Creative Ecology around Watershed

In Bristol apart from places like Aardman and the BBC there’s also a very large group of freelancers and artists. What we've been able to do is create a kind of creative ecology where people share their ideas. For example, we connect a filmmaker with a writer or we help to find a way to profile a new film at a festival somewhere in Europe. We see ourselves as an active hub that’s encouraging new ideas and new talent, showcasing it in the cinema or on the internet and trying to help these people to move the practice along. But throughout all of this we always get the artists and the producers to engage with the audience, because it's always the audience that provides the feedback and lets you know how you can make your work stronger, so you can learn for the next time. This is a very public-facing environment. Over the time we have built up a very strong relationship with the professional community in the city and with the universities. It is precisely this network of practice that comes together in Watershed that has had such a major impact on the city. It has raised confidence and levels of activity, it has increased innovation and it's led to Bristol being seen as one of the leaders in converging digital technology and creativity. Our practice is very much based on the openness, which goes right back to 1982 when we were set up as a space that was very open. We are as interested in working with a school as we are in working with an Oscar-winning filmmaker. In fact, what is most exciting for us is to bring an Oscar-winning filmmaker into a school to do a project together. Before Christmas we have for example launched an online advent calendar, called electricdecember.org, which is about young people making and also curating content and then presenting it to the world. Our curatorial approach is all about how far you can push yourself and to what degree we can help you realize your potential. We've thus gone beyond being a culture centre to being a catalyst that animates creative energy in our city and projects it out through the internet. With the arrival of the 21st century, the internet and the digital media enabled Watershed to expand its impact and to engage with a lot more people. We were very lucky that we had a very fast internet connection very early on as part of a university research project. This allowed us to experiment, to start making new work and to bring together people from the art community with the commercial community and young people. We created the dshed - digitalshed.net - to publish the works in progress as well as finished works, and talks and discussions, so it became a repository of a growing body of knowledge and content. This way a lot more people engaged with us even if they weren't present in the building. The building itself is a really busy hub with all sorts of people using it for all sorts of different purposes but underneath there's a growing base of ideas generation and content making. This energy fuels the whole organization.

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Creative Ecology around Watershed

Dick Penny, MBE

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