Whilst the Digital Test Commissions strand is about the process of testing new digital tools, methodologies and thinking that encourages discovery within artistic practice, we also encourage and support new experimental artistic works that engage with communities. This informs artist’s continued professional development (CPD), with support and mentorship from our digital programme lead, OGRE Studio.

Experiences of artists have ranged from overcoming technical hurdles, learning and experimenting with new software and tools and AI, This tests new ways of working and facilitates community-engagement and community-generated input - all with a focus on unlocking practice through digital means.

This is a summary of Max’s experience.

• The final work Max has produced is called “Those that eat together…”. It takes the form of a “digital garden” where people are invited to help plant and prune with their own submissions. It is a living archive of ecological flourishing within the post-industrial soils of County Durham. It gathers images, stories, and memories which trace how life persists across landscapes that have been toxified, uprooted, and abandoned by extractive industry. 

• This growing, explorable archive unearths connections between people, plants, and places shaped by resilience, solidarity, and care. It is abundant with communal meals, protests, weeds, soup kitchens, metallophytes, drag performances, a suffragette named after a flower, and an underground banquet. And it is growing!

• Each story can be moved, layered, and arranged alongside others. The website remembers every change, gently reshaping the archive as a shared garden tended by its community. 

Experience/Process: 

• Max has found the process of learning how to make a website that works for his idea extremely challenging, but equally rewarding (and liberating).

• Now Max feels like there are more options, and ways to connect his work with more people, with a greater sense of equity. Especially connecting more with diverse or marginalised communities online, in a more direct tangible way, through works hosted specifically online that harness the qualities of a democratic way of engaging audiences with the touch-points of his practice.

Community Engagement: 

• Since early June, Max has received just over 100 submissions - mostly photos of plants, along with some really beautiful stories connecting nature and County Durham’s history of resistance movements. With enough content now, the website’s garden is growing, is not so empty looking and is now live and publicly accessible.