How is art/ tech work reaching the public?
Collusion asked Flow Associates to undertake research into the current context of practice, commissioning and accessing art/tech works, and make this short report available for others to use. Flow spoke with venues, commissioners and artists to get a sense of the state of play and where and how R&D support is working or throwing up barriers for a thriving area of practice.
What do we mean by art/tech? Artwork, any artform, where technology is used in a practice led way to create experiences for the public. We are interested in physical work that the public needs to engage with in a particular location. We are excluding purely digital work that is experienced on the internet only. Artworks in this field can take a wide variety of forms, lengths and locations: from traditional venues to outdoor works and festivals, 10 minutes to an hour or more, using technology subtly or more substantially.
The pipeline for making practice-led art/tech work is broken, if indeed it ever existed. Alongside access to a range of expertise and resources, the cost of living crisis and subsequent hypercompetition for funding has led us to a situation where creativity, innovation and production is stifled by the lack of access to funding, whether application led or venue commissioned.
Further, where traditional commissioning is taking place for art/tech work, the ‘deliver this as a finished piece by X’ is failing to account for the iterative nature of art/tech work that requires more R&D and audience testing over a longer period of time to reach a truly finished state. As an emerging sector, when compared with a traditional sector such as dance or visual arts, there also appears not to be a strong shared understanding of who the key players and networks are in this field, with an apparent lack of connection and collaboration.