The project ‘Digital Art Academy - cultural education for digital skills’ is a collaboration between four partner organisations who have both the Arts and education at their core: Intercult (SE), Hellenic Association of Adult Education (GR), City Culture Institute (PL) and Fablevision (SC). The project’s overarching goal is to support the growth and intertwining of digital and creative competences for both adult educators and artistic professionals. All our project partners have a common desire to explore and support digital innovation within the CCS. In Europe, artists are struggling to cope with the post Covid-19 world in which there is an imperative to find new ways of creating and delivering content, specifically for certain sectors within the CCS. Through a positive lens, the situation is also a breeding ground for opportunity which the open attitude and curiosity of creative practitioners also supports. In order to achieve this, the project partners have recognised a need for more cross-sectoral collaboration in order to nurture a thriving community of practice that can work effectively together and accelerate innovation through the open sharing of knowledge. This project brings together adult educators with creative practitioners who, in cooperation with multimedia experts, will use digital technologies to create new art forms. Layered on top of this, the educators observe this process of learning by doing and transmute the process into educational content which can support other educators in the creation of course content. Extending beyond the upskilling of the project’s direct participants, one of the project outputs is the development of curriculum guidelines to support other educators in the digital upskilling of CCS professionals seeking further training. Overall, this project will directly result in a growth in the digital and creative competences of the project participants. It will also indirectly impact the competence levels of those who are recipients of trainings developed out of the project’s intellectual outputs. Furthermore, integral to the project results, is the development of adult educators’ competences to create course material and teach course content on the topic of the use of digital tools in artistic production and broadcasting.
The subject of the activities has been the lack of knowledge on the competence map of the cultural sector: digital tools for production and dissemination. The project aimed to experiment with new processes of training educators and artists in digital production and digital dissemination of art works.The project’s main objective has been developing innovative digital training solutions to enhance the effectiveness and competitiveness of cultural workers , artists and persons in the informal educational sector. The overall aim was to create a cross-learning between the creative, the educational and the technical sectors. The project has been a combination of learning digital techniques as well as examining and creating new artistic formats where the digital techniques are an integrated part of the artwork. Cultural projects have key roles in delivering informal learning, particularly at a time when artists and cultural workers must adjust to new demands of producing performances, stage events and distribution in a different format. An objective has also been to develop a methodology for informal teaching of the use of digital tools, aimed at cultural workers, artists and teachers within the non formal educational sector.
Bridging Digital is a cooperative project, focusing on innovative practices and enhancing the digital skills in the cultural and educational sectors. The project started in the ongoing pandemic as an attempt to strengthen artists and persons working in the cultural sector as this sector had been “hit dramatically” by COVID-19, causing not only job losses but also a loss of identity. An OECD report on the impact of COVID 19 on the CCS, identified this sector as among the most affected by the current global pandemic. This is attributed to the sector’s reliance on venue-based activities which have been hardest hit by social distancing measures.The project was created as a response to the lack of training for artists and cultural workers in the fields of digital creativity to meet the challenges of the future in the cultural field, which we identify to remain also in a post-pandemic life.This crisis created a strong pressure to innovate rapidly with digitalisation emerging as the most promising avenue for the sector’s development. Virtual and augmented realities can create new forms of cultural experience and the movement of content on-line can be a means to satisfy the demand for cultural content despite social distancing measures.