FutureEverything is launching its bold and innovative Vision & Action Plan for a new digital placemaking programme in Stockport Town Centre, Stockport Creative Campus, and is recruiting an artist for its inaugural digital commission in 2024.
FutureEverything is launching its bold and innovative Vision & Action Plan for a new digital placemaking programme in Stockport Town Centre, Stockport Creative Campus, and is recruiting an artist for its inaugural digital commission in 2024.
Vision & Action Plan
Following an extensive 12-month consultation programme we are thrilled to share our Vision & Action Plan for digital creative placemaking activity in Stockport’s Creative Campus. The Vision & Action Plan outlines how FutureEverything will work with the communities in Stockport and artists in the region on a digital arts programme to build a creative neighbourhood and reconnect the area’s historic past with its digital future.
Stockport Creative Campus is an opportunity to transform Stockport’s heritage-rich historic centre into a sustainable, world-leading digital arts neighbourhood. FutureEverything’s role in this is to curate and deliver an exciting programme of public-facing digital arts activities to build creative communities and develop new audiences. Our consultation with the communities and arts and culture sector in the town, including Sector 3, Stockport College and arts organisations such as Culture Bridge, has created an informed pathway towards our vision and reflects the bespoke needs and ambitions of the audiences in Stockport.
Adopting our unique approach of utilising storytelling, digital art, and participation we will work with communities and places across the town to reflect and respond to the past, present and future of a changing place, and to celebrate and bring to the fore the values of people, community, creativity, history and environment that give Stockport its distinct identity.
We Are Having the Time of Our Lives, Superflex, Plasmata, 2022, Onassis Foundation & FutureEverything
To launch our digital creative placemaking activity programme for Stockport Creative Campus, we are recruiting an artist or company, to work with us to create a new digital, mobile artwork that can tour to community locations in Stockport and co-create and deliver a series of engagement workshops. They will be appointed this winter and the inaugural digital public art work will premiere in summer 2024, touring destinations across Stockport including the town centre.
FutureEverything is inviting Greater Manchester-based artists/artist collectives, whose practice spans digital art and participatory co-creation, to respond to the brief which can be found HERE.
Led by Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, Stockport Creative Campus is a three-year town centre reinvigoration programme, to transform Stockport’s heritage-rich centre into a sustainable, world-leading digital arts neighbourhood.
Stockport Creative Campus will bring bold purpose to a regionally exceptional, yet under-developed, heritage quarter to kickstart a highly visible and widely accessible transformation which brings people of all ages and backgrounds together to experience and participate in digital arts and cultural heritage. Additionally, it will create a talent and skills-rich digital creative environment for those at every stage of development – from aspiring entrant to industry veteran – providing workspace, networking, bespoke support, and training.
What will happen?
By working with artists based in the region on new commissions and by engaging the communities of Stockport through creative opportunities, FutureEverything hopes to stimulate and inspire new ideas about Place. We will challenge perceptions about digital art, architecture and public space, and transform engagement with the town centre.
Alongside FutureEverything, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council has appointed other organisations to form a partnership including Manchester Metropolitan University, MadLab and IN4. The partners all have a defined role in working to establish the digital arts neighbourhood, developing the digital skills of residents, communities and developing pathways for creative graduates to set up in Stockport.
“At FutureEverything we believe that arts and culture have an important role in helping us rethink and reconsider our town centres. Culture can act as a catalyst enabling us to come together, opening up new perspectives and empowering us to imagine and enact positive societal change.”
Chris Wright, Executive Producer at Future Everything.
FutureEverything will be holding a series of pop-up arts workshops at community locations across Stockport. Keep an eye on our social media channels over the coming months for further updates.