Projects

Haunted Wires
IA4: Dreams & Echoes
Beachcomber
Mycomythopoeia
Cract!
Parsing Memory
World of Keepers
Time Odyssey
Museum of Imagined Futures
Distant Librarians
In Search of the Strange
Residue
The Pengguling Egg
this place [of mine]
Macabre Mail
Spook_bot

this place [of mine]

Welcome to a virtual playground of ideas for the future.

I was a Creative Associate on FutureEverything’s this place [of mine] – an ambitious digital arts programme for young people across Greater Manchester. The project invited participants to imagine alternate futures for their local high street, and to share their ideas through an experimental art platform. The programme included a Young Producer scheme, digital creativity workshops, five new art commissions and an immersive online world.

In the weeks leading up to the project, the whole country went into lockdown – so we had to completely pivot everything online. This meant getting creative with how we delivered workshops, how we built a sense of community among participants, and finding ways to build and create together despite being physically separated. It was a challenge, but it was also an opportunity to think creatively – delivering activities as talking “TV heads”, offering text adventure style workshops in Discord, hosting group Miro parties, building playful chatbots to capture research and ideas, and crafting Citizen Toolkits to help young people explore their local environment in creative, covid-safe ways.

Myself and fellow artist/Creative Associate Vicky Clarke delivered the whole creative programme. This involved: technical R&D, collaborating with the web team (Treble) to develop the online world, writing web content and chatbots, making 3D objects in Blender, content management of the online artwork, workshop design and delivery, digital tutorials and toolkits, supporting the Young Producers to create their own artworks and curating five new digital art commissions by local artists.

Once the world opened back up, this place [of mine] went on tour around Greater Manchester, to exhibit the collaborative online artwork, share the creative toolkits, and inspire more young people to dream big about the future of their towns.

The this place [of mine] online collaborative artwork won four CSS Awards, including: Website of the Day (voted for by industry experts), Best UI Design, Best UX Design and Best Innovation.

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Lead image / neon computers by Vicky Clarke.

Project commissioned by Greater Manchester Arts with support from Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) as part of the GM Great Place Scheme. Produced by FutureEverything and delivered in partnership with Manchester City Council, One Manchester, Oldham MBC, Link4Life, Tameside MBC, Wigan MBC, and The Turnpike.

Artists and collaborators: Studio Treble, Jada Giwa, Izzy Bolt, Jacob Bolton, David McFarlane, Joe Whitmore, James Medd, Tine Bech.