AS part of the Designing Our Futures arts and humanities research initiative, the Digital Arts Research Exchange is bringing researchers and arts organisations together.
The acronym seems appropriate. After all, DARE is developing a new approach to research in the arts, responding to the expectations and demands of funding bodies, academic institutions and the commercial and public facing sectors.
Led by MIRIAD PhD student and freelance digital creative David Jackson, the initiative is part of Designing Our Futures, a programme of networks, events, placements, projects, residencies and workshops for Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs) and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) working in the Arts and Humanities.
“DARE is about looking for research opportunities in new areas,” says Jackson. “We want to avoid the ivory tower approach to art research, or the idea that every project has to end with an exhibition of some kind – although it might!”
DARE is one of two digital projects that make up the seven strands of Designing Our Futures; {Code Creatives}, featured previously on Digital Innovation, is the other. It’s aim is to ‘provide a bridge between digital arts researchers and the creative digital industries’, and to this end one of Jackson’s first moves has been to establish partnerships with organisations working in the creative and cultural sector.
At present there are six of these: Site Gallery in Sheffield, MadLab in Manchester, Coventry’s Serious Games Institute, Liverpool’s FACT, creators of Art Player TV, and PlayGen in London (pictured): “We’ve gone out there and picked people that we think are relevant research partners,” explains Jackson.
The next step
The next part of the project begins in earnest at a Designing Our Futures introductory event at MIRIAD in the Righton Building at MMU on 27 September. All PGRs and ECRs at MMU are invited, and the event is also open to researchers from any of the universities that are part of the PARCNorth West consortium. “For DARE, the event is an opportunity to start matching up researchers with our partners,” says Jackson.
The first DARE event of the academic year is on 1 November at FACT. Full details are still being finalised, but Jackson stresses it will focus on practical concerns and be workshop-based rather than a series of talks.
“It’s about sharing expertise and pairing partner organisations with digital researchers. Participants will be able to go off and do some brainstorming and come up with real projects to work together on.”
For Jackson, DARE’s approach represents the model for how digital research in the arts will be carried out in the future. Crucially, says Jackson, it’s what funders such as Arts Council England, NESTA and the Arts & Humanities Research Council now expect, as the recently created Digital Research Development Fund for the Arts, jointly funded by all three bodies, shows.
“Essentially,” explains Jackson, “DARE is about how we adapt to this new digital research environment and how we prepare students for it.”
Designing Our Futures launch event, 27 September, Righton Building, MMU, All Saints, Manchester, 2-5pm. If you’d like to attend, email miriad@mmu.ac.uk to register. For more information on DARE, visit the Designing Our Futures website
