ACCA launches its Digital Wing

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) has officially launched its first-ever Digital Wing, a dynamic online platform allowing creatives, artists, curators and academics to engage in different ways with audiences.

Accessible via the ACCA website from January 30, senior curator Shelley McSpedden said Digital Wing’s first live week had been “really exciting”.

“We are really thinking of the Digital Wing as being something that evolves through time as an iterative process, and over the coming years we will continue to develop projects and the platform,” she said.

“We are being quite transparent about that and having discussions about how it serves our artists, our community and audience.”

Spurred on by the rise of digital technology, ACCA decided to engage in the long-term research process in 2021 and started surveying arts organisations, artists, creatives, curators, academics, and technologists about the way they use digital platforms and infrastructure, and online technologies.

This research was the basis for the platform and allowed for ACCA to explore ways in which the Digital Wing could consist of publications, new digital commissions such as artworks, and be a platform for writing.

“It’s also about thinking of the future of creative practice and understanding that more digital platforms and technologies will be used within work, in our everyday lives, and to engage with audiences,” Ms McSpedden said.

The key driver for us is really about expanding our reach and an online platform will allow ACCA to access people in different regions in Australia, and also throughout the world, which helps spread the work of creatives and artists and allows for further discussions and interactions.

To coincide with the launch of the Digital Wing, ACCA launched Digital Publication which is based on the current in-person exhibition running in ACCA’s physical gallery spaces; Data Relations.

The online publication explores the same theme of how technology and AI is impacting people’s relationships with one another, but through moving it to online, ACCA has been able to show a multitude of works in different formats.

This has allowed the leading writers, artists, and academics involved in the research to include audio, visual, and interactive digital components.

The Digital Wing also rounded off its first week online with the launch of the digital commission Offset.

The work is a major new digital artwork by New York-based artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, and “functions as an alternate carbon credit registry for the emerging global voluntary carbon offset market”, as described on the website.

Similar to the first publication to go live, Offset is considered as part of the current exhibition on show in the gallery spaces, as they are said to be “working in tandem”.

Ongoing expansion and growth of the Digital Wing will also see further developments made to continue to allow, when applicable and possible, for the virtual and physical spaces to intertwine and work in conjunction with one another. •

To access ACCA’s Digital Wing, visit: acca.melbourne/digital-wing