GrowinG Future innovators - ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative ...

175 Shipsides (2006)
176 http://fact.tv/
an almost vertical ‘slab’ wall made of school
tables, with holes cut to act as hand and
foot holes….
Working, really for the first time, within
a school environment, I was aware of
discussions about success and achievement
and how these are measured… Asking
the ubiquitous questions of “how has
the project affected you?” or “what is
the impact of the project?” ‘Height with
magazines’ uses a stack of (vintage)
mountaineering magazines to suggest
an absurd way of measuring or assessing
an expansion or ‘growth’ in stature,
knowledge and experience. This work
accumulated names and height through the
exhibition period.
Images from my collection of vintage
magazines appear in the photographic
series of Untitled landscapes. The
magazines acted as a resource throughout
the project and the group became quite
attached to them—often having favourite
images and making drawings from images.
The magazines were selected by each
young person and they were asked to
consider their pose, how they held the
magazine and their expression for the
photograph. Some fun responses came
about through their inventiveness and
response to the images. 175
Leadership and energy:
Increasingly common to contemporary arts
institutions are ‘peer-led’ programs—social
clubs functioning as project groups that are
run by young adults for young adults but with
support from the institution to realize ideas.
Summing up the concept and approach, Anna
Kronenburg of FACT explains, “the young
people decide what it is they want to learn
and how they want to do it and we facilitate
that for them.”
Even though peer-led programs are usually
extra-curricula, participants are still regularly
recruited through contact with school
programs. Members range from young
people who are simply curious about creative
media through to those more focused on
developing an arts portfolio and career. The
groups engage onsite and online, utilizing
project websites or social networking media
such as Twitter, Facebook and Myspace.
FACT’s peer-led program began in 2007 and
emerged out of a project involving a group of
local skateboarders who had been interested
in making films about skate boarding. While
undertaking this creative endeavour, they
came up with the name Freehand. They
began developing its brand and also worked
with a design company to establish its web
site. 176 The initiative now includes Freehand
TV, an arts-based channel, like you-tube, that
acts as a platform for youth-led events, ideas
and innovation. Anna Vroneburg explains the
early impact of the program:
They’ve done a number of projects
together [but] they’ve only started to peer
lead. So they didn’t peer lead straight away.
They were gaining new skills. Then once
the older young people involved started to
gain those skills became aware of where
they should go next, they were quite keen
then on recruiting new young people and
actually showing them how to make a
documentary film, for example, through the
things that they’ve learned here.
The program is aimed at 13 to 19 year
olds who have an interest in film and new
media, technology. Some things they get
involved with are just watching films and
talking about them afterwards. And then
there are sort of sub groups, depending
on their interests. There’s an online group
that meet and they specifically want to
work on the web site and Flash animation.
Then there’s another group who tend
to fundraise and make their own films,
documentaries, and fiction films. They
pick and choose the areas that they’re
interested in.
I worked on a project last year with a
group of young people and they basically
took control of it from start to finish…
They knew that they wanted to work with
an artist to create a project to work with
other young people from different areas
in response to a FACT exhibition. So they
wrote the application themselves, they put
it in, and were successful in getting funding.
We brainstormed together, but they led it.
Then they put a call out for artists. They
read through the applications to shortlist
themselves, then interviewed six artists
when they came to pitch. They selected an
artist and then worked with a quite hard to
reach group from Liverpool to deliver it.
Growing future Innovators: a scoping study 53