My RANperience: Fun on SNS, More Fun in the Real Place
Written by: M.A.W. Gumelar
Did you go to Roppongi Art Night 2019? Or have you been there in the previous years? I got a precious internship opportunity at Keio University Art Center, and this year we collaborated with Roppongi Art Night 2019 operated by a team organized by Roppongi Art Night Executive Committee.
The internship began with a workshop on system and design thinking which taught us a tool called 2x2 Matrix for thinking-out-of-the-box. In my own words, I would say that the tool is “thinking in a new polarity”. Common and logical extremes such as “old-new” and “black-white” are boring; in order to discover innovative ideas, it might help to think in new spectrums such as “classic — futuristic” and “minimalist — art nouveau”. As for the case in Roppongi Art Night, I think that “art-business” is an appropriate pair of extremes.
So, where is Roppongi Art Night (RAN) in the spectrum? We received a chance to conduct an interview meeting with the officials of RAN, and had interesting talks. Mori Building, one of the organizers of RAN, has a strong passion in arts. They located the Mori Art Museum on the 53rd floor of Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, an uncommon height for an art museum. The design idea is similar to that of some Shinto shrines in Japan: people need to ascend a long, high stairway in order to see the Kami. A point to consider is that the museum does not pursue financial profit from this.
On the other hand, the organizers of RAN wants to make this overnight event enjoyable by anyone. From the stories told by the representatives, I suppose that RAN takes a place in the middle of the spectrum; they said that they make a balance between high-class art and mi-yasui art (easy-seeing, like easy-listening in the case of music).
Since the project has a business dimension, we could talk about marketing, a vital process in any business. The current rapid advancement in information technology has a big impact in the marketing world. The situation on the Internet, especially social media, could somehow reflect the business growth.
And how is RAN doing? There was an official hashtag introduced for this year’s event, #RoppongiArtNight2019. By viewing https://instagram.com/explore/tags/ followed by a hashtag, we could see how many posts were associated with #RoppongiArtNight2019, #RoppongiArtNight2018, and so on. And if we compare the data with the visitor numbers during 2018 to that of 2014 (I took the approximation numbers from Roppongi Art Night booklet, published in February 2019), we could have a general idea of the approximate percentage of the visitors who shared their RAN experiences on Instagram.
The percentage that is growing bigger can be a good sign that RAN is getting better known. But we could also state that it is a natural thing because Instagram users are increasing each year hence unsurprising.
If we take a closer look at the percentage, there is something worth inspecting. Only less than one percent of the visitors posted on Instagram. It would be an inaccurate conclusion, I guess. I went myself to the event, and the atmosphere was jovial. Everyone was having fun and taking pictures, and I believe that most of them somehow posted some pictures or videos on SNS including Instagram.
There are two possibilities that could explain this. First, the visitors are using private Instagram accounts therefore their posts are not visible to the public. The second one, visitors are posting without using the hashtags; they might have used their own hashtags or no hashtag at all.
Furthermore, the assumption of one-person one-post might not work here. A single user might have uploaded several posts, thus the 1218 posts uploaded this year might be from less than 1218 users.
I did upload multiple posts too. In addition to #RoppongiArtNight2019, I used #iAmAtRAN hashtag which was set by my internship tutors. The hashtag was meant to help us keep in touch with each other and find out everyone’s activities.
There were twenty four exhibitions in my to-see list. When visiting each of them, I took some photographs and then posted them on SNS while taking a break. Of course due to my mobile data usage limitation, I did not post all of them (I am just a student on a budget after all). That is one reason, but the main reason is: posting something to SNS takes time, and doing it was only my priority number two. So I would rather use my time for my first priority, which is simply enjoying the art.
And other visitors might think the same. They approached the artworks, and felt their beauty entering their minds through their senses. They tried to understand what the artists were trying to communicate, appreciating art for its own sake.
Even if they did not post anything on SNS, they already had fun with the artworks; this is what is important. But of course, sharing what makes you happy with other people is good (some say: sharing is caring). And that is what SNS are made for.
I am looking forward to Roppongi Art Night 2020. Next year is a big opportunity because we have Tokyo 2020. Roppongi Art Night is usually held between March and May, but in order to attract more visitors, it might be good to move the date to July or August adjusting to the olympics schedule; in 2016 and 2017, RAN was held during the second half of the years (October and September). And if the power of social media is utilized for marketing this event, I believe it will help boost the RAN visitor number even higher.
Muhammad Alfian Wahyu Gumelar is a full-time Keio undergraduate student from Indonesia and has lived in more than 10 cities in the archipelago. Being a Shonan Fujisawa Campus student on weekdays, he goes to Minato City every Saturday to take classes on Mita Campus. “Liberal arts” may best describe what he is studying; he has interests in different things from computer science to religious studies.
