BTS WITH NMN: STEVEN WALKER - DIGITAL PROGRAMME LEAD
NMN: What have you been up to recently?
SW: Hiya! Where to start!? Eating crisps, getting the kids back to school and normal working patterns are back, so there’s a big catch up happening with my work. I’ve got a mult-discipinary practice that I house in a design company called OGRE Studio, with NMN being one of my absolute favorite long-term partners because the work they do influences people’s lives and places in ways that are layered, positive, collaborative and a little radical. I’ve been devising an exciting digital culture project with Redhills Miners Hall and developing a commissioning brief for NMN’s biggest digital residency to date, which is importantly focused around creating climate-tech solutions with communities [watch this space!]
NMN: Can you give us an overview of your role at NMN and what you’re looking forward to over this next programme phase?
SW: As Digital Programme Lead at NMN, I guess I’m a bridge for critical digital culture, emerging tech, connecting with creatives, and leaning into working-class community activism across County Durham. NMN operates within Arts Council England’s Creative People & Places network, targeting areas where cultural investment and engagement has historically been scarce. I’m from one of these places, so although I left to develop a career in art, culture and design, it’s great to now be helping engage the places that need more creative opportunities that last, to support more positive experiences in so many places that are crying out for them.
In this next phase of work with NMN, we are moving past digital work that lives exclusively behind screens and shifting into hybrid, socio-ecological, and physical media territory that has a few new core foundations at the centre of commissioning thinking, that I’m happy to share are:
Tech Sovereignty: Encouraging the bypassing of platform monopolies to build low-carbon, open-source, and offline digital tools directly with residents.
Decarbonising Creative Tech: Commissioning digital arts that drive physical climate restoration, enhance the public’s understanding of climate change science, and harness sustainable energy rather than arbitrary energy burning through usage of digital artworks.
Co-created Futures: Creating environments where digital artists, project experts and communities can understand the biggest collective problems people and places are facing, and create artworks that address and explore these in a profound and solutions-centric manner.
NMN: What do you think are the recent shifts in technology which are contextualising digital arts going into 2027 - and where are the opportunities for social action?
SW': Well, we’ve got to be positive in the face of so much problematic context with technology, politics and climate catastrophising with headlines are always negative, so I think we’ve got to respond with a positive, pragmatic approach and use what you’ve got to do what you can. Going into 2027, the honeymoon phase with Silicon Valley is obviously dead. Public fatigue around corporate AI utility, artistic mediocrity, literal weaponisation, and aggravated climate issues with energy-guzzling datacentres, and platform monopolies has created a huge opportunity for artists and commissioners to build radical alternatives and create better tools that benefit more people with greater (or specific) equity:
From Monopolies to Open-Source Sovereignty: The shift is away from proprietary black boxes toward local-first, low-energy, open systems. Digital art no longer needs to surrender its IP or data to corporate tech owners.
Tactical Techno-Realism: I think our audiences are ready for tangible hybridity. Encouraging real people power by combining high-tech digital systems with physical community infrastructure—like pairing algorithmic logic or off-grid LLMs (AI) with community gardens or offline mesh networks that help communities express themselves in dynamic, artful and impactful ways.
Collective Action over Individual Feeds: Instead of tech dividing communities into isolated algorithmic bubbles, we want to use digital tools as engines for mutual aid, solidarity, and climate adaptation.
NMN: What’s in the pipeline for commission opportunities coming up from this year with NMN?
SW: I’m very excited to be putting the finishing touches to this year’s (work in progress) flagship digital residency brief, titled; ‘Owtside the Lines & Redefined: Actual Reality — We are the Hope’. With this residency we’re looking for an artist or collective to explore community-inspired climate solutions as art with the aim of building a culture of climate sensitive art that does something about the climate crisis - to tell stories of places and people in innovative ways, that might use data, off-grid devices as sculpture or communicate collective climate solutions devised with the places the art is made with.
He hope this will blend art, technology, science, and collective social action in County Durham, normalising hope and making the steps that will get us to a better future, knowing what the alternative might be if we instead do nothing. It’s a really exciting development for curating the digital programme that could also link into some of the good practice gained from other parts of the programme, especially the permaculture and collective imagination and storytelling work. It’s a massive pleasure to work with all the different artist and partners that my work with NMN brings together.
NMN: What’s the best thing about collaborating with artists and partners at NMN?
SW: It's the magic that happens when world-class digital artists leave the gallery white-cube behind to build alongside residents in allotments, bingo halls, community centres, shopping centres, and our former mining villages. Unexpected things happen and people who would otherwise never engage in art and culture are right at the heart of its production. Magic.
Past works like these stand out for me;
David Blandy & Petra Szemán: Co-designed an alternative digital map and playable online game of County Durham built entirely out of local cryptids, community myths, and resident contributions.
Andrew Wood (Peterlee 75): Constructed SeventyFiveThreads (ver 1.0), an interactive game space probing the modernist utopian promises of Peterlee new town.
Digital Test Commissions: Max Cooper-Clark built interactive 'digital gardens' mapping life in post-industrial landscapes; Beth Ross archived lost bingo hall social histories; Ruth Flowers tested AI-simulated folklore and 3D scanning; and Izzy McLeod created digital tools for queer ecology zines.
OGRE Studio & Google Arts & Culture: Prototyped handheld, offline 'cyberdecks' running location-responsive GPS and trained Durham Digital Voice, an altruistic AI model offering companionship and tech navigation for isolated residents.
NMN: What’s your 'hot take' on devising digital arts commissions in the current environment?
SW: Perhaps instead of commissioning power-hungry, ephemeral VR, AR or immersive full building projection experiences that burn kilowatts just to show people a 3D rendering of a tree or an artist's paintings, but big and at low res, perhaps curators and commissioners could rethink alternative formats or commissions. In an era that will likely be defined by climate collapse and algorithmic extraction, if a digital art commission doesn't leave behind something useful for the next generation; like actionable knowledge and ideas, open-source tools, physical ecological repair, or genuine community agency, is it just high-tech clutter? We’re at the cusp of something civilization defining and we’re just one species on our planet, so how can we take steps towards a better collective future? What extra responsibility do we have as citizens and a cultural sector as creatives, producers, technologists and scientists? The future of digital art isn't in the metaverse or simulation—it's in the soil, the seas, the air and is powered by open hardware, joint enterprise, community solidarity, and radical local imagination.
