Digital Artist Collaborative Project

Tender description

As part of our innovative new approaches to using our records and data to engage audiences with archives in different ways, we are seeking a Digital Artist to work with TNA to ultimately produce a long term digital art piece. We have particularly chosen to work with a Digital Artist because TNA is currently in the centre of a digital revolution. The move to taking in more and more born digital material - and the change in the way that our users access archives, increasingly using digitised material online and searching through a digital catalogue - is a key moment in the life of this institution. We want to work with a Digital Artist who can explore this change and bring some of the beauty and excitement of digital possibilities to our audiences. We believe that any art work for TNA needs to be a point of provocation as well as a beautiful object - it needs to create transparency into TNA's work, inspire conversation, and potentially provoke a greater sense of connection to the organisation. Therefore we wish to work in partnership with an artist to scope a residency which explores and reveals to the public something of the unique footprint of the material and data we hold. We see ideas of opening up unseen things and also giving a sense of scale and impact as key. The outcome of a first residency (currently planned as a 6 month, part time residency) will be a 'proof-of-concept' temporary exhibition/ digital art piece which will be open to all visitors to the building. This first residency will be a scoping and testing exercise for us to explore the possibilities for a longer-term installation onsite. We aim to work in partnership with the Appointed Digital Artist to apply for funding to Arts Council England: Grants for the Arts. Should this first residency be successful, we will look to build further on the proof-of-concept to develop a longer term digital art installation funded through a larger grant application to a funding body, for example the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). We anticipate that the total length of this Contract could be up to 3 years, with 2 optional extension periods of 12 months each (3+1+1).