We asked Flow Associates to undertake a small piece of research to see how art/tech work is reaching the public in the context of a challenging enviroment for making and distributing new work.
The premise set by Collusion: 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 hyper competition 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. This emerging sector also lacks visible networks and sector collaboration.
From this starting point, Alex Flowers of Flow Associates set out to find how, in the context of these challenges, art/tech work is reaching the public and who is interested in this kind of work. You can read the report here, which for a very small piece of work, draws togeher a valuable overview and poses some key recommendations for how we move forward. READ THE REPORT HERE