Art, science and the digital: Unleashing creativity for European water management
Consortia are invited to propose concrete ideas at the nexus of art, digital, and water on how an alliance of digital experts, artists and stakeholders can contribute to sustainable water management. A major task will be to facilitate in STARTS residencies collaboration of artists with engineers and stakeholders concerned with water.
Water is becoming an ever-scarcer resource. The UN Sustainable Development Goals – SDG – therefore include specific goals on water. This call addresses the capacity of European regions to tackle the issue of water scarcity holistically beyond resource efficiency and the opening up of the traditional European water sector to novel digital technologies. Digital could become a major driver for responsible water use by providing data on smart management and measurements of water use. Equally important, digital (in particular social) media can create new ways to educate citizens on water reuse, ocean pollution while also fighting disinformation on environmental issues.
The main premise of this call is that a joint approach, combining digital with the arts will help induce behavioural changes by pooling the capacities of the arts and the digital to induce changes in our mind-sets, on a business, on a societal and on an individual level. The European Commission – DG CONNECT – has already promoted artistic experimentation with technologies as a catalyst of digital innovation in its S+T+ARTS programme -innovation at the nexus of Science, Technology, and the ARTS.
The action will work on three objectives:
- Co-Funding of STARTS residencies – Artistic experiments inspired by the STARTS residencies program, in digital companies and in companies from the water sector to help inducing a change of mind-set and novel ideas regarding the use and preservation of water and its resources.
- STARTS Sylloge – a narrative on new approaches to address water challenges: Create with input from key players in the project and with help of STARTS residents a corpus of discourses, that unfold and tell stories linked to water.
- STARTS water community: Develop a community at the nexus of art, digital, and water that can contribute to a new thinking in policy, business and society on sustainable water use.
