Inspiring Digital Engagement Festival, Sheffield

Last Wednesday I was invited to speak at Sheffield Hallam University's Inspiring Digital Engagement event. See http://grou.ps/inspiringdigitalengagement where hopefully more evidence of the day and discussion will appear over time:

Overall lots of interesting ideas and debate, in an area which I really believe folly has a lot to offer.

A few other projects presented on the day worth checking out:

• Benedict Phillips spoke about the Digital Media Labs residency project in Hull (for which folly was invited to nominate artists earlier this year)
• St Lukes in Manchester's self-publishing project slap-dash
• cSPACE's Geezer Power and Young Person's Guide to East London
• Access Space and Furtherfield's Zero Dollar Laptop project

Some initial thoughts I had relating to the work folly's developing:

• I presented our libraries artists-in-residence scheme, Radar, as a case study, and in doing so it seemed to reinforce the point for me that at its core Radar isn't actually about providing direct digital participation opportunities in libraries, it's helping the library service imagine and understand the breadth of digital inclusion/participation/engagement opportunities they should or could be offering and why.
• It seemed to me that there is still a disconnect for a lot of people when trying to understand the impact/value of an artist in this sphere - e.g. it's not about direct IT skills development for individuals, it's about affecting longer term changes in both service provision and individual's attitudes, behaviours, aspirations etc (and about being able to articulate/evidence the effects this has on employability, socio-economic inclusion, social mobility, social capital, health/well being etc as successfully as the more direct skills transfer activities do).
• This links into a point that I think is sometimes ignored in favour of "teaching IT skills" approaches to digital inclusion - to be digitally literate requires so much more than just IT skills - it's about how we relate to each other, contribute to society and make/understand/share meaning, in a current and future digital context.
• Is it not so much about affecting an individual with your art practice as it is about affecting the situation(s) in which individuals operate?
• Lorraine Leeson of cSPACE, another of the speakers, made a great point about "provision" (the direct offers of access and basic skills transfers) being a top-down approach - powers-that-be deciding what people need, whereas engagement = a shared process
• Is digital inclusion the issue which art/artists should/could claim to be able to tackle, or is it about how the arts can inspire people, in this case through digital tools/opportunities, to address other issues (e.g. all the things that reports like the Race Online manifesto claim to be benefited by an individual's digital participation, increased digital literacy and increased digital skills) and if so isn't the case to be made just the same as the case made by all socially engaged/community/outreach arts which address these issues in other ways?