The basics
The part of the website dedicated to this project is the A/artist blog, where you can read about all of our previous work and events.
Contact people for questions are Willem, Fern, Annelies and Anna Lina.
The official email used for A/artist correspondence is a.artist@mediamatic.nl (starting August 2022). You can find the username and login information on the Mediamatic Passwords page.
Lists, Research and Links
The A/artist team has already compiled a lot of information on interesting people and projects. This information is stored in the form of multiple lists in a google drive folder. It's a good idea to familiarise yourself with these lists when you start working on the project. This folder also contains the (very important) participants list with which we keep track of the dates, themes and attendance of our discussion rounds. For access to the folder, ask someone in the team and they will share it with you! [They can also take you through the information and the ongoing activities or those currently in development. It is also very important to be careful with the names we've added to the drive, as some should remain anonymous.]
Organising the monthly events
The project started out with biweekly roundtable events we hosted for autistic makers. With this network as a basis, we have now moved on to a public programme, with one public A/artist presentation on the third Monday of every month.
Here you can find a step by step plan for organising an A/Artist public presentation.
Working on the A/artist blog
The A/artist blog is where event announcements for the events, reports about the events, interviews with artists, role model pages, and other research are published.
Navigating the blog
The starting page of the blog contains a short general description of what the A/artist project is, followed by all the blogposts that have been written for A/artist, from most recent to oldest. To find older articles, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Show more results...“ -- there's a lot more to read there!
At the top of the page, you can also find the other sections: Events, Language, and Role Models. I'll explain what each of those are about, and also about the different kinds of blogposts you can write.
Events
Every event you plan as part of the A/artist program should also be added on the A/artist event page. Once you have added the event page here, also add it to the A/artist blog so it becomes more visible!
a guide to adding events to the website
Language
The 'Language' section of the A/artist blog is currently still under construction and unpublished. This is where we want to collect research about different and sometimes confusing terms and language used while talking about the topic of neurodiversity -- should we say someone is autistic or has autism, is neurodiverse or neurodivergent, what does 'neuroqueer' mean, and many more questions like these will be addressed here.
Role Models
The 'role models' where we publish short articles about neurodivergent makers (broadly speaking) who inspire us because of their lives and work. They can be very famous, somewhat famous, or not very famous; we also want to highlight inspiring members of the A/artist network who have given presentations at Mediamatic before.
This should be a growing collection, so if you want to add a role model post, that's great! You can propose your role model to Willem during the weekly A/artist meeting.
Here you can find the guidelines for writing a role model post.
The kinds of articles you can find on (and write for!) the blog
Reports
Ideally, for every event you organise there should follow a report about how it went and what was discussed. You can check the blog for examples of this. You can either write a short matter-of-fact report and add it to the event page, or you can choose to go for a more complete blog post - this is nice when you had an interesting artist as presenter and would like to say a bit more about it.
In this case, you can create a new page on the website (+article). Your blogpost should still be linked to the event via Keywords or Relation, and should have a similar title, so readers can easily make the connection. Also add a link to your article on the original event page, and if available, add photos that were taken during the event.
Here's a knowledge page on how to write a perfect blogpost!
Also make sure to always send your report to the presenters first (anyone you quote by name) to get their approval before publishing it.
Profiles
Since we often invite new collaborators to present at one of our events, you will have to add new artist profiles to our website.
It's important that presenters have a nice profile on our website if we refer to them by name (and as Actors) in a blog post or report. You can ask the person for photos of themselves and a description, it is usually also okay to copy a description from their website.
Interviews
With the public events, we have also started doing short interviews with the presenting artists beforehand, which we can use as communication material so interested visitors can already get to know them a little bit.
Interviews are a lot of fun, because you get to think about what you want to ask the artists, and most of the time they have really interesting and inspiring answers!
Guidelines for conducting an interviews are here.
Role model pages
Already explained above :)
Research articles
You can also write blogposts about neurodivergence-related topics that interest you, such as language-related questions for the 'Language' section. As a rule, check in with Willem before you start writing, and maybe prepare a little pitch about why your proposed topic is relevant and interesting for the A/artist blog. Other than that, have fun!
Network
This project relies on our network of artists and other contacts, which we are always working on extending and maintaining. If you know someone who has a project or job or other relation that might be relevant or interesting to us, don't hesitate to contact them, and (if applicable) invite them to one of our events! However, do check our various lists on the google drive first - they might already be on there.
When you invite a new contact, also add their contact info to Stager so they can be found again later.