Creative Economy Blog

Digital R and D for the Arts

Hasan Bakhshi - 13.07.2012

Yesterday, I was delighted to host Skinder Hundal and his team from the excellent New Art Exchange (NAE) in Nottingham to mark a key stage in the evolution of their Culture Cloud project.

Culture Cloud is one of eight projects we are supporting in England, in collaboration with Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in a pilot digital R&D Fund for the Arts and Culture.

When we devised this Fund we knew we wanted to achieve certain things:

-  to connect technology companies, cultural institutions and researchers;

-  to rigorously test propositions as to how technologies can widen and deepen audience engagement, and

-  to disseminate the insights, the hard data and the research findings so that organisations not directly participating in the Fund would benefit. 

At the same time there was a significant open-ended aspect of what we were trying to do. Unlike Science & Technology, very little is known about how R&D is managed by arts organisations, how it should be evaluated, and how well the knowledge created through R&D flows (or not) across organisations (what economists call spillovers). We do not even have clear definitions of what R&D is in artistic contexts. We wanted to put together talented R&D teams so that we could also use their project experiences to improve our understanding of R&D in all of these areas.

Culture Cloud has proven to be just such a project. We could see the creative sparks between NAE and their chosen technology partner, Artfinder, right away. In fact, if memory serves me correctly, these two organisations first met at one of the Digital Day workshops we ran for the Digital R&D Fund while the Call was live.

Culture Cloud is a digital space for artists to upload their artwork onto a web portal where both professional curators and the public vote for the works they like. The winners will receive a cash price and the possibility of a solo show at NAE. Over 900 artists from across the UK submitted their works and a panel of curators from NAE and eight partner galleries shortlisted these down to a list of 101. Over the following month the public voted for their favourite out of these 101 and the top 40 were announced at yesterday's event. Audiences will be able to view the works physically at NAE, as well as online and vote for their favourite work in the exhibition. The response from the public and artists alike has been of an order of magnitude higher than NAE envisaged at project inception, and it has already committed to running Culture Cloud as an annual competition with plans to take the concept overseas too.

Thanks to projects like Culture Cloud, we were delighted to have been able to announce this morning at Sadler's Wells that £7 million new funding will be made available over the next three years for digital R&D projects for the arts, with details of how to submit expressions of interest and applications available on Nesta's website. Following from the eight projects that have already been supported through the pilot, the digital R&D fund we are piloting in Scotland with Creative Scotland and plans underway to take the concept into new areas, the coming months and years should generate a step change in how arts organisations use technologies to engage with their audiences and which is, importantly, supported by a rigorous evidence base.