Join Alyssa as she sits down with Sarika Sanyal, Program Director of Future Tenant, to follow up on Future Tenant’s experimental programming, how they shifted in-person programming to digital platforms, and their adjustment to remote work as an organization supporting local artists and partners in the arts.

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Alyssa: Hello AMT Lab listeners, and welcome to an interview by the Arts Management and Technology Lab. My name is Alyssa and I am the Podcast Producer. In this episode, I sit down with Sarika Sanyal, the Program Director of Future Tenant, whom we previously interviewed back in the fall to talk about Future Tenant’s experimental programming. Today we will discuss the results of their programming, including their adaptability to remote programming. Please note that we're recording this episode as of May 8, 2020, during the Coronavirus pandemic. We're practicing social distancing by recording over Zencastr. Therefore, you may hear differences in the audio quality, particularly as we switch from speaker to speaker. We hope you enjoy this episode brought to you by AMT Lab.

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Alyssa: All right, I am here today once again with Sarika where we are Zencastr conferencing calling from Pittsburgh to California. Thank you once again for joining us for another conversation today.

Sarika: Thanks so much, Alyssa. It's really great to be continuing this conversation now.

Alyssa: Absolutely. So today we have a particularly special episode planned. Now, the last time we spoke we talked about Future Tenant 2.0, the student run organization that provides a laboratory setting for artists, arts managers, and audiences to explore the limits of the creative expression of presentation and interpretation of various art forms. We also spoke about a few experimental projects, particularly with The Children's Museum (Pittsburgh, PA) that Future Tenant was planning. Our original plan for today was to go over these results of this programming in another mini-sode, but while we'll still be discussing this topic today, there is now much more to Future Tenant’s research and that is no other than the recent pandemic that has affected many arts organizations and forced many of us to work remotely. Therefore, we will be discussing the results of Future Tenant’s research today, but we're also going to take a moment to evaluate the technology adoption that Future Tenant worked on to adjust to remote programming.

So, first and foremost, congratulations to you and to the staff of Future Tenant for undertaking such an adjustment so quickly, I really can't imagine that it must have been so easy.

Sarika: Yeah, thanks so much Alyssa. The team definitely had to adjust pretty quickly, just like the rest of the world during this time. When we first got the news that we would be going remote all across the board, I think the team was generally feeling pretty bummed out because we had so much planned for the spring. But we were quickly able to turn this into an opportunity to put much of our pilot testing over the past year to work through digital engagement to continue working with the artists we had already committed to.

Alyssa: Absolutely, and it's always sad when, um,  you're not able to continue forward with programming, but it's always a good opportunity and it shows just how flexible the organization is to quickly, um, keep working with the artists and quickly adapt as much as possible. So, when we previously discussed some of the programming of Future Tenant and The Children's Museum, we spoke about the creation of pop-up programming with different organizations around the community. This exhibition has since concluded, but a large majority of the remainder of Future Tenant’s work has either had to be canceled or adopted into this digital format, as you've mentioned before. Would you be willing to describe this adoption process in detail?

Sarika: Yeah, of course. So, when the pandemic started, we were well into planning our spring programming, as I mentioned. We had started the year with planning and supporting the College of Fine Arts (CMU) MFA student exhibitions at Platform, which is the new student and faculty run space in the former Pittsburgh Filmmakers building and were also selecting artists for the Pittsburgh International Airport transit murals, where we went through a request for proposals for this particular project and those-, those murals were already installed in January. And during all of this, we were also planning our first pilot program with a local artist by the name of Gil Teixeira, which took place in February. So that was our first pop-up program at The Museum Lab at Children's Museum. So, as you can see, we were really picking up the momentum in our programming and working with our various partners through this pilot year. And we had been well in the works of planning the final MFA exhibition at Platform, which would have taken place at the end of March with a group of artists and we had also been designing a pop-up workshop program with a local artist for The Museum Lab, which would have taken place in April. And much of the planning for that final program was based off of our design thinking and STEAM findings from earlier in the year, which was what we had discussed in the previous mini-sode.

And so, in order to pivot to online engagement, we really took a moment to revisit our design thinking findings that we found to be the most successful and implemented these into our digital program. And we wanted to make sure what we did was educational, approachable, and visual and those were some of the findings from our STEAM research. So, we wanted to make sure we were still keeping that in mind and those were some of the elements of the-, of digital programming that we had been thinking about starting this year to test out how our digital platforms could also support artists and our partners.

