Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what plans she has to invest in the digital arts.

DCMS recognises the importance and potential of the digital arts, and invests in a number of digital arts programmes and projects through Arts Council England (ACE). ACE funds a range of digital arts commissions through Project Grants, with recent examples including the Jasmin Vardimon Alice VR project and Digital Democracies which is a project focused on developing digital artworks for public spaces.

ACE also supports a number of National Portfolio Organisations that specialise in digital art including Blast Theory, Invisible Flock and FACT.

The Space, which currently has a £2 million two-year grant from the taxpayer via ACE, aims to help build the digital capacity of arts organisations so that they are more knowledgeable and confident about developing digital arts projects. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Space has also delivered 25 digital commissions for the BBC, including the Culture in Quarantine: Filmed in Lockdown series, and in the last six months it has delivered a further 12 commissions for Culture in Quarantine made by disabled artists to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Disability Discrimination Act.