How can neurodivergent artists market themselves?

 "How can neurodivergent artists market themselves"?

This was a question I was asked during a webinar entitled ‘Neurodivergent artists and practitioners discuss how they work with digital’ last week. The Space, the BBC’s digital agency, had invited me to speak because of my recent commission for ‘Spectrum Sounds’ which will be broadcast later in the year.

Autism does present real challenges in this respect and I found myself giving a fairly downbeat answer. Reflecting on my compositional life, I realised that many of my contemporaries have carved out pretty successful careers, winning frequent commissions, prizes, recording and publishing contracts, broadcasts, and generally being talked about and listened to. My compositional career has been less obviously successful by comparison.

Why might that be? One possibility is that my music is not as good as theirs, but I would counter that argument with the evidence of all the fantastic reviews and comments I get whenever something is performed or broadcast. The most common epithet used to describe my music is “beautiful”, which can’t be too bad, right? I mean no disrespect to my friends and fellow composers now in their 60s when I say that my music stands alongside theirs perfectly well.

No, I think the real problem has been my almost pathological inability to “network” and “self-promote”. Funnily enough, I wrote about the importance of this in my book ‘The Digital Musician’, but I realise that I am lousy at practising what I preach, at least in this department. I’ve never set much store by fame, nor have I ever expected to make any significant money from composing, but I have wanted to communicate and express myself through music. 

I remember when Island Symphony premiered in 1995, a senior figure in the musical world declared it was “brilliant” and “a very important composition”. Then he said: “now what you have to do is to convince everyone else of its importance”. At that point, I realised that I had no hope of doing so. I simply lack the social and networking skills for that kind of endeavour. Island Symphony has a small and enthusiastic fan club, but it remains largely unknown, I think.

This is a facet of autism, I’m afraid. The whole system of marketing and self-promotion depends on one’s ability to get out there and talk to the people that matter. To be a presence on the scene. To indulge in the kind of back-slapping and mutual praise that makes the wheels turn. Performers rely on composers having reputations that will advance their own careers. Composers rely on commissions from organisations that can invest in them and expect a worthwhile return. Record companies and publishing houses are completely driven by marketing, of course. And then there are competitions, which form the life-blood of contemporary music these days. Panels of respected judges select works from a pool. What guides their choices? Some notions of musical excellence, no doubt, but these are surely shaped in no small measure by the reputations that precede people. Even judged anonymously, one can sense a zeitgeist in contemporary music that shapes opinion. If you do not make your presence felt, then you are not part of that zeitgeist. How do you make your presence felt? Through social interaction.

What can autistic people do about this? It requires constant presence. You have to be seen and mingling, so that when opportunities arise people think of you. You have to be visible, both online and offline, on the arts scene. How can you do this if social interaction is a challenge? I honestly don’t know. Some people say: get an agent. But that involves having constant and ongoing social interactions with the agent. Not to mention finding one in the first place. No doubt if you can get the right agent it will be great. But what happens if you get the wrong one? 

I do have something positive to say, though. Times are changing. There seems to be a new willingness to listen or to try to understand or include neurodivergent people. The Arts Council has woken up to this, but I also think wider society is engaging too. When I was young, there were very few people who identified as autistic. Now there are at least 700,000 in the UK. Many of those are working in music and the arts. It is hard to ignore so many people. 

I won the commission for Spectrum Sounds by entering a competition. That is only the third time in my life that I have submitted an application to a call like that. I would not have done so, were it not for some kind people at the Attenborough Arts Centre who pushed me into it. Of course, I am pleased to have won the commission (although still rather anxious about those who applied and were not successful). It has brought me back to composing in ways which are very rewarding for me, following my hearing loss. 

