration is evident in all areas of The Space – from the alliance of the Arts Council and the BBC, to individual organisations working with technical partners, bringing their vision to define proposals. At the very outset Faber teamed up with Somethin’ Else, the award-winning content design company and specialists in interactive design. Literary Platform readers will be familiar already with their BAFTA-nominated The Nightjar, and Richard Dawkins’ The Magic of Reality on iPad app for Random House – and Paul Bennun is a speaker at the next FutureBook Innovation Workshop.
Full piece here.