The value chamber: performance and digital iterations across art, design and education

Through an integrated series of research and development activities this paper reports on a project that explored new ways of capturing value for small-to-medium arts organisations. The paper arises from the ARC funded Linkage Project 'Agile Opera: Chamber Opera in a New Era' undertaken by RMIT University in partnership with Chamber Made Opera, the Australia Council for the Arts and Federation Square Management. The Agile Opera Project brings together university researchers and arts based practitioners to investigate new ways to capture value through a series of micro-labs (industry workshops), digital iterations of works, performance-exhibitions, and the development of a digital platform designed for small-to-medium arts SMA organisations. Chamber Made Opera is connected to the traditions of performance which value the situated experience, in which artworks share the same space (chamber) as an audience, and inherits the sustained experimentalism of its art form. This paper reports how digital platforms can be used-aligned to the intrinsic values of a small-to-medium arts company-to translate live spatial performances into digital and spatial re-creations that we call Digiworks as they enable value to emerge through garnering new audiences, in new venues, through an enhanced portability of performance. Through the interconnected layers of this research project, we seek to answer the question proposed for this conference: How do we continue to promote value in an increasingly conservative and short term economic context? In an environment in which arts organisation must move quickly and with agility, alliances formed within research and educational centres offer valuable opportunities to undertake deeper and valued work at a different tempo.