But I wonder what would have happened if the BBC, for example, had taken more of an interest in my work all along. I received several BBC commissions back in the 1980/1990s, but then they fell away. Because of my inability to network, I have never attempted to engage in any of the contemporary music festivals that run annually. Nor have I tried to get involved with performers unless they specifically asked me for something, or I could pay them from some commission money. Once I have a commission, I do hire people and pay well, but the commissions are few and far between. I’ve never had any idea how to approach a publishing house or a record company.

What’s great now is to see some young autistic composers breaking through and supporting one another. I saw it at the Sound Festival in Aberdeen recently, and I am seeing it around the place more and more. I wish them all the best and look forward to seeing the fruits of this societal shift that is going on. The increase in diversity in contemporary music can only be a good thing, in my opinion, and is long overdue.

Some thoughts following the Interdisciplinary Autism Research Festival (IARF2021)

A couple of weeks ago I spent the best part of three days attending the first Interdisciplinary Autism Research Festival. This was a wonderful event, during which I experienced the rare thrill of encountering an entire community of creative people and academics whose brains are wired the same way as mine. 

It would be both invidious and impossible to try to summarise or critique all the presentations. I managed to attend roughly half (there were two parallel tracks) and found myself impressed by the quality throughout. Every presentation had something special to offer and to single anyone out would give the false impression that there were “highlights”. So, I will restrict myself to describing some general thoughts that have arisen since the event. I needed a week or two to process everything in order to arrive at these comments. Even so, they are very much in formation still, and will doubtless evolve further over time. I just wanted to set them out now before the memories fade.

I should say at this point that I am not an autism researcher. My fields are music and computing (and ‘pataphysics, but that’s a whole other discussion). But I am experienced in interdisciplinary research, having directed a large research institute that sat at the intersection of technology, social science and the arts/humanities, and founded interdisciplinary subject areas, most recently Creative Computing. 

The IARF was inspired by the artistically-driven FlowUnlocked project and was part of the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Remembering what really matters’: Nature, Culture and Autism”. The disciplines represented in the festival included (in no particular order): autism research, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, education, health, disability studies, gender studies, philosophy, politics, linguistics, literature and creative arts (e.g. dance, music, visual arts, performance, animation, photography, graphic design, theatre). There was also a healthy sprinkling of activism, consultancy, community engagement and probably several other important areas that I have missed. Such a superfluity of perspectives provided a very healthy intellectual ecosystem for the kind of discoveries of connections and differences that are essential to the emergence of new, hybrid disciplines. The fact that so many of the participants were united by a shared neurotype meant that one could observe the rapid formation of such an interdiscipline in real time.

There are three main types of cross-disciplinary collaboration: multidisciplinary, in which teams of researchers from different disciplines assemble to address a common problem; transdisciplinary, in which researchers exist beyond, across and above all disciplines; and interdisciplinary, in which the methodologies of one discipline are used by another. The IARF fell largely into the last camp, with a great deal of methodological cross-fertilisation between mainly quantitative disciplines such as neuroscience and mainly qualitative ones, such as the creative arts. Indeed, one recurring fault-line for the whole festival was an autistic take on the ancient debate between positivism and phenomenology. As  usual in such discussions, the consensus was in favour of a mixed-methods approach. But what was unusual was the extent of the consequences for the individuals concerned of an inflexible insistence on one or the other. This was really a theme: the courage and determination of individual researchers and/or artists fighting for an autistic vision within an intolerant culture which insists on a methodological approach that constantly reinforces an outdated and harmful set of stereotypes.

The sense of assertiveness and fellow-feeling that this generated was accompanied by some classic signs of the emerging form of a new interdiscipline. A key area for discussion was jargon, which is always a major concern of communities of scholars as they try to establish boundaries for their field. In this case, participants were actively discouraged from using certain words which evoked rejected forms of research. Other terminologies were debated at length. 

