Create Gloucestershire ran a hands-on lab exploring where data and art meet.
The lab brought together artists interested in how data might shape their creations, and people who work with data and wanted to explore it in new ways. Participants got creative through 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’, was a chance to form rapid collaborations and prototype new art-works based on open datasets.
The event was held from 9:30am - 6pm on September 21st 2019 at Atelier, Stroud.
To make sure there was a mix of artists, developers, data specialists and other skills, applications were reviewed on a weekly basis to confirm places.
The artists
Joe Magee - Joe Magee is an award-winning UK illustrator, artist and film maker. Joe worked 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.
Sarah Dixon - Sarah is a digital communications consultant and artist. Sarah supported those who wanted 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.
sarahdixonfineart.co.uk
https://creativedigitalhuman.com
Tomas Millar - supported any artists who wanted 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 was 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 provided the space, suggested source data, expert facilitators, and a workshop structure that helped participants form interdisciplinary teams and work together to produce a creative collaboration by the end of the day.
Participants brought curiosity, questions and an open mind.
Who was it for?
The lab brought together artists, data specialists and practitioners from arts and education organisations. It was designed for:
Artists who had a strong creative practice and an interest in how data could be a source material for their work, but wanted to understand more about how data can be found, stored and processed.
Data specialists who understood how to access, manipulate and make sense of digital data, but wanted to explore how creative processes could be used to explore, amplify and tell new stories with data.
Arts and education professionals who wanted to use data in a more informed and creative way, and to build their knowledge and confidence to deploy data to shape practice, policy and creative work.
When and where?
9:30am - 6pm, September 21st 2019. Atelier, Stroud.
Was there a theme?
The focus of the lab was on culture and learning.
We prepared a range of datasets related to cultural education (e.g. arts teaching and schools) in Gloucestershire, and participants were free to set their own questions, bring or find other data, and explore these broad terms in any way they wished.
How did it work?
The day had three parts:
Arrival and introductions: discover who else was 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 and prototypes of creations to our panel of expert judges.
The prizes
Recognition was awarded to projects in five categories:
Brightest insights - the creation which did the best at finding a signal in the noise, and presenting a collection of related data points most clearly.
Best narrative - the creation that shared the most compelling story, whether a single data point or an analysis across lots of data.
Most creative data relationships - the creation that responded 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.
The agenda
09.30 - Arrive and introductions: get to know the other participants and discover the skills and experience in the room.
10.00 - Data & Art Demos: learn about some of the source materials to work with, datasets, artforms and equipment.
10.30 - Finding questions, forming teams, sketching ideas: pitch ideas to explore and join an interdisciplinary team. Each team used a design canvas to sketch out the questions, data, analysis and artforms to explore, and to make sure they had the resources they needed.
11.15 - Start creating: with support from our facilitators, start creating arts-led responses to the data available. From data visualisation sculptures to data-informed dance, the only constraint was 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 creations, with a single team or sharing skills across teams.
17.00 - Showcase & awards: each team had five minutes to present the outline or prototype of their creation. The panel of critics gave feedback, recognising the best creations in a number of categories.
18.00 - Close and drinks
