Are UK Creative Industries Trying to “Move Fast and Break Things?”
I’ve been talking with a lot of artists and researchers lately regarding austerity— for the arts, education, nearly everything. Even America is being pushed into an austerity of its own kind: the executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, to remove diversity, equity, & inclusion (DEI) from the aims and objectives of the National Endowment for the Arts, and, most recently, to remove funding from the Smithsonian Museums for anything to do with promoting “divisive, race-centered ideology.” While I agree that DEI is far from perfect in practice- and I believe most of you reading will agree with that assessment- eradicating entire programmes that even partially promote it is not the solution either. I could talk more about this, but that’s not my point today (sorry). What cuts across all these endeavours, which have their own, shadowy twin here in the UK, is cultural austerity.
Typically, we think of austerity as something which is linked to financial capital. However, as recent events in the US show (and the past 15 years, in the UK), defunding arts, culture, and heritage means that we limit - or even, fully eradicate - cultural capital.
For those of you local to me, in Scotland, you might think that things are actually looking up for the first time in a long time. Yes, the recent Creative Scotland Multi-Year Funding outcome was overwhelmingly favourable compared to what we all feared. However, beyond the creative sector, and in the research sector in particular, the picture is actually more dire once you begin to look more closely.
As I was mentioning to an artist just the other day, “I would have never gotten the funding for my PhD if I applied through Edinburgh College of Art.”
That’s a problem.
And, to be incredibly clear, I did not pursue the topic I am pursuing because the funding was available. Rather, I first encountered the intersection between theatre and technology at a Virtual Reality and Theatre honours seminar (yes, that’s right) at NYU in 2019. Then I chose to write an undergraduate thesis about it. Now I’m pursuing a PhD in the area.
The paradox of austerity many researchers and artists like myself face is a mix of overwhelming amounts of funding and hardly any funding at all. More specifically, I am talking about the CoSTAR and Immersive Arts programmes:
UKRI has pumped £75.6 million into CoSTAR, which is gradually launching several 'labs' across the UK dedicated to research and development around the implementation and integration of a host of technologies into the fields of live performance, game design, film and television, and more. The CoSTAR LiveLab, hosted by the University of York and intended to be the hub for development in live performance in particular, includes three laboratory spaces: "a large-volume commercial virtual production stage with high-resolution motion tracking, LED panels and 3D immersive sound, a network lab for performer-performer and performer-audience interaction, and an end-user experience lab for virtual production."
The Immersive Arts UK programme is giving away £3.6 million to creatives across the UK with an interest in “making art with technology to actively involve an audience.” Mind you, “immersive” art doesn’t always have a technological component, and it certainly doesn’t need one, but perhaps this was necessary to greenlight this massive programme. And the response from the creative sector has been overwhelmingly positive, with 2,500+ applications submitted in the first round of the fund.
Are creatives genuinely interested in advancing their practice at this intersection of the arts and technology?
Or
Are they just doing whatever it takes to get by?
Is this a problem across just the creative and research sectors, or is this an issue with government funding (and priorities) more broadly?
This reminds me of the UK government’s recent promise to “unleash AI”, fully harnessing the “power” of this technology. Here, we have to be careful: technology is not going to solve all our problems. In fact, I’m not entirely convinced it can even solve 50% of them.
On the other hand, I do agree that the arts should “move with the times.” In theatre in particular, it is actually so slow to catch up that, when I explained my research to one theatre artist, they thought this included moving from analogue to digital light boards (face palm). And perhaps these massive and multiple schemes are helping to bridge this gap. Or maybe, they’re pushing the industry in a place it just doesn’t want to go.
No matter what, we cannot allow technology to win out above arts and culture. As a matter of fact, the UK government sees them as one and the same on paper: “IT, software and computer services” are included in the UK Creative Industries!
The bottom line is, as both a researcher and an artist, the message I’m being sent is that my artistic work doesn’t matter. I should upskill in something related to technology and secure my future that way. And every day, I have to remind myself that my practice is valuable— so valuable, in fact, that people are no longer asking, what can tech do for the arts, but what can the arts do for tech?
