Arts for Social Change
The Twelve Apostles of Rombalds Moor, Ilkley: Photo © Intercultural Roots (cc-by-sa/2.0)
Is an app Intercultural Roots is developing that will allow users to explore an online gallery of media at particular places of interest to interact with or contribute their own content. Beyond entertainment and eco-tourism, the app aims to merge art, nature, and community while promoting environmental awareness and local involvement in local initiatives like reducing pollution and protecting wildlife.
Wanted: Artists, makers, practitioners, community leaders, naturalists, historians, storytellers, ecologists etc. *
EcoGPXTM, an innovative environmental smART app and mobile web experience developed by Intercultural Roots (IR) and funded by an Innovate UK Creative Catalyst Award, aims to expand the ways artists engage with audiences and users encounter the environment. IR is seeking collaborators for two workshop intensives in September and October 2023. Chosen artists will be paid for workshop and development time.
Open Call for: artists, makers, naturalists, dancers, historians, activists, eco-practitioners, community leaders, performers, etc!
The EcoGPXTM digital ecology and app will train users in embodied practices that deepen engagement with the materials that comprise local and global ecologies and stories emerging from them - the same materials that collaborators on this pilot project will develop in workshop sessions. Through media artifacts that will be curated, designed, or made by our collaborators, this pioneering project will generate a platform that will encourage personal, creative interventions into green spaces for end users and collaborating artists. The app will also originate and develop a radical distribution platform for transmedial art works combining text, image, sound art, video, performance, movement, etc. If you can bring creative energy and expertise into a generative community project that constellates around groundbreaking environmental solutions, and creative practices, please apply. You'll find an unmatched opportunity for exploration, co-creation, and development and connect with members of a global network of artists established, fostered, and sustained by Intercultural Roots.
EcoGPXTM project has significant potential for international expansion and promises wide-reaching impacts, revolutionising human-nature interaction and enhancing ecological awareness globally but the pilot project will focus on sites in Ilkley, West Yorkshire including: Neolithic sites on Ilkley Moor, the Ilkley Manor House and Roman Fort, the River Wharfe and perhaps spaces that are important to you.
Collaborations will begin in mid September 2023 online and culminate in two intensives in Ilkley in September (14th-19th) and October 2023.
*Note: If you are keen to be involved in the project but don’t identify in one of the above categories of practitioners, please still consider applying, EcoGPXTM is a community-driven, inclusive project.
EcoGPXTM presents considerable opportunities and benefits for local arts, culture, heritage, environment and business development communities in rural areas, towns and cities through partnership. EcoGPXTM aims to promote an eco-embodied understanding of the socio-cultural history, environment and needs of a location through an artistically devised lens. The smart app will provide users with an OpenAI interfaced, media interactive and embodied connection to particular local sites that contributes to support the sustainability of local artists, creators and makers, community groups and local economies. While the chosen site location for the prototype app due to be deployed in early 2024, is Ilkley, Yorkshire, partnership proposals for future UK & International sites for 2024 development are currently being accepted and funding applications developed.
“Climate action knows no borders and EcoGPXTM will curate artists, socio-cultural historians and environmental experts to address local eco-nature and wellbeing challenges through the public’s embodied interaction with the smart app. We are already receiving requests from artists across our international network who would like their local communities to be involved.” - Dr Alex Boyd, Founder and Executive Director - Intercultural Roots.
Winner of Innovate UK Grant, Intercultural Roots, Selects Ilkley as Pilot Site to Develop Eco-Engagement Smart App - EcoGPXTM
Wanted: Artists, makers, practitioners, community leaders, naturalists, historians, storytellers, ecologists etc.
Intercultural Roots (IR), a charity dedicated to promoting embodied arts for health and social change, wants you to slide your phones back into your pockets and engage with the ecology around you relying only on the ancient technologies contained in a more traditional device - your body! To further such deep engagements by Ilkley residents, visitors, and the eco-tourists the project promises to bring in, IR’s international collective of artists, practitioners and researchers is working with Ilkley residents to develop (wait for it... ) a smartphone app! ‘That’s what they call a paradox’, writes EcoGPX™ Creative Director John Zibell who on his Facebook page describes the project, which won an Innovate UK Creative Catalyst grant this year, as developing ‘a geo-fenced art gallery where works and performances curated and made by local artists trains you to see, hear, touch and taste the ecology you move through like an artist, by doing their embodied practices and eventually developing your own.’ Putting the phone away is one practice that’s built into the app which craftily asks you to navigate your own experience like ‘a cartographer of the body’s infinite landscapes.’
