Artists, technologists, designers, and all creative practitioners have a crucial role to play in how we make decisions about our future. Future of work, education, communication, climate, even the new products and emerging technologies which receive approval for market distribution. Creating conditions for inclusivity, diversity, equality and sustainability requires a humanitarian contribution or approach and this is achieved by ensuring artists and creatives are engaged in the decision-making processes.
Taking an action-research, artist-led and human-centred approach we are passionate about building opportunities to connect and open up conversations between different people and places, to empower citizens to interrogate reality and imagine better futures while encouraging cross-sector dialogue and collaboration. It is for these reasons that we joined forces with other like-minded arts organisations across Europe to establish a new network – CoDE.
FutureEverything has a rich history of collaboration and cooperation with art and digital culture organisations in Europe. Since establishing our first festival of digital culture, we have continued to push creative boundaries and stimulate new ways of thinking, across a diverse range of sectors, disciplines and audiences. Working with Sensorium (Slovakia), IMPAKT (Netherlands), and School of Machines (Germany), we have initiated a new EU-wide collaborative network Connected Digital Europe (CoDE) to test ideas and share the knowledge, capacity and experience through a specially curated conversations, events, workshops, and art commissions, developing an evidence base in which we can use to empower others to lead from.
CoDE responds to the new possibilities and concerns that have emerged because of the Digital Shift. Artists working with digital media are on the forefront of the creative use of and the critical thinking about digital technologies. The field of digital arts is rapidly expanding and becoming even more important and relevant and requires organisations like ours to advocate for best practice in curation, engagement, evaluation and dissemination.
CoDE aims to connect forward-looking artists working in the digital realm with underrepresented groups, policy makers and groups concerned with digital agency and the ecological impact of technology in order to organise collective processes that will lead to a technological future that is more inclusive, transparent and sustainable. They are well connected in their communities and their communities have trust in them. These programme ambassadors will participate on project’s events in the role of constructive reference and critique and bring new ideas relevant to their communities and elevate our capacity to help create a long-term vision to embed creativity within policy-making processes.
We are aware the biggest challenge within this context is bringing creative practitioners together with industry, research, policy-makers, change-makers, to discuss, debate, collaborate and implement policy. We will work together to provide support, advice, contacts across the various new projects. The partnership will deliver evaluation and facilitate the City Lab concept and provide organisational, facilitation, co-curation, and mentorship design and support to educational aspects of our collaborative programme and manage the creation and production of the visual identity and visual guidelines for the project and digital methodology toolkit.
Further information about our projects and processes will be shared soon.
(Hero image credit: 108 Steps, Matthew Rosier)