FutureEverything is launching its bold and innovative Vision & Action Plan for a new digital placemaking programme in Stockport Town Centre, Stockport Creative Campus, and has recruited Di Mainstone as the lead artist for their first public digital arts commission, 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
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.“
This spring we’ll be kick starting our exciting programme of public-facing digital arts activities, as part of the Stockport Creative Campus initiative, with a residency, workshop programme, and a world premiere of a new digital artwork by acclaimed artist Di Mainstone.
Di Mainstone is a multi-disciplinary artist and international award-winning filmmaker, who collaborates with communities, scientists, historians and musicians to develop powerful films, playful public installations and immersive experiences. Her work focuses on themes of climate change, biodiversity loss, and forgotten women’s histories.
Building on Di’s international reputation for innovative and accessible art installations and her ongoing quest to emphasise the importance of ecological issues, her digital art commission ‘Emotional Biodiversity’ will invite communities in Stockport to explore their emotional and neurological response to biodiversity loss, through the lens of soil.
Read more about it HERE and follow our social media channels to watch this exciting commission unfold.
“I’m delighted to collaborate with the community of Stockport to co-create a digital artwork called Emotional Biodiversity. As part of FutureEverything’s Creative Campus Commission, we will run a series of workshops exploring participants’ connection to Stockport through the lens of soil. Collaborators will be invited to creatively explore their own sense of rootedness to the town, as well as to contemplate their emotional link to Stockport’s soil and the biodiversity within it. Our cohort of workshoppers will literally get their hands dirty creating new species of bulbs and plant life which will feed into a final touring digital installation.”
