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Featured Artist: Dave Webb

Welcome to a new series of interviews with the incredibly talented Artists that facilitate our workshops and training.

At Creativity Works we work alongside experienced, creative, responsive Artists who endeavour to ensure successful participant led activities. The majority of our Artists are socially engaged practitioners. This means that they work with genuine depth and ‘an expanded repertoire’ – allowing participants to feel supported, factoring in time and space for personal and social reflection, development and growth.

We’d like to start with one of our newest Artists, Dave Webb.

Three women look towards a screen, with Dave Webb between them. Dave is wearing a dark green, spotted t shirt, black framed glasses and has short, dark grey hair. The women have a laptop and one of them has their hand hovering over the keyboard.

Dave Webb delivering a workshop

After completing a MSc in Creative Computing in 2020, Dave moved away from traditional IT to become a freelance creative technologist and artist. He now lectures at Bath Spa University in Creative Computing and is resident at ‘The Studio,’ Bath Spa University’s incubator for new creative, arts and performance talent.

Please could you introduce yourself and what you do for Creativity Works
I am a creative technologist, which means I use technology for creative aims. That could be an art project where I am the artist, or more often working with other artists to use technology in their work. It could also be a commission, like developing a game or a data visualization for a museum. I lecture in Creative Computing at Bath Spa University. I love introducing people to coding and other technology through creative activities, and showing that it is available for anyone to learn and use. This is the work I will be doing with Creativity Works.

A dark room holds a number of screens, each a different size and presented portrait or landscape. On the screens are brightly coloured waves lines, and one says ‘I need 56.2 percent of you.’ Two people are looking at the screens, one woman with long curly hair in a black jumper and a man with very short blond hair and a silver sequinned jacket.

AI Hall of mirrors at Glastonbury 2022

What made you decide to work for Creativity Works? 
As fellow residents at The Studio, Stacey and I have had many conversations. I am very aware of how both creative activities and technology have actual and perceived barriers to becoming involved. There seemed to be an overlap between the work that Creativity Works do with communities, and my interest in lowering those barriers to access for coding, and using technology for creative and fun outcomes. The opportunity presented itself as part of the current programme of creative workshops to empower vulnerable people.  Learning to code and making with technology should be available to all.
A boy with a white shirt and short, dark brown hair is sat in front of a laptop with his hand on the tracking pad. There is coding on the left of the screen and a kaleidoscope-style image on the right in reds, greens and blues.

A  student in a coding workshop

Could you briefly describe your career path to date

I have always worked with IT and technology but did not have any exposure to the arts until quite recently. I had a change of career when a business failed, and discovered this overlap between technology and creativity. I have met so many interesting people with different ideas, skills and life experiences than I ever did in my more corporate jobs before. I keep discovering new ways to work with technology, and new people to work with.
 
What advice would you give freelancers looking to work in arts and technology?

As a newcomer to the arts and creative thinking, I found I had to loosen up and embrace the idea that it’s OK for ideas to be wrong, and in fact it’s an essential part of the process – to generate and share imperfect ideas and not be afraid of feeling uncomfortable about that. It unlocks better ideas, and invites the opinions of other people. It’s a tough lesson, and contradicts some of our instincts to protect our most vulnerable self. On the technology side, learning a new skill like coding is intimidating, but if you learn it because you have something you want to do, like solve a problem or create an image in a particular way it becomes much more engaging and rewarding. I try to tackle both of these in workshops I run.

Is there anywhere our readers can follow your career and work?

I mostly share what I am working on through instagram. You can find me @crispysmokedweb, and I have my recent and historical projects on https://remented.com/portfolio/

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