UNBOXED opportunities

Download the full 'UNBOXED opportunities' press release (PDF)

People across the UK are being offered thousands of opportunities to be involved in next year’s UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK, including creative bursaries, paid training and professional development, schools’ competitions, and public participation activities.

They have a chance to be part of, and gain skills and experience, as a result of being involved in one of the biggest celebrations of creativity in a generation. Taking place throughout the UK in 2022, UNBOXED has commissioned ten major creative projects, bringing free large-scale events, installations and globally accessible digital experiences.

More details about these opportunities can be found at unboxed2022.uk/get-involved

• More than 850 paid bursaries of between £100 and £25,000 are available for creatives aged from 18 to 25 years, to help develop and deliver Tour de Moon, a festival of nightlife and countercultures inspired by and created in collaboration with the Moon. Tour de Moon will travel in convoy around England with a mission to imagine multiple better futures for, and with, young people. Closing dates run into the New Year.

Bursaries are being offered to artists, writers, thinkers, activists, scientists, students, emerging musicians, speakers, directors, filmmakers, live event producers, float designers, costume designers, DJs, performers, digital content creators to create immersive film events, perform live, develop scripts, design floats and costumes, write for the Tour de Moon zine and DJ.

• Children and young people are being invited to enter a UK-wide poetry and computer coding competition for 4 to 18-year-olds by 19 December 2021. Prizes range from talent development opportunities to the chance to be part of About Us, an UNBOXED project that sees audiences immersed in 13.8 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to the present day, using innovative projection mapping technology combined with poetry, music and science.

• Members of the public are invited to become one of 20,000 Lumenators who will create dramatic outdoor artworks that use thousands of specially designed lights to sweep across mountains, lakes and moorland at 20 locations throughout the UK’s National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty from April to September 2022. Exact locations will be shared with the Lumenators on the day. The project, Green Space Dark Skies, uses new technology to create compelling online audience experiences.

These opportunities follow the professional placements and development opportunities for designers, creative technologists, animators, creative producers and sound designers, particularly from under-represented groups, offered by immersive story-telling project, StoryTrails. These include paid placements with nine companies commissioned to produce an R&D Virtual Reality project reinterpreting some of the UK’s greatest film and television archives from the BFI and the BBC as well as mentoring and participation in the development of StoryTrails.

Produced by some of the brightest minds in science, technology, engineering, arts and maths, UNBOXED features ten major multi-site and digital creative projects that share new ideas and possibilities for the future. Events and activities take place from 1 March to 2 October 2022 – from the Outer Hebrides to Dover and from Omagh to Swansea, and across traditional and online media.