Gavin Artz, the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), explains his thinking…Collaboration is at the heart of innovation – an area very close to Gavin’s heart, in his role at ANAT, an Adelaide-based organisation that represents those people with a creative passion for emerging technologies.
“There are scientists and artists who are currently innovating and developing intellectual property in order to create and do what they do. However, this needs to be recognised in order to enable future innovation,” Gavin says.
“There is an opportunity now – at this time in history – which could be considered the ‘new renaissance’ where science, art, engineering, creativity and innovation come together.
“There is social, economic and innovative value associated with this approach and it would be a great achievement for the Creative Industries Innovation Centre to harness this,” he says.
Gavin believes that with digital forms of art and technology rapidly expanding and evolving, and a crossover is occurring between non-traditional disciplines, such as art and science at a grass-roots level. This also means there is a need to support and enable artists so that they can benefit from this commercially.
In order to achieve a world where artists are financially rewarded for their creativity, ANAT has been looking closely at a range of revenue models, with a particular focus on how to commercialise new art forms, particularly in digital media.
“We are looking at digital media models because there is an opportunity for creative industries to innovate in this area. Artists that play with technology add a human perspective and this is a truly interesting approach that also offers a great commercial opportunity.
“We also know that many artists are ignored by the economic process so our link with the Creative Industries Innovation Centre is an opportunity to engage commercialisation processes that have been applied to and benefited areas such as science and engineering and apply this to the arts space,” he says.
Gavin Artz joined ANAT in July 2009 as CEO, after two years as General Manager at the organisation, an opportunity to continue his enthusiasm for, and dedication to the Australian media arts sector.
His expertise is focused on developing viable models for media arts organisations, with an emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as improving the financial outcomes for the sector and the artists it represents.
Article as published by Creative Innovation – http://www.creativeinnovation.net.au/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia.
I would like to know more about these models that Artz mentions. Haven’t we been at the digital age for some time now? I see more and more artists working cross disciplinary including the arts and sciences. It’s everywhere.
Hi Danielle,
Yes, cross disciplinary is everywhere and we are seeing a shift from the individual artist to the collaborative team as the producers of creative culture. There is also a greater recognition that this is not just collaboration between artists, but also across, what are looking more like, entrepreneurial teams; where creators, business, tech, marketing, accounting, science and academia (too name a few) are coming together in transdisciplinary teams. This means that not only are creative works being made, but also businesses created, IP commercialised and essential research from a creative cultural base being undertaken. My favorite model is AncillaryIPs (which you can conveniently find here in Filter https://filter.anat.org.au/opinion/artistic-practi…), this model works best in this new team environment. But also software models have been tried and tested in the digital environment as well as open source and crowdsourcing.
There are some changes needed though, business needs to be educated that creative culture is a great place to look for commercialisation opportunities and there needs to more sophisticated, entrepreneurial, business training for creative practitioners.
We also need to question what is an artistic career in an era where work is getting difficult to show and nearly impossible to sell in a traditional artworld context. Would an artist be happy to have a creative career in a robotics research lab? Would you have more artistic impact from such a career? It is starting to happen, but most people have a preconceived idea of what it is to be an artist is in society.
Change is happening, this doesn't make it easy to find a path, but gives us an opportunity to create the paths.
Thanks for the great comment!!
Gavin