When the Australian Centre for the Moving Image opened its doors in Melbourne 13 years ago, it couldn’t be known how ubiquitous the moving image would become. What does a museum that celebrates the moving image do in an era of smartphones, YouTube and Instagram, when every teenager on Twitter becomes a curator and formerly hard-to-come-by film and sound recordings are now just a few clicks away?
For the director and chief executive of Acmi, Katrina Sedgwick, the new state of play means museums – as large cultural institutions, well-funded and well-resourced – must expand to “co-creation”.
“A 21st century museum model is about enabling audiences to access and explore little parts of the [creative] process; it’s not just about showing the final object,” she says. “We’re supporting and collaborating in the making of work across all points of it.”
Sedgwick’s latest brainchild? The first shared work environment, or “co-working space”, for the creative industries to be set up by a major Australian cultural institution.
Acmi X, a 60-seat, 2,000 sq m space opening in May, will be in the offices of Acmi in Melbourne’s Southbank arts precinct. After the opening of similar spaces in New York’s New Museum and the Watershed in Bristol, UK, Sedgwick is hoping to build a community of long-term tenants comprising film-makers, scriptwriters, game and app developers, graphic and web designers, theatre-makers, writers and visual artists – ideally installed for one to two years but with short-term leases also available.
At $600 per month tenants have access to a desk with high-speed internet, a large space for socialising, a kitchen, a series of informal and private meeting spaces, and bicycle parking. The space will also hold networking and professional development events.
Tenancy includes industry membership to Acmi, allowing members access to some of the museum’s audiovisual resources at discounted rates. Acmi is also offering opportunities for film and game-makers to test their works on the museum’s yearly 1.2 million patrons.
The Acmi X co-working space is an attempt to bring together creatives from diverse industries and encourage the continued blurring of media platforms. Audiences, Sedgwick says, are “not so interested in: ‘Is it a piece of cinema? Is it a piece of television? Is it a game?’ Is it a piece of theatre?’ They’re interested in the story and how they can engage with it, through whatever device is available to them.”
Concepts like “collaboration” and “de-siloing” may be the mantras of today’s creative economies, but in practice they prove elusive. Sedgwick hopes Acmi X can bridge that gap.
“This co-working space is enabling proximity so that you have a diverse range of practitioners in a space together, having conversations,” she says. “And it may not be that they necessarily are going to make work together but they’re going to be sharing ideas, sharing processes and perhaps inspiring different approaches.”
• Acmi X launches in May and applications for tenancy are currently open
