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Since 2010, starting at the Nottingham Writers Studio, James Walker and I have been dismantling the boundaries between the page and the screen. Our collaboration began with a shared mission: to build digital platforms that don't just host stories, but embody the rebellious spirit of the city they were born in.

Nottingham is defined by its 'unholy trinity' of rebel writers - Sillitoe, Lawrence, and Byron. And a heritage that swings between extremes. From the visionary logic of Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer, to the frame-wrecking defiance of the Luddites. Our work lives in that same tension, combining digital innovation with a raw, edgy narrative to engage readers in ways that feel both modern and urgent.

Supported by the BBC, Arts Council England, and Nottingham Trent University, our collaborations have helped creative practitioners find their digital voice. From the cinematic, site-specific exploration of the Sillitoe Trail to the zombie-genre digital comic Dawn of the Unread designed to engage reluctant readers. We blend the written word with video, social and live events to create 'Living Literature'.

This commitment to creative rebellion earned us the Guardian Award for Teaching Excellence in 2015. More importantly, these case studies served as the strategic backbone for the bid that secured Nottingham's status as a UNESCO City of Literature proving that the future of the word is as radical as its past.

These projects are informed by the discipline of the Bauhaus and the free spirit of creative counterculture.

My creative foundation remains a deliberate contradiction: the rigorous functionalism of the Bauhaus meeting the subversive energy of sixties counterculture. An ethos cultivated in the multidisciplinary art practice at Leeds Polytechnic School of Fine Art in the 1980s, where I was mentored by the writer Jeff Nuttall (Bomb Culture 1968) and abstract expressionist Willy Tirr, a German emigre who was among the WWII liberators who uncovered the horrors of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

The artist is a catalyst for ideas and a kind of touchstone for the values of society.

Leeds Fine Art was an incubator of "controlled rebellion" as recently documented in the academic research of Professor Gavin Butt - No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment went Punk (2022), and the Nottingham Contemporary exhibition Still Undead: Popular Culture in Britain Beyond the Bauhaus.

Today, I continue to apply the design discipline and intellectual courage to push digital storytelling beyond its current boundaries, establishing a blueprint for future endeavours.

Projects

• Whatever People Say I Am - Digital comic (2020 - present)
• Memory Theatre - DH Lawrence Pilgrimage (2015 - present)
• Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature Bid (2015)
• Being Arthur - National festival of Humanities (2014)
• Dawn of the Unread - Guardian Award Winner (2014 - 2015)
• The Space Arts - Sillitoe Trail (2012 - 2013)