1. Visit our toolkit.

The CuriousWorks Toolkit is a free resource library for artists, educators, cultural leaders and media makers everywhere. Bookmark it: http://toolkit.curiousworks.com.au .

2. Take our Creative, Online and Social Media Intensive Training Course.

You don’t need a whole lot of money or a degree in computing or communications to have a voice on the internet. Websites, videos, blogs, podcasts, twitter feeds, facebook pages – all are achievable with a budget of $0 and whatever computer/multimedia tools you have handy. Sometimes you just need a little guidance to get you started, and then you’re off fulfilling your web publishing dreams!

This is why we started the Creative, Online and Social Media Intensive Training Course at CuriousWorks, to give people a kick start and the right advice to be able to sustainably build their own web presence or multimedia for minimal cost.

To find out more about our training services, including pricing details, email our Head Educator, Elias on elias@curiousworks.com.au or call us on (02) 9281 2570.

Feedback from participants at previous training sessions:
The trainers at CuriousWorks make learning easy and give you the quickest and most effective ways of tackling massive projects. For my sector in particular l couldn’t recommend CuriousWorks more highly, the understanding coupled with an extraordinary knowledge base and ability to teach puts the organisation at the top of my list.
Candy Bowers, Artist and Youth Arts Community Worker

CuriousWorks are great facilitators. The content was thought provoking and empowering and their passion and knowledge was really inspiring. Those 4 workshops were like a creative rebirth for me! And the fact that I had a little more of the basic computers skills than some others in the group didn’t slow me down, each of us got individual attention and got to learn at our own pace.
Norman Holmes, Financial Education Coordinator, Mission Australia.

CuriousWorks’ media training is fantastic… I was surprised at how quickly you can learn new media techniques and how effectively you can apply them without buying new equipment and software. The trainers show you how to work with what you’ve got.
Lorraine, Academic and Environmental Campaigner

CuriousWorks is renowned for its innovative approach to creating art across many forms and for particular sites.

We’ve filled one of Australia oldest surviving buildings with performance, music and installations, connecting in an innovative narrative many of that city’s untold stories. We’ve sent audiences on a boat down a river, amongst beautiful water projections, listening on headphones to intimate stories of fleeing a war-torn country to build a new life in Australia, set to a luscious, intercultural score.

Contact Shakthi on shakthi@curiousworks.com.au or (02) 9281 2570 to discuss how art and digital media can come together to create an unforgettable event for your community.

Critical and Audience Feedback from previous events:

Review Excerpt – The Migrant Project

Shakthi, the writer-director for this production, has used state of the art technology to bring together a marvellous combination of sound, light and video images. I think he has managed to successfully blend various forms of art and media to give a new meaning to visual imagery… The production was an extremely gratifying experience for me because it was refreshingly different from many other productions that ultimately end up building layers of cliches within the story. The Migrant Project underlined a paradigm that I have believed in all my life – the fact that although the performing and fine arts have no distinct language and yet they remain the most potent forces that can bring about awakening, peace, tolerance and compassion in the world.
Avijit Sarkar (theatre reviewer)

Sample Audience Feedback

I just want to make a comment about you bringing different art forms and cultures together… and how natural it is, I want to add, that people like you, from different backgrounds, find it almost a must to bring together different art forms, because it is as if one art form cannot contain. I see you, as a group, exactly like explorers, going into new territory, whilst you are both the explorers and the cartographers, so as you move into this new territory… you’re actually circumscribing, describing, refining a land that becomes clearer and clearer and clearer as you travel… I am looking at you, getting a sense of us, going out into the ocean, and that is extremely powerful, extremely hopeful, it is an incredible statement that you’re making and that you’re bringing us in that journey… and you’re open, see here you are, you’re absolutely open, everything you see, everything you’ve done, even to this forum, even the way that you stand, in front of us, is all about hope and courage and vision. I really commend you.

Sample Audience Feedback – The Lanka Project

I just spent three weeks at [international arts festival] being bombarded by art from around the world. This was a breath of fresh air.

Nice work mate. Until they realise we’re all one, it’s not going to work, is it?

CuriousWorks can provide targeted advice and training on how new media can maximise the potential of your project or organisation.

We work with you to revolutionise the way you engage with your beneficiaries or clients. We facilitate the development of your own unique digital media strategy that helps you achieve your mission. The strategy includes website advice, using videos and photos online, blogs, publishing online, twitter and other social media, plus how to make the best use of our free online toolkit.