So, one of the things that came out of this was the Artist Spotlight series and that sort of became our main focus wh-, so we would invite artists who we worked with throughout the year, through our partnerships and those that we were supposed to work with later this spring, to share more about their work through a Q&A interview about their practice. And in doing this, you know, we wanted to be very mindful of everyone's time and ways of working right now and because everyone, you know, was really still adjusting and so, for some of the artists, we simply did an interview via email and with others, we did a virtual studio visit with the team, which turned out to be really fun, and, you know, just as informational and engaging as it would be in person. And that was the first time I had been, I had done something like that, so that was a really fun moment. And, you know, although the audience for the STEAM research-based programming was youth ages 10 and up, we were able to sort of repurpose our research in other ways and like most institutions, we had to really reconsider the purpose of our digital platform and create this virtual connection between the artists and organizations we worked with throughout the year. So, the Artist Spotlight series really became a way to support that.

Alyssa: Absolutely. And it sounds like not only were you successful in this repurposing, but also the fact that you guys had a lot of fun with it really speaks to the work that Future Tenant has done.

Sarika: Yeah, definitely. Not to mention, that’s so much a part of building our relationships, right?

Alyssa: Of course, yeah. So, could you tell us about your methods for evaluating your completed and new programs?

Sarika: Yeah, of course. So, we used a combination of qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods and this was something we had always planned on doing. The only difference now was that the programs changed. So, for our programming with Museum Lab, we were really only t-, we were only able to put on one pop-up program, which was based on our design thinking approach and that was the program with the artist Gil that I mentioned before. Um, he is a local artist who works in art and tech through sound. So, he wanted to explore the music composition potential of people's digital habits, um, and what our relation with digital technology sounds like. So, it was a really fun program where audiences used their phones to connect to a program the artist created where your phone essentially turns into your instrument and he created rules for when people would play that instrument based on daily habits. So, by the end it sort of creates this like communal musical sound. And for this, so we did shift our evaluation a bit based on digital versus in-person programming. So, for example, with this program I just talked about, we focused on quantitative elements, such as the number of people who participated and how long the program lasted, but we also noted a lot of qualitative things like how the audience behavior changed through each iteration of the program. We started with a set of questions that we established with the Museum Lab managers, and some of these questions, just to give you an idea, were things like, how long did visitors engage with the experience, were there other events going on in the space, was the program easy to follow and understand, did the artists have all of the resources needed to finish the program, what types of visitors engaged with the program, and how is this program relevant to the Museum Lab? And that was just a little sample, there were a lot more, but I won't go into that.

Once the program was over, we met as a team to discuss our individual observations, then we met with the Museum Lab team to gain more feedback from them. And we gathered all of this information and sort of bucket-, bucketed them into separate findings about the program, which also became recommendations for the future. So, some of these recommendations included considering the length of the program to continuously engage audiences, thinking about the relevance of the program to that particular audience, given you know, the time of the year, or what day it is, what other things are going on in that space, and trying to gain a better understanding of the space itself so that the team can further engage visitors at the Museum Lab. With our new online digital engagement, we are working through a more quantitative based approach, you know, through the website and social and our newsletter and so, we're also evaluating the process for how we put on a digital program and not just the program itself. So, some of those quantitative elements have to do directly with, you know, click throughs, and things like that, but by focusing on the process, um, we can really tell, you know, that can also measure the success of the programs. So, for the Artist Spotlight series, we spent a lot of time writing out the concept and what each step of managing this project would look like and who the point person would be and the quality of the output overall. So, all of that is just as important as the product itself.

Alyssa: Of course. So, it's a lot of, uh, quick thinking on your feet to re-measure a lot of these programs and there certainly are quite a few takeaways. Based on these evaluation results; however, would you consider all of your programming successful or perhaps unsuccessful, in a way?

Sarika: Yeah. So, well, you know, when we set out for the year, we really had the mindset that this is a pilot year, which gives us an opportunity to test a variety of programs and really understand how we as arts managers can continuously support the arts community in Pittsburgh through these different formats. A few of our key goals for the year included building and strengthening relationships with community partners, raising the visibility of Future Tenant through digital engagement, establishing best practices and operations for pop-up programming, and gaining hands on experiences within different types of organizations and connecting with local artists. So, that sort of gives you an idea of what we're measuring our success off of. And I would say that, yes, we have reached the majority of our goals this year and the team has especially been able to connect more intimately with the organizations we worked with, especially given everything that's going on right now, and with the artists, which has been really, really amazing to see. And over the year, we've gained first hand experiences in forming, you know, brand new relationships, and deepening our partnerships and this all, of course, is supported by our, by our evaluation findings, both qualitative and quantitative and the many, many group discussions we've had. Um, and the evaluation process itself has shown us the areas where we need to grow as arts managers and really-, the really great thing about Future Tenant is that we get to take risks, and challenge ourselves, and then learn along the way. And I think, you know, we all really agree that we have created a pretty solid foundation for the upcoming year in continuing this model.

Alyssa: Excellent. Well, congratulations to you and to the Future Tenant team and to the artists on this accomplishment.

Sarika: Yeah, thank you.

Alyssa: What were you most proud of in this process?

