Senior Lecturer in Film, Dr Richard Misek, has recently launched his new research project, ‘Digital Access to Arts and Culture beyond Covid-19‘ which which will explore widening access to arts and culture through streaming video.
Since the global spread of COVID-19, video streaming has emerged as perhaps the most popular and effective tool for maintaining access to arts and culture. Live streamed concerts, online film festivals, virtual gallery tours, Zoom-based performances and workshops, and countless other innovations in digital programming have helped physically-sited arts and culture institutions stay ‘open’, and provided locked-down audiences with desperately needed opportunities for cultural engagement and shared experience.
The recent outpouring of creative alternatives to physically-sited events has also lifted former geographic and economic constraints on who can access arts and culture. The lessons being learnt through current crisis-driven innovations in digital delivery could – if gathered, consolidated, and channelled into sector-wide discussion and action – help provide arts and culture organisations with the resilience and agility needed to adapt their business models to a post-COVID landscape. They also present a unique opportunity for them to engage with new and more diverse audiences.
This project – developed in collaboration with Arts Council England (ACE) and digital support agency The Space – focuses on providing arts and culture organisations of all sizes and from across the UK with specific, practical knowledge about how to manage their digital programming.