So, this is an exciting time for the community of interdisciplinary autistic researchers. The new field is in formation in front of our eyes, and is ours to shape and develop as we see fit. It has great potential, and it is wonderful to see practice-based artistic research being included and treated as equivalent to more traditionally 'academic' disciplines. Bruce Tuckman’s classic model for group formation is “forming - storming - norming - performing’. So far, I have seen nothing but forming. Perhaps this will be one group that resists that rather neurotypical sequence by skipping past the “storming” and “norming” steps and heading straight from “forming” to “performing”. Certainly, the level of direct communication between participants would suggest that this is very possible. 

Designing autistic spaces

One thing that my identification/diagnosis has revealed to me is my mostly unwitting role in designing autistic (or, more precisely, autism-friendly) spaces.

During my academic career, I have often been in the fortunate position of being asked to create spaces. On every occasion, I have been the Director of a Centre or an Institute, or the holder of a large capital grant that has given me the right to dictate how the space should be designed. To give some examples, I have built: two recording studios, a multidisciplinary research lab, a performing arts space, a usability lab, and an enormous institute full of digital technology and experimental equipment. Furthermore, I have frequently been asked to advise on the construction and design of spaces outside the university. Back in 2009, for example, I designed a digital gallery/workspace in a local arts centre, and I have recently been consulted on the design of a laboratory in a science park. 

Now, I should stress that I have no qualifications for building and designing spaces. However, I do have some quite strong opinions about how it should be done and since I was “in charge” in these situations, I took some key decisions. What I now realise is that every one of those decisions arose directly from my autism. Of course, I had no idea at the time what was going on!

In my life, I have always navigated the world by trying to find autism-friendly spaces. So, for example, on arriving in an airport, the first thing I would do is to seek out the multi-faith room. This is generally a quiet space with low-level lighting and low stimulus colours, often wood. It would have a transient population, so there was no real danger of unwanted social interaction (unlike churches, where there is always someone who wants to chat). As a child, at school, I created a “war gaming club”, which had only two members. The reason was that I could then take occupancy of a basement room that was otherwise unused. After a time, it became apparent to the other member that this was really about something other than “war gaming”, so he left. I had a silent room all to myself. There are many more such examples. 

When designing spaces in universities, or elsewhere, my main priority was to control the environment and especially the sound and lighting. All my spaces had the kind of sound-proofing that would be used in noisy industrial spaces. In other words, they were as close to silent as I could get, whether they were recording spaces or not. The colours would be simple - a white, or a pale blue - and uniform. This would extend to the ceiling and even the floor, but with differences in shade or texture making it clear where the boundaries were. This is important for me, because my proprioception requires location points to be able to function. Lighting would be LED and not fluorescent. As with many autistic people, I can see the flickering of fluorescent tubes and find it very disturbing. There would be no irregular patterns, no asymmetrical features, no irrelevant “features”. The spaces needed to be predictable and functionally elegant. They also had to be flexible and have technology built in, including silent air conditioning to remove any smells (again, my autism means that I have always found certain smells intolerable) and moderate the environment to a steady temperature. 

Now, when I look at the BBC’s Sensory Environment Checklist https://bbc.github.io/uxd-cognitive/ I see that these spaces of mine all conformed to those standards. I used them for my personal wellbeing, but what was interesting was how much neurotypical people also liked them. It is often that way: the environmental changes that suit autistic people also suit neurotypicals. Luke Beardon wrote: autism + environment = outcome. I now understand that I have somehow been aware of that formula all my life. 

Most recently, a local media/arts centre started talking to me about extending a space that I had designed back in 2009. This is a digital gallery. It is set off from the main area by a corridor, so many people do not go into it. I created a beautiful autism-friendly environment in complete contrast to the bright, buzzy café nearby. It has a floating floor, silent aircon, LED lights, and buff walls that can easily be repainted. Over the years it has hosted many superb exhibitions and installations and the directors of the centre obviously assumed that its purpose was solely digital art. Little did they, or I, realise that it is also a space for autistic people to retreat to when they arrive at the centre. Interestingly, they are now asking my advice once again about how to extend it. This time they are talking to me not because of my academic position or expertise in digital arts so much as my identity as an autistic man. I’ve been very frank with them about the purpose of the space, how it could attract a new autistic audience, what is required of the extension to make its dual purpose clear. We’ll see what actually emerges, but it is a sign of how far we have come that such things are now being openly discussed and in a most positive way.

