‘Could you give this guy Simon a ring?’ I was asked by Adam Gee, Commissioning Editor for Channel 4’s New Media department and responsible for commissioning this website. ‘He may not know what you’re talking about’, he added. Well, so far that made two of us.

I found out from Adam that Simon Rowe is a photographer who was about to start running a weekly mobile phone and digital camera workshop at London’s Roundhouse. It was true, this sounded like an ideal opportunity to link up and Adam had been alerted to it after a meeting with someone at the Roundhouse.

I called Simon on his mobile and true enough, he hadn’t yet been told that I may be contacting him, so we had a long chat about what each of us was doing.

I went to see Simon and his group of North London teenagers (all boys) in one of the studio rooms at the newly refurbished Roundhouse, looking better than I’d ever seen it over its many uses and temporary reincarnations in recent years. When I was introduced as coming ‘from Channel 4’, the immediate reaction was ‘Can you get me a job?’ I had to tell them I was freelance and had no sway over personnel matters at the Channel. That done, I introduced the Big Art website in general and the Big Art Mob pages in particular. Something I’ve noticed before whilst talking to groups of this age group, all sat in front of computers linked to the internet, happened again and by the time I’d gone through the site on the projected screen at the front of the room they had all found it themselves and some had already signed up!

Armed with their own phones and cheap digital cameras supplied by the Roundhouse they were ready to go out and capture images of the art in their area and add them to the Big Art map when I left.

Watch out for postings from Camden on the Big Art Mob pages at www.channel4.com/bigartmob


Nick Pearson
Big Art Project website manager