No great gap between PlayStation and Puccini

Net Results: Going by the media response to Sony's new PlayStation sponsorship deals with dance, opera, arts and music companies in Britain, you'd think technology has never had anything to do with the arts, either as sponsors or as a creative element, writes  Karlin Lillington.

Several recent articles in the British press have used a silly taken-aback tone to discuss the sponsorship, particularly of an upcoming performance of the opera La Bohème, where PlayStations will be in the foyer for audience use, and a dance festival at Sadlers Wells, where audience members can bring their portable PlayStations to download dance clips from PlayStations in the lobby.

The articles are agog that a company supposedly more associated with teenage boys playing Grand Theft Auto is not just forking out to support such "grand arts", but also stipulating that the arts centres provide an interactive element - which can be quite broadly interpreted - for their audiences.

The articles speculate that Sony is trying to capture an upmarket audience's interest in the PlaySation, an audience made up of people in their 20s that first started on the PlayStation during their teenage years.

Oh, please. This is so condescending to every group involved - audiences for the arts, PlayStation users, the arts themselves and technology companies.

First off, audiences for opera are not all doddering toffs in top hats and glittery gúnas. Any trip to any opera house in the world will reveal a whole cross-section of society and opera has probably never been more recognisable to a mass audience, following the Nessun Dorma effect. Stick a beautiful bit of opera in front of an unsuspecting general audience and see it rocket up the charts.

Television and radio advertisements for a couple of years have been full of arias selling everything from cars to mortgages - and just try to get a ticket for Andrea Bocelli when he visits. Then there's the Celtic Tenors, the Three Tenors, the Irish Tenors, Il Divo . . . well, you get my drift.

As for audience, many forget that a huge proportion of the PlayStation's first aficionados were actually 20- and 30-somethings, men in particular, now in their 30s and 40s, many well-heeled. A prime arts audience, I should say. So there isn't really some huge yawning gap between the "typical" user of a PlayStation and an arts-goer. Indeed if you can afford the upcoming version of the PlayStation at around €500, you can easily buy excellent season tickets for the English National Opera.

In any case, technology companies have been involved with arts sponsorship for decades. Take IBM. They've had a formal arts programme since 1970.

Intel also is well-involved in the arts - for example, in 1999 it made an underwriting grant of €5 million to the major American art exhibit at the famed Whitney Museum of American Art and created a widely lauded website, called "The American Century", to go with it.

Microsoft makes community- focused donations to support the arts in the Seattle region as well as being involved with larger projects worldwide. In Scotland in 2006, Microsoft UK was a major donor in a Scottish arts funding scheme called the New Arts Sponsorship Award programme.

Then there's Sun Microsystems. In Australia, the company has a 12-year sponsorship deal with the Musica Viva music programme, which presents thousands of music events in Australia each year. Sun has also commissioned many musicians to compose pieces for Sun events.

According to one article, "Sun Microsystems' research shows close to a 100 per cent overlap between Musica Viva audiences and Sun's business and government customer base". So much for technology customers and users not being typical arts audiences.

In his biography iWoz, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak talks about how he put significant bits of his considerable personal fortune into the arts - even forms he'd never attended, like ballet - simply because he liked the companies' passion for what they did.

Adobe Systems last August sponsored ZeroOne San Jose, "a global festival of art on the edge". Apple sponsors exhibits in many places, including the University of Virginia Art Museum, and a few years ago semiconductor company Novellus gave $25,000 to the Word for Art outdoor exhibit in San Francisco, in which six artists did installations and works on the theme of "interconnectivity".

According to its website, Novellus is "a leading supplier of chemical vapor deposition , physical vapor deposition, electrochemical deposition , chemical mechanical planarisation, ultraviolet thermal processing and surface preparation equipment used in the manufacturing of semiconductors". Sheesh. The rather groovy PlayStation flirting with ever-popular Puccini is, to me, a far more likely link-up than Novellus embracing bleeding-edge installation artists.

And back to where we started: Sony has long been a supporter of the arts under the plain old Sony moniker. Obviously, given its products, Sony also has long been part of the music, photography and video market, too. And it has a record label and owns a film studio.

So making its PlayStation brand a key sponsor in the arts and pushing creative artists in more traditional and formal arts to experiment with technology is a brilliant idea - a bit wacky and cutting edge, maybe - and has certainly got Sony lots of media attention. Fair play. That's good marketing and good fun.

As for the broader media: while it may make great story headlines to pretend otherwise, art and technology are old friends and constantly evolving collaborators. Technology (even PlayStation!) users are - surprise! - not all 14-year-old pimply geeks.

As Sun realised, arts audiences are a core technology demographic. And computer games have broad appeal. Just ask my 80-year-old dad - an opera fan all his life and a devotee of Microsoft Flight Simulator since his 60s.