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Transforming Collections: open call for practice research residencies

A colourful and fluid digital artwork with purple and pink shades against a black frame
  • Written byCat Cooper
  • Published date 30 September 2022
A colourful and fluid digital artwork with purple and pink shades against a black frame
Clara Boulard: MRes Art: Moving Image, Central Saint Martins, UAL.

UAL Decolonising Arts Institute has launched an open call for artist practice researchers to undertake a series of virtual residencies as part of the Transforming Collections project.

Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation, Heritage is one of 5 Discovery projects announced in September 2021 by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of Towards a National Collection (TaNC): a 5-year research and development programme harnessing the potential of new technology to dissolve barriers between UK collections.

Led by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute in collaboration with UAL Creative Computing Institute and in partnership with Tate and 15 national and international museum collections, archives and arts charities, Transforming Collections aims to demonstrate what an emerging, distributed yet connected and evolving digital national collection can look like, and in so doing, empower people in collectively reimagining art, heritage and nation.

We welcome practice-based research proposals for new digital and/or physical commissioned works that seek to critically and playfully intervene in and disrupt collections, to generate insights and understandings of the ways in which the Transforming Collections research can enable new stories to be told. Artists will have the distinctive opportunity to work with machine learning software developed by the project team as both investigative tool and creative medium. Up to 8 virtual research residences will start in January 2023 and conclude in March 2024. The call is open to mid-career or established yet institutionally under-represented artists, such as artists who identify as black, brown or people of colour. Artist researchers working in any media can apply, including digital, audiovisual, live art, performance and installation art.

What histories, stories and connections do our collections conceal or neglect to reveal? How can machine learning help us to examine patterns in data – including absences and omissions – and interrogate collections’ habits in highlighting what is known, or hiding what is unknown? Drawing on the project’s early findings and emerging tools, we look forward to working with artist-researchers to critically imagine what an evolving digital national collection can be or become.

— Dr susan pui san lok, Transforming Collections Principal Investigator and Director of the Decolonising Arts Institute

Artist researchers will be supported by the Transforming Collections team at UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute and Creative Computing Institute towards the research, development and production of their work with machine learning tools and collections data.

Transforming Collections will convene an international public conference on 20-21 April 2023 at the Van Abbemuseum, the Netherlands, foregrounding interdisciplinary practice research as a key theme.

In autumn 2024, new works generated by the virtual residencies will feature as part of a Transforming Collections x Tate Learning public programme, which will include digital and/or physical displays as online or onsite interventions. Transforming Collections will also work with Art UK to showcase the artists commissions, engaging their Art Detective initiative to invite the wider UK public to contribute to existing knowledge around works in collections highlighted by the project.

Apply

Find out more and apply. The deadline for submissions is 12 midday on 30 October 2022.