Sarika: So, one of our main goals this-, as a team this year was to really gain an understanding of the landscape of arts organi-, organizations and artists in Pittsburgh and we are all really proud of being able to collaborate with a diverse partner organizations we had this year and the artists. You know, I sort of mentioned developing these relationships that, you know, they were non-existent before, um, with those particular people and those organizations, and using our platform to support them, and we've created long lasting relationships, and, you know, especially with our partner organizations by understanding the different avenues of sharing art with the community. And because we're a student run organization, we were really able to utilize what we learned in classes right away in real time, through the work we were doing at Future Tenant. So, I'm super proud of us as a team that we created an impact with artists and organizations and that we actually made it all happen, you know. So, it was fun to really see like all that planning you're doing and then finally be able to see it come to fruition.

Alyssa: Oh my goodness, yes. It's so satisfying whenever it happens, um, and when it happens, like, so successfully too. Um, you know, looking back on everything with this project, from pre COVID-19 to the current times that we’re in, is there anything that you wish you can go back and change, other than the obvious pandemic that we're in right now?

Sarika: Yeah, well, you know, because we're in this pilot phase, I think, you know, testing out different pilot programs definitely comes with its challenges. There were a lot of moments where we really had to be patient and flexible, because the process for each program and each partner was so different. So, in a way, there were moments in the, on the logistics side of the programs that I wish went differently, but they also became learning moments for us. And, an, an important part of our findings this year as a team was that we wished we had more time to really become more involved with our partners. So, we were really an organization on the periphery of each of our partner organizations, so while we get more access to the spaces and people, I think it would have been overall beneficial to get even more into the organization, which could take on different forms like attending more events, meeting more people on the management side, etc. Um, and one of the other things that I wish would have gone differently would have been really finding a way to promote what we were doing within the greater community in Pittsburgh. The CMU community and our partners, obviously, were aware of what Future Tenant was doing, but I think it would have been nice to share out to the larger community, but I also understand that building that relationship with the larger community takes a much, much longer time and that's something that I hope Future Tenant is able to continue working towards.

Alyssa: Mhmm, of course, yes. Okay, so Future Tenant is one of the numerous organizations that adapted to remote work and to remote arts, and something that I'm personally curious about is if these organizations who adopted so quickly to this new technology will now maintain it, either as an optional work style or as part of their programming. Actually, I just read a small article today, um, from LinkedIn that mentions that a lot of these organizations who are refusing to adopt may not last so long and as you mentioned in the last fall's mini-sode, part of Future Tenant 2.0.’s goal was to prep for the digital age of arts and prepare it for the audience's tomorrow. So, that all being said, does Future Tenant have any plans to keep experimenting with this tech and remote adoption or maintain it in some way?

Sarika: Yes, we definitely are planning to continue adapting to the digital age of the arts and, you know, it's well in the works all around us right now, so in a way, it, you know, really makes the most sense. In terms of the workspace that, that we all worked in, since we don't have a physical location, we had pretty much been working remotely this whole time, um, starting out the year, and we would have weekly in-person meetings, and then of course, in-person meetings with our partners, but there was a lot going on through email communication and because we're a small team, this, all of this was a pretty seamless way of working for us. And on the programming side, we've been exploring how we might expand our digital platform and what this may look like with each partner moving forward. So, thinking about how can we create a tone of voice through our digital platforms that is applicable to our partners and in parallel with them, while still, you know, remaining our, our own entity voice? The current pandemic has really brought up a lot in terms of accessibility in the arts across the field and we want to continue exploring this because this model is really about continuously supporting the arts community, and cultivating those new perspectives within that community, through this thriving network of artists and arts leaders, and doing this digitally is just as important to us as in-person engagement.

Alyssa: Absolutely. And that's very important work because not everybody is always able to get out to the museum for any reason, whether it's a matter of transportation, or it's a matter of cost barriers, or other sorts of barriers that are out there. So, you know, like this could, this does have the potential to become very big as we move into a world post COVID-19 but at the same time, like, it's mainly about accomplishing the mission.

Sarika: Right, exactly.

Alyssa: All right. Well, thank you once again, Sarika. It’s been a lot of fun learning from you, and from Future Tenant, and it's been interesting to hear about how your group has adapted.

Sarika: Thank you so much, Alyssa. I really appreciate you being able to share, you know, more about Future Tenant through AMT Lab.

Alyssa: Absolutely, yes. For anybody who is interested in learning more about Future Tenant, please check out their website at future tenant.org. That's FU, TU, RE, TE, NA, NT, .org. Additionally, the first part of this episode with Future Tenant takes place in December 23, 2019 in the recording from last fall.

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Thanks for listening to the Arts Management and Technology Lab Podcast Series. You can read more on the intersection between the Arts and Technology at www.amt-lab.org, or you can listen to more interviews in discussions in our Podcast Series on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or Stitcher. Thank you for joining us.

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