Feral Arts

Feral Arts employs a team of visual arts, video, and digital media artists to support various community-based projects that are designed to enable collaboration with local communities and sensitivity to local needs. Feral Arts projects provide marginal cultural and community groups with supported access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). The group partners with local communities and government and business stakeholders to build and test new tools for cultural and community development, including tailored software programmes and online resources. For example, Dajarra Community ICT Project is a technology training initiative funded through the Department of Innovation and the Information Economy.

Feral Arts' 2008-2010 programme, Storytelling in the Public Interest, works with key organisations in the arts, environment, education, and health sectors at local, state, national, and international levels to develop sustainable digital storytelling communities and networks. This work explores new and creative ways of combining images, text, voice, and music in telling stories, and is based on the belief that stories are the building blocks of culture, identity, and knowledge. The focus is on accessible systems that work well on basic personal computers (PCs).
Feral arts is using its community cultural development skills and digital media products to: promote storytelling that is respectful of Indigenous histories and reflects diversity and the multiple layers of history different people have with places; demonstrate the power of local stories in helping to build strong, viable, creative communities; and create fun, accessible and meaningful ways of working together - integrating with the work of key community networks and services, leveraging existing skills and resources, and exploring the potential of digital media technologies.

One such technology is Feral Arts' own PlaceStories, a software system for managing digital media, creating digital stories, and publishing online. It is being customised to support the communication needs of community organisations, government agencies, and others who work with communities, particularly rural and regional
communities. Stories bring together text, audio, and images in creative ways. Most are under 2 minutes long; they look and behave like videos but they are much smaller in file size. A Windows software programme installs on a standard personal computer (PC) for users to gather and manage digital content (photos, graphics, text, audio) and create digital stories. The emphasis is on accessibility, simplicity, and local ownership and control of the work produced. The second part of the system is the web server and database. This enables users to create projects, communicate, and collaborate with other users and to publish their work through online communities. Each story is given a location and appears as a story marker on the relevant project map. PlaceStories Projects are collections of stories published in a PlaceStories community, where groups of users may communicate and collaborate privately before sharing work in the broader community. Each Community has its own customised website, with nominated administrators to check all story content before it is made public.

Present and past PlaceStories projects:

• Feral Arts has been contracted by Arts Queensland to develop a customised PlaceStories Digital Storytelling System for its Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF). The work is taking place in stages between July 2007 and December 2008, and aims to have a fully operational statewide system in place by 2009.
• Feral Arts is partnering with the Mater Hospital to develop a digital storytelling system to celebrate the lives of the children born through the Neonatal Unit. The new system and the digital stories being created will be launched as part of the opening of the new hospital in mid-2008. Families who had children through the Unit are being invited to create and publish digital their own stories to a growing database to share with new patients and with future generations.
• The Landcare PlaceStories Project is a national and international arts and environment sector partnership planned for 2008-2010. The goal is to work with rural and regional communities across Australia to improve their viability and sustainability in economic, environmental and social terms, by making better use of key cultural assets (stories, histories, knowledge, networks). Click here for samples of digital stories created by participants at 6 regional training workshops conducted in October and early November 2008.
• A past project focused on the cultural needs and interests of older people (over 55 years of age) in South Brisbane and North West Queensland. Placestories built on the work of Arts Queensland's Living Memories Project (1999) through model projects, research, and online resources supporting ongoing arts and the cultural activity of older people. Feral Arts partnered with local schools and community organisations, providing teachers, students, and selected older community members with training and information about community oral projects and the scope and capacities of the current prototype of the online database. Younger people worked with older Queenslanders to share skills and experiences, making use of a range of arts and cultural media in workshop settings to explore the theme of place and cultural identity. The projects were featured online and were produced in video and CD-ROM form. This project concluded with a public launch in December 2003.
• Another youth-related ICT project was the Rural Students in Cities Support Project, which linked boarding school students with their home communities through PlaceStories.
• The aim of Feral Arts' 2002-2004 programme was to assist local cultures and communities in developing creative responses to globalisation through partnership and collaboration within the arts and cultural sector. Activities such as the Rural Communities and Globalisation Symposium 2003 (a 2-day gathering of key policy makers and rural community stakeholders in Townsville) were organised. Also, an online resource called Globosaurus was built to support discussion, collaboration, and information-sharing about globalisation and its impact on a cultural and community level. This project brought together people from different disciplines, linking local cultural and community responses to globalisation with work emerging internationally. The first 6 months of Globosaurus focused on discussion generated by the release of The Rockefeller Foundation's Community, Culture and Globalization.

Cultural Identity, Technology, Ageing, Youth, Globalisation.