digi_club

digi_club was a two-year project aimed at young people, through which folly explored new ways of working to engage teenagers in high quality digital arts experiences and encourage young talent to thrive.
 
In January 2007 folly launched digi_club as a digital youth club for young people aged between 12 and 16. It aimed to encourage young people to create their own digital art. digi_club was a place to meet artists and be inspired.
 
Digital art is often created and presented using tools and media that are familiar to young people, such as the internet, digital video and even games. digi_club was developed by folly in the belief that this makes digital art an accessible 'way in' to art appreciation and creation for young people as well as a way to introduce new, creative ways of using technology that may already be familiar to them. The younger generation frequently referred to as Digital Natives has grown up with and readily takes for granted all the different devices, platforms and tools used to access, create and play with digital technologies.
 
digi_club aimed to increase the skills of young people and encourage them to think more creatively about their use of new technology through a programme of workshops, online activities and facilitated forums.
 
The digi_club website was the central platform for activity - an online space where young people could find inspiration from each other and artists. They could submit their own artistic work, comment upon each others work and ideas, meet new people and learn from one another.
 
digi_club was a unique online space, focused on encouraging young people to create their own digital art. It hosted a membership area of young people's work, access to professional artist's projects, a forum for discussion and facilitation and pointed young people to free tools and resources to develop their own work.
 
It was a safe and secure environment for 12 – 16 year olds, monitored on a daily basis by folly according to our Child Protection Policy and government standards for communicating with children online.
 
During the two and a half years that the digi_club website was live, around 400 young people worldwide became members, with 40 active online participants, submitting over 150 works of art, 100 blog entries, and 400 comments on forum topics, submitted art and blogs. The website achieved on average 8000 unique visits per month.
 
Although the delivery of digi_club as an offer to young people has now ended, the digi_club website now exists as an archive of all this activity.
 
folly also commissioned an online work of interactive art from internationally acclaimed artist duo boredomresearch, especially for digi_members: The Forest of Imagined Beginnings was a new type of experiential online forum, an online landscape vulnerable to the whims and wants of the digi_club community who could adopt this digital terrain as their own. 150 messages have been left in the digi_club forest.
 
A physical digi_club workshop programme was developed in collaboration with a range of partners across England's Northwest including The Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston, Cornerhouse in Manchester, More Music in Morecambe, The Adult College in Lancaster, The Marsh Community Centre in Skerton, BBC Radio Lancashire, and Lancaster City Council. These artist-led workshops introduced young people in the Northwest to Free and Open Source software which they could use to get creative, and explore the potential of the technology they use everyday. Work produced in the sessions is showcased on the digi_club website. Workshops have covered topics such as digital sound, digital animation, interactive art and pocket movie making.
 
The delivery of digi_club was not free of challenges, and folly has learnt a number of lessons through the development and realisation of this project.
 
We acknowledge that take-up among young people has been comparatively low, considering the potential global reach of the website. Despite reactions from adults being overwhelmingly positive, the digi_club “online youth club” model has not engaged significant numbers of young people at a meaningful level.
 
There was an obvious discrepancy between the number of people visiting the digi_club website (evidenced in the average unique monthly visits figure of 8000), and the level of meaningful engagement in the platform amongst young people (40 active members submitting a total of around 250 pieces of content). It is unclear exactly what the reason for this was, however two things can be assumed – visitors to the site were mostly adults and therefore not the right age to be eligible to participate, and/or young people who did visit the site were not finding an offer which they were interested in getting involved in. This second assumption is also evidenced in the discrepancy between the number of visitors initially signing up for an account (400) versus the number of members who then continued to actively participate or contribute (40).
 
digi_club became a place for young people to share digital image manipulations, rather than the broader scope of what technologically engaged arts practice can be. As a platform digi_club was therefore not unique and, importantly for folly, not an accurate reflection of the artistic processes and ways of being creative with technology which most excite us, and are the curatorial priorities across the rest of our artistic programme. The “new type of experimental online forum”, the Forest of Imagined Beginnings, although successful in the pilot versions exhibited for adults, failed to find a significant audience of young people, and was not actively embraced by the core group of digi_club members who already used the website to share their work.
 
Although the security of a restricted web space for young people clearly held significant value for adults, through the reality of promoting such a platform to young people themselves we began to realise that a “youth club for 12 – 16 year olds” is not necessarily an exciting or cool proposition to the target audience – if teenagers can do similar things in youtube or deviantart (to name just two), and feel like they're being treated the same as everyone else in these spaces, why would they sign up to something which specifically claims to be aimed at kids?
 
folly believes in the value of digital art/culture to young people and that we have something to offer young people in the field of “getting creative with technology”. Moving forward our aim is to step back from digi_club in its current format and current age restrictions. Through research and consultation in 2009 folly will address our commitment to young people and develop a way of working which results in meaningful levels of engagement/participation, sits right within the wider regional/national/international offer and is a better reflection of folly's artistic and curatorial priorities.