A blog by Kennedy (Kenn) Chew – Live & Digital Assistant

Reflections from Kennedy

My experience working at Live Art Development Agency (LADA) for the past 10 weeks has been really enjoyable. The past arts organisations I’ve worked for have been for the most part very set in their ways, so it was really refreshing and fun to be able to bring in some of my own ideas. I appreciated feeling like my ideas were valued and having the room to implement them. 

I am also very grateful for the immense support while conducting a research project for my internship course. I was curious about what visitors are actually researching in the Live Art Research Collection since it is home to over 8 thousand items. I started to think that there must be thousands of publications or DVDs that go untouched and unused for years on end, which we could shine a spotlight on. Building a community of likeminded artists is such a big part of what LADA does, that finding popular topics of research and creating an event centered around it would bring artists together in a way that we know would interest them. The only problem was, we don’t really know what our visitors are even researching. I worked on creating a visitor booking form and survey to find out what our community has been interested in recently. It’s been so interesting to read about what our community is creating and which items from our collection are being enjoyed. 

Thinking about user experience has been something new to me during my placement here at LADA as well. Creating and designing welcome guides, maps, and info packages has taught me a lot about the small details that can make visitor experience more welcoming and less overwhelming.  

LADA is such a valuable and unique resource for artists. As an artist myself, it’s been really fun looking at items in the collection as I’m reshelving and cataloguing, and have gotten the chance to look at a lot of really cool art while completing various tasks. One of the items from the collection that has really stuck with me is Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh, which is a great LADA publication. I also discovered works by the vacuum cleaner and specifically recommend checking out cleaning up after capitalism. The piece consists of 8 short fun activist art videos! 

I will remember my time at LADA very fondly, and can’t wait to return in the future.