York, where Stretch had its headquarters, was been awarded UNESCO designation for City of Media Arts in 2017. Stretch will be collaborating with the Mediale, a festival of digital arts to create ‘Stretch and Collide’, a digital platform to capture and disseminate the personal stories of people from unheard and vulnerable groups.
Stretch and Collide is a simple and accessible way that will give people with limited access the opportunity to share their story digitally exploring new ways of personal, digital story-telling. At STRETCH what we want to do is to capture digitally these experiences of the criminal justice system and the life that led them there. We aim to bridge the ever-growing digital divide and increase participants’ while giving a voice to those who are so often left unheard and at the same time merge these stories creatively with the arts.
We don’t want to create a curated collection, we want to trigger the genesis of a real life archive that will evolve naturally. A collection of real life stories and confessions that will be donated by members of vulnerable and unheard groups in the society..
So the first step of Stretch and Collide will be to digitally capture these experiences and the second step is to disseminate them digitally and physically using the arts. We want to launch an open call to artists with all the stories collected and give the artists the opportunity to create a new work based on these personal experiences. We will select initially 12-20 artists and commission them to develop a new piece of work. We want to pair offenders and artists to work together to produce new artworks from any discipline using these stories as the foundation. The digital nature of the project will be able to reach artists and people with stories from outside London in order to create an interesting anthropological map of the country!
Stretch and Collide will capture and share the stories and at the same time it will be the means to disseminate this open call where artist will be able to choose the story that inspired them and work with that offender. The platform will offer a contributing functionality to upload your story anonymously or not and a space for the general public to leave comments and get in touch with the story teller or artist.
The new artworks will be published live through this digital platform and the whole project will culminate in a festival in the spring of 2017.