Access Rider

 I have recently been asked to complete an Access Rider. This is an easy way to communicate your needs to colleagues, employers or organisations, especially in the arts. It was a very interesting exercise. I thought I would share mine with the wider community, in case people are preparing their own and are looking for examples. There are many other examples, along with a template and instructions here https://weareunlimited.org.uk/creating-your-own-access-rider/

Name

 

Andrew Hugill

 

Intro Paragraph

I am a composer, musicologist, and author. I'm a Professor at the University of Leicester, where I lead the Creative Computing programme. I frequently speak at international conferences and give public lectures.

 

I have three invisible disabilities which affect my work and life: 

1. autism (includes social and sensory issues, but no learning difficulties);

2. severe hearing loss (includes tinnitus and diplacusis);

3. balance disorder (Ménière's Disease).

 

I often find a typical concert or conference situation overwhelming. Foyers and registration areas, communal break-out spaces, anywhere with strip lighting, unclear signage, background music, unstructured social interactions, reflective surfaces, lots of information, and general hustle and bustle, can cause me to shut down or have a vertigo attack.

 

My Access Needs

I have divided my access needs into Essential and Desirable. Essential needs are those that are completely necessary for me to do anything at all. Desirable are those which I can manage without but which could have negative consequences for my spoons. See the supporting information for an explanation of spoon theory.

 

Essential

a.   I do not drive, but will travel on public transport.

b.   My dietary requirements are: gluten-free, low salt, no caffeine.

c.    I require disability support in airports.

d.   I cannot balance in the dark, so some kind of low-level lighting is always necessary.

e.   I need a dimly lit quiet space to retreat to at any venue (doesn't need to be anything special).

f.     I need occasional short breaks to avoid loss of spoons, and I cannot listen to music for long.

g.   Speakers at conferences and events must use microphones, or live captioning.

h.   I must avoid fluorescent lighting, irregular patterns on walls and floors, and spaces with too much information/bustle.

i.      I must avoid floral perfumes, air fresheners, and other artificial smells.

j.     I need captions on videos and in live conferencing.

k.    I follow routines, so need to be able to take lunch at 13.00, for example.

 

Desirable

a.   I prefer natural light and spaces with clear edges/corners.

b.   Please avoid shining lights directly into my eyes, especially when I'm speaking from a podium.

c.    I prefer to see in advance pictures or videos of the places I am going, to reduce anxiety.

d.   I prefer low-arousal room colours (see autism-friendly environments below).

e.   I like to have advance warning of any fire alarms or other unpredictable and loud events.

f.     I prefer there to be no applause (but I can quickly put on noise-cancelling headphones to mitigate this if necessary).

g.   I lip-read, so prefer to be able to see people's faces when videoconferencing.

h.   Free-flowing "networking" events are very difficult for me. I prefer one-to-one or private contact.

 

In general, the social model of disability applies to me very well. The environment disables me more often than my conditions. For that reason, my access needs focus a lot on environmental factors.

 

Emergency Information

In any emergency, please contact [redacted].

In the case of a vertigo attack, please do NOT call an ambulance. Provide a quiet, dimly lit place, with water and a receptacle for vomit, then leave me alone. 

In the case of a shutdown, please communicate simply and clearly. Again, find a quiet, dimly lit place and leave me to recover. 

Supporting Information

 

An article on Spoon Theory: 

https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/

 

An explanation of the social model of disability:

https://weareunlimited.org.uk/resource/the-social-model-of-disability/

 

A description of how to create an autism-friendly environment

https://livingautism.com/create-autism-friendly-environment/