“As an Ilkley resident and arts practitioner myself, I’m delighted that the EcoGPX™ prototype, funded by Innovate UK, is to be piloted and will expand to benefit more areas in the UK and internationally. It promises to engage users in environmentally friendly, creative health and climate action activities as well as contributing to supporting community, cultural, heritage and economic needs.” Dr Alex Boyd, Founder and Executive Director - Intercultural Roots.
It’s not all about works of art for Intercultural Roots; it’s about fostering spaces for collaborative cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary practices. So the artists from the local area invited to make the art - during a series of workshop intensives in Ilkley September 14-19th and again in late October - will collaborate not only with members of IR’s international community but with Ilkley-based ecologists, historians, and community leaders. ‘Something I’ve learned as I get to know the international IR community - from artists, researchers, and eco-somatic practitioners, to educators, and climate activists - is that the story of a place needs to be told and retold not only by the people living in that place but for people who visit with a real interest in those stories’, Zibell added. ‘That’s what I want to ask of the people of Ilkley during our workshops, that they tell us their stories and allow our collaboration to be that we listen in a way that only newcomers fascinated with a place can.’
The prototype of the EcoGPX™ app is being developed in Ilkley, West Yorkshire with community groups including Ilkley Manor House, llkley Clean River Group and local artists, socio-cultural historians and ecologists. The intention is to go wider across the UK and internationally in 2024. The app will guide users to particular geo-fenced sites of interest around Ilkley where historic artifacts, climate and ecological data, images, stories, dance, performance, sound art and music will be presented. They will also be invited to make ‘DIY’ art works themselves (with guidance from the app and inspiration from the curated works it makes available). If they want to share their work it may be left as a digital surprise of imagination and felt-sense for future visitors to encounter or respond to in turn. The EcoGPX™ project team and Advisory Board will ensure gallery content is moderated to be appropriate with guidance to adhere strictly to the project’s environmental ethos of ‘leave no trace’.
For more information see the Open Call for EcoGPX™ Ilkley collaborators at this link or via the Intercultural Roots website - https://interculturalroots.org/project/ecogpx
EcoGPX™ is a Trademark owned by Intercultural Roots for Public Health CIO. ©️Copyright 2023. All Rights Reserved.
OPEN CALL FOR COLLABORATORS - PAID & VOLUNTARY OPPORTUNITIES
Wanted 14 - 19 September: Artists, makers, practitioners, community leaders, naturalists, historians, storytellers, ecologists etc.
EcoGPX™ is a new smartphone app being developed by the Intercultural Roots charity that will allow people to freely access an online gallery of engaging media filmed, recorded and photographed at particular places of interest initially in Ilkley. It will encourage people to visit those locations to be guided by and interact with unique media that artists, ecologists, musicians, historians and story-tellers will present. Anyone who wishes to record and leave their own inspired response using their smartphone will also be able to do so.
The Ilkley prototype of the app, funded by Innovate UK and planned to be ready in January 2024, isn’t just about entertainment or eco-tourism. It's a way to bridge art, nature, and community. Local community groups such as the Ilkley Clean River Group or Friends of Ilkley Moor for example, will be able to use it to educate people about the challenges Ilkley faces and how local people can get involved in improving the environment. This could include information about helping to reduce the amount of raw sewage going into the river, how to get involved in litter picking initiatives or in educating dog walkers about keeping their dogs on a leash up on the moors to protect nesting birds. It’ll certainly encourage more people to get outdoors in healthy ways to creatively engage with the amazing heritage that Ilkley offers, or to join our local community groups.
There’s an opportunity for people who are local or connected to Ilkley and the area in some way to get involved in creating and filming content for the online gallery between the 14th and 19th September. If you are interested in paid or voluntary involvement the deadline is the 7th September. Applications are invited via this link https://forms.gle/SPp1su12px3xjP379 or via https://www.interculturalroots.org/project/ecogpx
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“Global Excellence of the Year, 2022” Award winners from the 22nd World Congress, Akamai University
Intercultural Roots is a partnership of two charities each registered with the Charity Commission in the UK to operate worldwide. Intercultural Roots for Public Health (Registered Charity No. 1179885). Intercultural Roots for Traditional Embodied Arts (Registered Charity No. 1146653).
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