Curiosity And Collaboration

Before STEAMhouse became a physical space in Digbeth, it was a concept, an idea; a centre for innovation and creation.

By Clayton Shaw

Our dream was to unite talented people from different backgrounds in the arts, science, technology, engineering and maths – the STEAM sectors – to bring amazing new ideas to life.

Now STEAMhouse is a reality we can see the space doesn’t shape us. We, the artists, the innovators, the dreamers, the thinkers shape the space. They come to us with unique and imaginative ideas, and an openness to share and collaborate. To find and meet people within and beyond their disciplines to expand their ideas and look at new ways and contexts to apply them.

If interdisciplinarity underpins STEAMhouse it is because we recognise the need for diverse voices, diverse content and diverse creation. By facilitating an open space for innovation, we can respond to rather than direct these voices, giving an equitable platform for discourse and dissent, ideas and innovation, creation and craft.

STEAMhouse partners with Hello Culture collaboratively, co-curating the programme and hopefully providing a forum beyond the day when those ideas and thinking can develop and flourish.

With a focus on diversity in technology we support different and diverse approaches and methods and allow for a fluidity and iterative approach to STEAM which democratises access.

The interplay between arts, science, technology, and engineering is one that fascinates me and the artists at Hello Culture bring with them a diverse set of skills, disciplines, media and practices at the heart of this interplay.

STEAM philosophy doesn’t allow for permissions and invitations in and in partnership with Hello Culture we want to reclaim the notions of diversity and equality where self-identification is respected and valued. Using diverse technology to represent yourself subverts the narrative of being invited in and allows you to reclaim your voice and identity and celebrate that through your creativity.

If Hello Culture: Identity explores how the arts and digital sector can find new ways to forge practices, collaborate with other sectors and contribute to creating new opportunities for experimentation, content and influence how the world sees itself and others; then STEAMhouse, through curiosity and collaboration,  becomes a place for those new practices to flourish and disrupt established methods of practice and representation.

As the world becomes more fluid and intersectional, less binary and less reductive, so STEAMhouse imagines a future of diversity in people, practice, perspective and production.