Digital Scan (2023)
research

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented, acute period of digital experimentation and transformation in the Australian performing arts sector due to the widespread closure of venues. Deploying the kind of creative and design thinking the sector is best known for, arts organisations boldly explored how digital platforms could support new distributed ways of working as well as new means of creating and distributing creative content to audiences online. Outcomes were highly varied and uneven, revealing organisational vulnerabilities and inequalities in terms of access decades in the making.

This research sought to consolidate the experiences and lessons from this extraordinary period of disruption and experimentation and seeks to understand how these practices are shaping new digital futures for the sector. 

The 2023 Digital Scan engaged with 59 organisations and over 150 individuals, with a particular focus on National Performing Arts Partnership Framework (NPAPF) organisations and identified digital innovators. It included desktop reviews, surveys, listening sessions, a digital conversation platform, and data that was collaboratively interpreted at multiple points by an extended research team. It identified two key mindsets in the performing arts: digital optimists who primarily see the digital as an opportunity, and digital ambivalents who see the role of digital in the arts as limited
and potentially risky. Building upon these, this research then identified how resource flows (skills and funding), networks and relationships, and power structures are shaping digital innovation in the performing arts, forming nine key opportunities that Creative Australia, state and territory governments, and arts and cultural organisations can use to advance meaningful and sustainable digital development in the performing arts.

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Creative Australia

In collaboration with Aden Date with Dr Amanda Mwenda, Johanna Bell and Dr Josh Harle.

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Artwork: April Phillips