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Escalator is an East of England programme
and it's all about talent development of artists in the East region.
Escalator Digital is quite a new programme
to build capacity and skills around digital technology.
That might be looking at ways
that people can engage and deepen their relationships with audiences.
It might be about how they might make more new creative content
or how they distribute their work more effectively.
I'm going to give a tour of this project first
before talking about the concepts that led up to it.
Metal is an arts organisation working with artists from all different disciplines.
Metal have taken on the responsibility for Digital Escalator for the Arts Council,
which include these week-long, intensive residential laboratories
which bring together usually around eight or ten artists
working in different disciplines to share a peer environment
where they can learn lots of stuff,
share lots of skills they might already have,
and then hear from all kinds of different specialists.
We're working in Ipswich, Norwich and Peterborough.
There's a real mix of participants who are already quite technically savvy
and some who're absolutely starting from baseline.
We also bring experts in to inspire and talk about the way they might work.
When I went downtown and stood there with these pieces on a busy day
I thought, "This is awesome!"
Was it designed to be a static experience, in that you were meant to stand and listen.
There wasn't a sense of it being so you could walk around the area.
You try to design the three different labs with different focuses.
In Norwich, with the historic nature of the Creative Writing courses at the university,
what we've been able to do is work with the Writers' Centre to think about
how they can devise a story or write a book or a piece of poetry
using a mixture of traditional tools and new pieces of software.
What's most important to me about these alternative media writing projects
is that you don't do them because the technology exists.
That's gadgetry and that's really boring.
The most important thing is that conceptualisation process,
a way of dealing with the language that has multiple media possibilities now.
In Peterborough we're concentrating on projection
and outdoor, large-scale intervention with architecture.
In Ipswich working with Pacitti Company they have a strong track record in
working with life art and performance.
If you're working with surround and if you want to work with a surround panner
then your maximum is 7.1.
The idea is that you are constantly making and doing
but you're talking with your colleagues about your work
and you're also being informed
by people who have really radically pushed practice.
When I saw the timetable for the week I saw that sound was the theme.
I thought I'm probably more interested in the video.
That isn't how it's turned out.
As someone who works with landscape and space essentially
I hadn't understood that sound was spatial,
kind of leaving with a complete language of potential I didn't know was there.
So that's very exciting.
It's open-ended.
So you might have had a tiny idea that you bring to the lab
but in the end you might push it away and come out with something different.
I applied for the Ideas Lab because I've been making artists' films for a few years.
I got to the point where I've got several ideas on the go
and I think we've all benefited this week from different perspectives on what we do.
Because someone looks at it differently.
I've got a project I've been working on with a school in Southend
and there are 40 different languages spoken at the school.
We've been thinking of recording and celebrating the different ethnic languages.
The Lab is giving us kind of other ideas where to expand.
I think it's just exciting and I've got these tools now
for creative ideas to just manifest
which will be hopefully some great digital projects in contemporary art.