In the 1960s a radical theatre director Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price imagined a place called a Fun Palace. A place of radical learning, a ‘university of the streets’ a place of making, play, art, science, a building for everyone; especially the working classes. Somewhere you can be entertained, you can learn to build or make something, or your can teach another to build or make something. Littlewood and Price’s Fun Palace paled in the face of 1960s city planning. But this year hundreds of Fun Palaces are happening around the country; free, radical and transformative, and driven by the communities that they are a part of. A place where sciences and arts and people meet.
In the context of that, this blog post is a call to arms. not a call to ‘working out how artists and technologists can work together’ – it’s a call to demolish the premise built into our (relatively recent) notions of genre and form, through a radical recognition of our similarities. Some of that premise has caused us to work separately, some of that premise has meant that our somewhat separate communities have developed languages that mean the same thing but sound different. Improv theatre is a game jam. Paper prototyping and play testing is devising theatre. Hack culture is DIY music. You might only know what half of those mean but they’re really similar ways of working I promise.
So this is a call to those working in tech and games and digital and play – an invitation to those who are experts in the use of the material of technology, games and play – get involved. And to those running Fun Palaces already, make contact. This being the first year, and this idea springing first from the mind of an artist (Stella Duffy wanted to reimagine the Fun Palace in honour of Joan’s centenary) this idea is first being heard about in arts and community centres. That’s in part why I was brought on board as Digital Champion – to encourage people to remember the sciences bit, or at least to fold into their activities digital culture – a place where science (technology) and the arts intermingle, meet.
“Technology is not something to be used cynically, to qualify for funding, or to add a veneer of supposed “innovation” to tired work. For art is a purpose, not an excuse. To make art with technology is to make art out of technology. Artists should consider it as a material like any other.“ – Tom Armitage, technologist
Both the arts and digital technology are equally capable of being functional and tool based (design, architecture, advertising), as well as fundamental world-shifting genre busting works of absolute art (Kentucky Route Zero, glitch art, Subtlemobs). Unfortunately, much of the talk and work around digital technology in the arts perpetrates ideas about 1) them being separate things in the first place 2) that the interplay between technology and art is a new one. Digital culture is culture just with a new set of tools to make it, video games (for example) reference a culture of play that is at the heart of human development throughout our existence. In the 1950s in a book called Homo Ludens Johan Huizinga explained that:
“Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.” (p.1, 1995)
In this context, for example, theatre and video games are both forms of make believe that share a common heritage – both of them formalisations of play. New technology has been shifting and becoming how we make art since we’ve been, um, making art and technology.
Fun Palaces is the perfect place to rediscover how arts and technology intersect. Because they are self-generating places where new rules can be invented. The mainstream Big Museums and Galleries continue to digital art as separate to art (and to for the most part ignore games entirely, occasionally extending them the odd exhibition). The fact is though – a Fun Palace has much more in common with a Hack Space than it does most Big Art Spaces. There are other kinds of making. In both tech and the arts – DIY, grass roots, indie game, hacker, folk cultures.
The idea that only organisations with institution-level capacity to support formal and still conventionally artist-authored pieces of ‘digital art’ work are capable of a digital/arts crossover is a damaging one. It vanishes the edges. It denies an openness, radical level of experimentation and community context that is also an aspect of (some of) digital and arts culture. So this is a call for the grassroots – the DIY, the people working with paper, card, Arduino, Twine and their expansive imaginations, and for community and folk art-tech. On the 4th and 5th of October a 2 day festival of community arts, science and technology (over more than 100 venues – some physical, some digital, some community centres, some forests, swimming pools, chocolate shops, caravans, radio stations and arts centres) will happen for the first time. A University of the Street – a shifting, fluid space where a community makes its own culture – including the digital kind.
If you’re someone who works in tech/science/games/digital and you’re free some of that weekend – join in. Check the map for the nearest Fun Palace you could join and offer them an activity you could run, or start your own, and invite in others to join you. All it needs to do is hit a few key values: 1) that it’s free, 2) that it’s local, driven by the community 3) that it is in small ways transformative – people learn, enjoy, think, make, play, do.
It won’t be perfect this year, or in 5 years time, but this is a beginning, the rest is up to you. If you’re not sure where to start but like the cut of this idea’s gib – of connecting the grassroots of tech to the grassroots of art – get in contact with me. I will help to cultivate conversations between current Fun Palaces and interested people, and I’ll also help hack labs and technologists to run their own Fun Palaces and invite artists and the local community (who think they’re not technologists) in. You can grab me @hannahnicklin on Twitter or at HN@funpalaces.co.uk and I’ll explain more, and help find ways you might fit in.
Onwards, towards a new, radical, folk culture of owning and making arts and tech. Here, with Fun Palaces, but also with all of the other great community tech and art that also happens.