Hello, we are Many & Varied. We gather together people who have ideas and make things.
Who we are:
Many & Varied is a gathering of individuals who have ideas and make things. We don't really mind what your day job is: you could be a maker, an artist, a technologist, a curator or academic. Although we're rooted in the arts, we like to mix it up, so don't feel you have to be working in that area to get involved!
You can read more about M&V here, but the short version is that we're working to bring together interdisciplinary communities of interesting do-ers from across the region.
What we’ve noticed:
- There’re folks out there that know and do some random and interesting stuff (that’s you!).
- Interesting and random things happen when you get those people in the same space.
- Interesting projects often need interdisciplinary teams to make them happen, but it can be hard to find the right people to work with outside of your usual gang.
- In the Midlands especially, it can be difficult to find working environments that stimulate our creativity, invite serendipity, link us up with potential collaborators and support us as we develop the early stages of our projects.
What we’re doing about it:
We're running events and hosting gatherings to bring together a diverse group of practitioners characterised by their tendency to work interdisciplinarily and collaboratively in unusual contexts. And we're going to shout about all this cool stuff that often doesn't fit comfortably into the traditional pigeon holes but is still happening anyway!
We want to add momentum to nascent infrastructural and cultural changes within the creative ecology of the West Midlands. We want to join things up a bit. We want to link people up a lot. We want to make things more visible. We want to support people who are working hard to make interesting projects happen.
Basically we want to give the ecosystem we want to work in a little tender loving care.
To get the process started we're running Bees in a Tin 2015 - a gathering for people interested in the spaces where the arts, science, technology, and games crash into one another, apologise, and then buy each other a drink. We're also running a series of salons to support practitioners as they develop work in progress.
See our projects page for things we've done in the past.