We use our unique brand of empowerment driven consultancy – we don’t want you to be dependent on us or keep paying contractors and consultants. We want to empower you using as many easy-to-use, open source solutions as possible, solutions that can be implemented by your own staff. And still keep you at the cutting edge.

Contact Elias, our Head Educator, to discuss your project further: elias@curiousworks.com.au or (02) 9281 2570.

In March 2011, CuriousWorks conducted a week-long training program for members of The GroundSwell Project. Over five days, Shakthi, Elias and the CuriousWorks team skilled us up in the uses and applications of social media, as well as demystifying key processes and techniques of digital story-telling.

In Curiouswork-speak, it was a truly awesome week, and we will definitely be returning to Shakthi and the team for further training.
Peta Murray, GroundSwell

I now use the training and consultancy I got at Curiousworks everyday. I get my photos on the Internet, I have a functioning website and blog, and use the new media to create identity for my not-for-profit organisation. I can’t recommend them highly enough.
Lorraine, Director of Forest Media

CuriousWorks enables communities to tell their own stories: powerfully and sustainably.

We are constantly innovating the connection between art, education and technology.

We’re steadily building a future where all Australians have regular access to self-directed, compelling stories from the margins of our society.

We do not document or represent those in the margins. We give them the tools and the training to speak for themselves.

We respectfully collaborate with communities to create innovative, acclaimed artistic product that celebrates their culture.

Step by step, we’re growing a new generation of storytellers by building cutting-edge arts and media capacity in the most under-resourced places in the country. Our process empowers – rather than exploits – those communities and brings long term, positive change to lives of our storytellers.

Our ultimate goal is redundancy.

Our Mission
CuriousWorks’ mission is to subtly reshape the systems of cultural production in Australia, for the benefit of all Australians.

Our work is always about instigating a more diverse, more accessible, more surprising, more imaginative arts and media scene in our home country. We want creativity and innovation to be a part of every day life for all Australians.

We establish long-term, multi-faceted partnerships with those who are working towards the same goals. We believe the arts and digital media can bring the stories of those in the margins into the centre of our society – for the long-term. However, we believe this must be done through a best-practice model that brings real, positive change to the people and communities that are involved in this process.

We do not document the stories of marginalised communities or engage in short-term programs with them. We work to empower their local cultural leaders to use digital media to represent their own people in their own ways, for the long term. In doing so, we hope to slowly build empathy and social inclusion within and between these communities and well as those in the ‘mainstream’ of Australian society.

Through extensive, respectful collaboration, we also develop innovative creative initiatives for the stage and screen that give prominence to Australia’s untold stories. The initiatives are multi-platform, in public spaces and aimed at fostering public dialogue around contemporary Australian issues.

Based in Sydney, Australia, our work will always possess the characteristics of the country that inspires it: intercultural, interdisciplinary and clearly challenging its status quo.

Our Purpose
CuriousWorks exists to identify, connect and build cutting-edge arts and media capacity in a new generation of storytellers: storytellers that hail from Australia’s most marginalised places and feel committed to improving their community’s capacity for self-representation.

Community Program
We use media and the arts as a transformative tool that prevents young people especially from succumbing to the entrenched disadvantage of their local environment.

Cultural Leaders Program
We transform a proportion of those young people into cultural leaders that have the ability to powerfully and sustainably represent their community – and influence their local public institutions as a result.

Enterprise Program
We further train a proportion of those cultural leaders into entrepreneurs that can make professional creative media, for the consumption of mainstream Australia, as their full-time job. These young leaders eventually take over CuriousWorks’ role in their community and are the centre of a hub of media and arts activities in their region.

We distribute all content widely and powerfully through the Internet as well as traditional media forms.

Our Values

• we provide the opportunity for all Australians to have a voice
• we find creative and innovative ways to build cutting-edge media capacity in people and communities
• we are agile and responsive: our model is tailored to each community we work with
• we focus on sustainable outcomes – the community takes ownership of our projects
• we network, both online and physically, the people and organisations we work with
• we have ambitious goals and achieve them in an organised and disciplined manner
• we are open: we share our knowledge and are as transparent as possible as a business
• we are a hybrid organisation: we bridge the arts and creative industries, enterprise and charity
• we’re playing our part in shifting to a renewable world running on renewable resources

Guido is one of the lead artists and filmmakers in Matta Media, the South-Western Sydney division of CuriousWorks.

Guido was born in Chile, but came to Australia as a refugee when he was a young boy. He and his family spent 8 months at Villawood Migrant Hostel.

Guido has had over nine years experience in the film industry in various production roles. He has worked with various filmmakers such as Khoa Do, Murry Liu and Peter A. Holland.