Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a digital, participatory, co-design project aimed to re-engage older audiences that no longer attended arts and culture venues.

Paper long abstract:

Past the texting vistas of a mobile horizon, the illuminated graphs on laptops and tablets, the lost telecommunication signals encircling London, Warwickshire and South Lakeland, towards a different place beyond these digital landscapes where dancers sync, singers swing, and actors tread in a local arts venue. Here audiences sigh and guffaw, murmur and laud, heckle and walk. Walk in. Walk out. Touch in. Touch out. But the (ac)counting for audience participation by digital means is still crudely 'bums on seats', even though what and how we sit, is no trivial matter. The best seat counts but how and to whom?

In this paper I will consider numbers as an 'open process of mattering' as an agential possibility in relation to access and engagement (Barad, 2009). The participatory, co-design project aimed to re-engage older audiences that no longer attended arts and culture venues. Within the digital stories collected I follow the numbers. I unravel the economics around digital access from the words of those who participated. This is not just the so-called attenders and non-attenders but from the perspective of arts programmers, box office teams and charitable organisations in order to understand 'digital access' in the UK.