Last 9th of September, the members of Better Factory consortium dove into the project and explored the collaboration opportunities and challenges between industry and arts.
Why art and creativity are so important for the industry sector? This is one of the questions that motivated the participants to the first workshop organised by S+T+ARTS together with Better Factory in the framework of Ars Electronica event.
Ars Electronica is a diverse and unique event. Its history reflects the rapid course of the digital revolution – it is peppered with new ideas and great visions that went around the world, groundbreaking prototypes that opened doors to different worlds, new forms of communication that radically changed our interaction, innovative business models that shook the very foundations of the economy and were downright prophetic works by artists who followed all of this, commented on and asked uncomfortable questions.
Better Factory challenges and opportunities
The workshop, moderated by Natalia Cardona from MWCapital, started with the project coordinator of Art and Research at Gluon, Ramona Van Gansbeke, who introduced the Better Factory project, its challenges, and opportunities.
This introduction was followed by Rodolfo Groenewoud van Vliet, business director at In4art explains how artists and industry can collaborate and which is the relation between art and industries: “Thus, if artists start experimenting from a scientific point of view, they can create new futures.”
His speech concluded with some ideas on how artists can collaborate to participate in industry transformation.
Ali Muhammad, head of Robotic Systems at European Dynamics, presented RAMP, a one-stop-shop B2B platform where transactions of automation technology services can be carried out fully in a digital space. Moreover, he spoke about the different possibilities that the RAMP platform offers.
Marco Duarte, project manager of Inova+ explained the different ways to apply or find the right partnerships in the European funding landscape.
Understanding the collaboration between artists and industry
The session was followed by an interactive workshop through a mural collaborative board that was designed to collect feedback from the participants. Four exercises were proposed to identify key aspects that should be defined at the start of a collaboration between artists and industry partners, best practices for effective communication during the partnership, main conditions to validate the product development on the artistic side, and the main risks/concerns regarding the share of the propriety rights.
You can find some of the ideas that were discussed, we will be happy to receive more thoughts. Do not hesitate to add yours here. For more information about Better Factory, visit our website and follows us on Twitter or LinkedIn.
