This is a CTP of initiative: Hackspace 2 (North-West of England, UK)
This CTP refers to the decision made by the new board of directors to actively move into a new arts-science direction.
The hackspace had been approached in its previous iterations by arts funding bodies, including Arts Council England, a national development agency for arts and culture, who has had an increasing focus on the use of digital technologies in the spaces. However, the directors described how this early attempts to garner funding had been abortive, due to the difficult dynamics in the directorial team at that point:
“The Arts Council came calling when I was away, which they rarely do. They said ‘Here are all these funds, you should apply for them’. And they rarely do that, but I wasn’t there and the co-director dealing with it just dropped the ball – they didn’t understand it, they hadn’t met the deadlines, they hadn’t applied for anything. It was such a mess. I said ‘If you want to look at the arts – how are you going to manage this in the future? The [co-director] said ‘I need someone to work with me, I can’t work on it on my own’. I said, ‘If you can’t do it alone and you can’t lead on the arts, then you shouldn’t be a director. If we’re employing someone to help you do your job, then you can’t do it’.”
This event had been part of an earlier attempt to move the hackspace into the arts but, as the quote above indicates, the directorial team at that point didn’t have the capacity or skills to shift into the arts space at that time. As the quote indicates (and other CTPs describe more fully), this incident was also part of a larger series of events which led to the restructuring of the directorial board. Following the restructuring, the board were able to reapproach the arts space, this time from a heavier tech-arts perspective. One of the directors, A, was able to up a fellowship in the US, which afforded over $100k in funding to develop arts-technology project with US-based collaborators. This project let them to move beyond smaller work and move more fully into the arts space: “It allowed us to move into the art-science realm, although we were already in DIY Bio. It let us go beyond the ‘meat and two veg’ stuff”.
This shift acted as a CTP because it allowed the organisation to realign as an arts organisation, taking on additional responsibilities, developing a wider range of activities (including a new arts accelerator), and working with a new set of partners, focused around art and culture.
This CTP was shaped by events including the organisation’s earlier attempts to move into the arts space. In addition to the abortive attempts to gain funding, described above, previous directors had also set up a provisional gallery space in the nascent hackspace.
This CTP was also shaped by the increasing focus on interdisciplinary arts-digital technology work from funding bodies in the UK and Europe. These include the 2012 Happenstance project which aimed to make arts bodies ‘digital by default’, though introducing technologist residencies; and the Digital R&D fund for the Arts from NESTA which “supported ideas that use digital technology to build new business models and enhance audience reach for organisations with arts projects”.
In the UK, culture organisations such as Lighthouse (Brighton) and FACT Liverpool worked to support interdisciplinary work in arts, media, and technology. In Europe, organisations including V2 (Rotterdam) and transmediale (Berlin) worked to support similar ends. Whilst technologically mediated art has been part of the culture scene for several decades – for example, Bell Labs hosted the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in 1967, facilitating engagement between artists and engineers – the presence of (comparatively) more accessible digital tools and resources has made these forms both more accessible to would-be creators, and prevalent to audiences.
Funding bodies which engaged with these issues often focused on supporting bodies which carried capacity in digital technologies, such as the hackspace, as a means of introducing these skills and capacities into the arts and culture environment. Through this framing, hybrid technology organisations such as the hackspace (and other hackspaces documented for the TRANSIT project) were able to work with arts bodies, whilst developing their own internal capacity.
This CTP was shaped by events including the organisation’s earlier attempts to move into the arts space; and the increased focus on interdisciplinary arts-technology work from different funding bodies in the UK and Europe.
Beyond the earlier difficulties described above around raising initial funding, the directors didn’t describe any difficulties or frictions around this shift in direction.
The directors described how they felt that their shift into an arts space was part of an intentional ongoing progression of forward leadership, rather than following the trends described above around digitally mediated art:
“Why did we move into art-science? We’re not just followers of what’s out there, we’re also leading where arts and technology are going with coding; it’s where our own interests go to. [The co-director A] was brought into support the organisation, but these projects give him the opportunity to support his creativity as well, his particular interests. They give him this outlet that makes him want to stay at [the hackspace].”
As this quote indicates, A’s role in the organisation had not been intended to lead on arts projects, but instead works on professional development and new project delivery across the non-profit and for-profit spaces. In taking on additional funding and support from the arts sector, A was able to benefit personally and professionally through support for his own creative practice, whilst also supporting the creation of new projects and schemes throughout the hackspace.
As detailed above, the move into arts-tech was built on the back of the hackspaces engagement with DIYBio. The organisation had founded the first DIYBio group in the UK in 2011, and also organised the first DIYBio conference in Europe. Whilst these activities were not done with the intent of laying the ground for further arts engagement, they enabled the organisation to strengthen its skills in supporting interdisciplinary work, whilst also tapping into the larger networks of people whose work spilled over between synthetic biology and art. In the absence of this CTP, the organisation would have limited its ability to derive funding from arts-related support schemes; and limited its activities to those more closely associated with technology and education.
This CTP permitted the hackspace directors to learn about the dynamics of the intersections between art and technology, both for their own practices and for those of the greater organisation. One director described how this was essential in pushing the organisation forward:
“Lots of makerspaces have a garden shed ethos where people want to hack away with some tools and make a thing. We think that’s brilliant, but want to look at other applications. Do you take that to market, do you work with that as an artist? Lots of artists are rubbish with technology, lots of technologists are bloody awful with creativity – so what happens when you bring it together? We’re at that point where these things are intersecting and it’s very messy”.
The shift permitted the organisation to expand their networks out to a wider and more interdisciplinary set of partners, organisations, funders, and collaborators. As one of the directors described, this work built on the previous projects which the organisation had developed, but also allowed them to expand their capacity:
“Stuff in [the arts] domain hooks up with stuff we’ve already done. We’ve had synbio mentor; we’ve got to know people who funded coder courses and then synbio courses; we got to know people who funded the IndieBio work in San Francisco which was much bigger. Now we’re meeting people from across Europe – biologists, artists, technologists – which has helped us develop our own practice. When we were working on the arts accelerator we drew those people in and they were our first artists in residence”.
The accelerator program fed into the organisation’s longer term plans, by allowing the hackspace to both develop its own capabilities in the arts, and develop those of wider communities. As one of the directors described, the hackspace had been opportunistic in taking advantage of these funding shifts whilst looking out for their own interests and ways in which they could support the organisation’s transformational aims:
“We have been opportunistic around funding – things turn on a dime. You apply for funding and it takes you in a particular direction. We always apply for funding for things we really want to do, but we’ve not followed a money trail, we’ve followed a development trail and funding has enabled us to be become better and strategically looked at. We’ve built on where the itch is – directors, communities, users, we listen do what they want to do, whether that’s draw more people in, find staff, form excellent partnerships”.
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