Arts Council England has introduced “digital arts” as a new discipline to enable it to better track the scale of investment in this area and support future policy and funding decisions.
Digital arts will become the grantmaker’s tenth supported art form discipline and is the first to be introduced in more than 20 years.
In collaboration with its National Portfolio Organisations, the grantmaker has defined digital arts as “creative practice where digital technology fundamentally shapes how work is conceived, made and experienced”.
This will include digital storytelling, socially engaged digital practice, immersive installations, interactive and game-based art, virtual production, AI and generative systems, data-driven art, digital craft and decentralised technologies.
A report examining artist-led uses of AI, published today by Braid UK fellow Oonagh Murphy, found that since 2019, ACE has invested £4m in creative practitioners using AI technologies in their work.
It found that £900,000 of this was specifically targeted at helping 88 individual practitioners develop new AI skills.
Of the total invested, 32 per cent went to visual arts, followed by 18 per cent to dance, 17 per cent to combined arts, 12 per cent to theatre, 9 per cent to music and 9 per cent to digital arts.
The grantmaker said that by introducing digital arts as a discipline, it would be better able to track the scale and impact of investment in this area, supporting future policy and funding decisions.
“It will also provide stronger evidence of how public investment in digital arts can support economic growth,” ACE said.
The grantmaker’s Digital Culture Network, which aims to develop and increase the digital skills and maturity of the creative and cultural sector in England, will also appoint an AI tech champion.
Owen Hopkin, director of new technologies at ACE, said: “Today’s announcement marks an important shift in placing digital arts on an equal footing with our other supported disciplines and it shows that this work is already playing an integral role in the future of our creative and cultural sector.”
