Spring is just around the corner. There is still a lot of unpredictability for our planned events but we are moving forward and maintaining a hybrid online/in-person format as we wait for news that things will open up again. Weekly meetings continue to design and test our program’s structure. Here’s your incubator for digital arts and cultural entrepreneurship update for March, 2022.
Using Winnipeg as a main ‘hub’ for our project we’ve been able to to start connecting and coordinating our efforts to establish a viable program.
Announcing our project on CPAC for Canada’s Inaugural National Kindness Week
We were honoured to be able to talk about our project and announce our funding during this year’s National Kindness Week Celebration. It’s the first year of this special week being celebrated and we were invited to be part of a special press conference to commemorate the event by our partners at Global Dignity Canada.
The press conference included remarks from Senator Munson, who championed the National Kindness Act, as well as Michael Barrett Member of Parliament for Leeds-Grenville-Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, and Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Member of Parliament for Saint-Laurent, who were both instrumental in passing the Kindness Week legislation through the House of Commons.
We’re so thankful for being included in this special event, and it was a great opportunity to share what our program is going to be doing over the coming months.
Timelines and Future Planning
Our sessions and workshops planned for the Inuit Studies Conference next month are being postponed from April until June. This is an impact to our timelines as we have our whole week of workshops and activities that have been planned and we don’t want to have to cancel them all again. Our current plan is to continue with our planned Winnipeg Arts and Cultural Entrepreneurship workshops this April and we will adapt what we are planning to do to be done in June.
There’s a lot of disappointment about having yet another of our key events for our project cancelled again, but our project is still on track, we’re accomplishing what we set out to do, it’s just that it’s taking us a lot longer than originally planned.
We are starting to look beyond the original six-month or one-year program we originally intended for this project. In fact, we are starting to envision the work we are doing today being able to continue for at least the next two years.
It’s very important to keep in mind that our incubator program is only now in the middle of its first experimental stage – from the beginning, we wanted to start as small as possible, and we have not yet developed it into a full scale program.
No to NFTs … for now.
Our project has been able to prototype a small storefront capable of selling real-world goods, but also NFTs.
The purpose of including NFTs as one of the areas we would explore as part of our incubator project was aimed primarily at learning how new technologies like non-fungible tokens and blockchain smart contracts are generated, administered, as well as designed and developed. However, after having a lot of conversations about it, we’ve chosen not to continue that module of the project.
We have three main reasons for this:
- Cryptocurrency regulations and the whole process of purchasing and conducting transactions was just too confusing and even intimidating; There are a lot of politics right now after recent incidents in Ottawa involving the use of cryptocurrencies and impending regulatory changes are just too difficult to navigate.
- We found some of the concepts easy to communicate, particularly when it comes to concepts like gamification and in-game purchases (which the younger team members are very familiar with). But we found a lot of the financial and coding terminology were just too much to unpack and very difficult to communicate.
- Many in our group felt the additional, associated financial costs of minting were ultimately “too much trouble” and that energies and efforts would be best directed elsewhere. Our goal with our incubator program is to introduce and discuss so we will likely only touch on NFTS very briefly.
There is interest in looking more closely at incorporating some of these technologies like blockchain and NFTs into a future project.
Capacity Building
We might be a small project, but we believe deeply our work has strong value for our communities, and for Canadian and American learners alike – now and into the future.
As we enter our fifth month of our program, we continue to struggle in finding our footing as we plan to transition from pandemic-related restrictions to finally being able to attend in-person events. Attendance has also been difficult for several of our students and artists due to school and work commitments. Overall we are maintaining a consistent group meeting size of between five and seven people throughout the course of the project.
Urban Photography in April
Get your cameras ready! A key component of our incubator program is an introduction to professional photography and video production, co-developed by Dr. Olaf Kuhlke at the University of Minnesota Duluth and Dr. Alec Johnson at the University of St. Thomas. This spring, we will be using these approaches to support production of a small series of photographs, photo stories and videos that will be evaluated and critiqued by the instructors and students together, in synchronous online work, through Zoom.
And that’s all we have for this month. Thank you to everyone who has been attending our weekly meetings.
We are incredibly thankful to the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Greenhouse program for funding our incubator for digital arts and cultural entrepreneurship here in Winnipeg. We also thank the University of Minnesota Duluth and the Arctic Buying Company for supporting this year’s program.
This experimental pilot program was made possible with financial investment from the following organizations and we gratefully acknowledge their encouragement and support.
