Ideas in Progress: Room
A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with Arts Council Senior Officer Adam Gent about how we communicate our vision and ambitions as an organisation. For a small team, it can be challenging enough to keep on top of the marketing and communications for our programme, let alone find the time to share our creative ambitions or the ideas that emerge from our colleagues and the communities of artists and filmmakers we work with. It’s not called the Engine Room for nothing.
One way of doing that, I realised, is to share some of the ideas behind unsuccessful funding applications. In a landscape where funding is limited and competition is fierce, an unsuccessful application isn’t necessarily a reflection of the quality of the idea. This is the first of what I hope will become an occasional series looking behind some of the ideas we've developed but never had the chance to realise.
Most recently, we applied to The Space Digital Commissions fund with Room: a proposed immersive digital artwork combining VR environments, LiDAR spatial scanning and 360° audio to create a shared experience of place.
As the cost-of-living crisis continues and the post-pandemic shift towards home-based living endures, our everyday spaces—bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms—have become multi-functional "Swiss Army knife" environments, accommodating work, rest, creativity and survival. We wanted to work with local people to create an explorable portrait of working-class life by capturing five homes across a range of housing types, from HMOs and social housing to new builds and caravans. The resulting work would be experienced online, through VR, and via community broadcasts, with each space shaped by the voices of its occupants. Their stories would guide audiences through both the physical environment and the wider realities of their lives. The technology wasn't the destination—it's simply another way of listening, documenting and sharing lived experience.
Of course, projects like this begin long before a funding application is written. Funding makes ideas possible, but it rarely creates them. Room grew out of conversations we've been having for years about whose stories are told, how working-class lives are represented, and how new creative tools can help people tell their own stories.The idea was also shaped by conversations about the transformative potential of the Pride in Place investment, which will benefit people living in the Bridgwater South area over the next decade. We saw an opportunity to create, in effect, a baseline—a portrait of these homes and lives before that investment has had time to take effect.
Ten years from now, the artwork could be revisited, allowing us to ask not only what has changed, but how change has been experienced. If long-term investment really does transform lives, perhaps one of the clearest places to see that transformation is in the spaces we call home.
Whether or not they ultimately receive funding, developing ideas like this is part of our job. It strengthens our practice, informs our community work and helps us imagine new ways for people to make, share and experience culture. Not every idea becomes a project—but every idea helps shape the organisation we want to be.
Deb Richardson