Culture | Data | Learning: creative lab
Join Create Gloucestershire for this hands-on lab exploring where data and art meet.
Are you an artist interested in how data might shape your creations? Or do you work with data, and want to explore how to look at it in new ways? We want you to join us and get creative though team projects to discover, explore and represent data about the cultural education landscape in Gloucestershire.
This one day creative lab, modelled on a technology ‘hackathon’, will be a chance to form rapid collaborations, and prototype new art-works based on open datasets.
The event will be held from 9:30am - 6pm on September 21st 2019 at Atelier, Stroud.
Register your interest by signing up using the button below. Or for a fuller description of the event please read on below.
To make sure we have a mix of artists, developers, data specialists and other skills, we will review applications on a weekly basis and get back to you to confirm your place.
** JUST IN! ARTIST ANNOUNCEMENT **
Joe Magee - Joe Magee is an award-winning UK illustrator, artist and film maker. Joe will be working with anyone interested in drawing to interpret the data.
Joe studied Graphic Design at London College of Communication before becoming a regular contributor of images to a range of international publications such as The Guardian, Time Magazine, Liberation, New York Times and Newsweek - having upwards of two thousand images published.
See more of Joe’s work here
Sarah Dixon - Sarah is a digital communications consultant and artist - Sarah will be supporting those who want to work through this challenge using textiles.
Sarah studied biology at UCL and subsequently worked in the Amazon and the Hindu Kush as an ethnobotanist. She was always simultaneously making art and working online, and increasingly linking these fields of work together. Informed by her background in biology, her art practice is socially-engaged, meaning it explores social settings and relationships as material. Using everything from Renaissance painting techniques to bunting, Sarah’s projects investigate the invisible rituals that shape our lives and how we can collectively re-create and reconsider them. She is a founder of the Women’s Art Activation System, a collective for activating women’s art, and recently qualified as an RD1st coach.
Https://creativedigitalhuman.com
Tomas Millar - will be supporting any artists who would like to explore the data through virtual reality.
Tomas grew up in the Stroud Valleys and, after moving away for several years to study Architecture at Edinburgh University and then The Bartlett School of Architecture in London, he returned to Stroud to form Millar + Howard Workshop Architects. As a teenager Tomas was actively involved with youth theatre in Stroud and helped form The Flies on the Wall theatre group, which continues to thrive today. Tomas maintains an active role in the arts in Stroud, having helped to found the Stand + Stare immersive theatre group and worked with SVA on several site-specific projects.
Tomas enjoys the blurring of boundaries between different disciplines and how different art forms can learn from and influence each other, particularly the interplay between hand craft and digital technology. He has a keen interest in how this can be used in innovative ways to enrich the way we live, work and play. From flying video cameras on quadcopters to designing flat-pack laser-cut buildings, Tomas has a real enthusiasm for the ever-changing ways in which we can engage with the contemporary world.
Barney Heywood - Barney is an artist and designer with a background in graphics, film, installation and performance.
Barney runs an interactive design company called Stand + Stare who produce exhibitions, installations and events that use AV and new technology to tell stories in engaging and exciting ways.
Culture | Data | Learning: One day creative lab
What is it ?
A one day collaborative workshop to:
Build conversations and collaborations between arts and data specialists
Explore and interpret datasets through a variety of artforms
Design or create artworks that can communicate data in new ways
We will provide:
the space, suggested source data, expert facilitators, and a workshop structure that will help you form interdisciplinary teams and work together to produce a creative collaboration by the end of the day.
You will bring:
Curiosity, questions and an open mind.
Who is it for?
The lab will bring together artists, data specialists and practitioners from arts and education organisations. We’re designing it for:
Artists - who have a strong creative practice and an interest in how data could be a source material for their work, but want to understand more how data can be found, stored and processed.
Data specialists who understand how to access, manipulate and make sense of digital data, but want to explore how creative processes could be used to explore, amplify and tell new stories with data.
Arts and education professionals who would like to use data in a more informed and creative way, and want to build their knowledge and confidence to deploy data to shape practice and policy and creative work.
When and where?
9:30am - 6pm - September 21st 2019. Atelier, Stroud.
Is there a theme?
The focus of the lab will be on culture and learning.
We’ll prepare a range of datasets related to cultural education (e.g. arts teaching and schools) in Gloucestershire, but you will be free to set your own questions, bring or find other data, and explore these broad terms in any way you wish.
How will it work?
The day has three parts:
Arrival and introductions: discover who else is present, find out about possible datasets and learn about possible art forms: from VR and street-art, to printmaking and digital sculpture.
Planning and making: supported by our facilitators, join a team and plan out a creative work that responds to data. With interdisciplinary teams, bring together data, designs and creative responses to make something by 5pm.
Showcase: present the plans, prototypes of creations to our panel of expert judges.
So there are prizes?
We’ll be awarding recognition to projects in five categories.
Brightest insights - the creation which does the best at finding a signal in the noise, and presenting a collection of related data points most clearly.
Best narrative - the creation that shares the most compelling story, whether or a single data point, or an analysis across lots of data
Most creative data relationships - the creation that responds to data in the most creative way, with or without a literal representation of the data
Most likely to influence policy - the creation that could have the biggest impact on local or national policy makers.
Most likely to get gallery/stage space - the creation most likely to end up in an exhibition or festival
What happens after the event?
That’s up to you! You might want to continue talking with the collaborators you meet on the day - or you might just take learning from the lab back to your own work.
What will the agenda look like? [DRAFT]
09.30 - Arrive and introductions
Get to know about the other participants: discovering the skills and experience available the room.10.00 - Data & Art Demos
Learn about some of the source materials we have to work with: datasets, artforms and equipment.10.30 - Finding questions, forming teams, sketching ideas
A chance to pitch ideas to explore, and to join an interdisciplinary team. Each team will use a design canvas to sketch out the questions, data, analysis and artforms to explore, and to make sure they have the resources they need.11.15 - Start creating
With support from our facilitators, start creating arts-led responses to the data available. From data visualisations sculptures, to data-informed dance - the only constraint will be that the artworks created should draw on one or more datasets.13.00 - Lunch
14.00 - Sketching, making, creating (continued)
Continued space to work on your creations. You may work with a single team, or share your skills across teams.17.00 - Showcase & awards!
Each team will have five minutes to present the outline or prototype of their creation.
Our panel of critics will give feedback, recognising the best creations in a number of categories.18.00 - Close and drinks