What is ‘the Arcade Project’?
The Arcade Project is a plan to create and run a community built ‘arcade’ in Redruth town centre with a working exhibition of automata and workshop space for making things.
Fluxus Cornwall CIC will invite groups from the community to imagine, design and build amusements with the support of our experts, other interested people and each other. The finished inventions will be available for visitors to admire and interact with, starting as a tiny exhibition in Knights Arcade and eventually having a permanent home on the high street.
This town is home to craftspeople, engineers, artists, coders, welders, woodworkers, rocket scientists, game designers and much more, so we’ll be tapping into generations of experience and skills to make this happen. Redruth has always been an inventive town and we’re building on strong foundations!
Why do we want to do this?
There are so many reasons! But here are some:
There’s so much talk about the death of the high street, and it IS changing. Shopping has moved online and to out of town shopping centres and that’s not going to go away. We have to see change as opportunity and we believe that unique independent retail spaces; interesting things to do and lovely places to meet up are what will help our towns to thrive again. We intend to make the arcade a fun place to visit in the heart of town.
Redruth is buzzing with creativity, but we know that many people are not into arty stuff. We want to give people a chance to be creative in other ways too- metalwork, electronics, carpentry, digital, lighting, signwriting, game design, sound engineering or pretty much anything else!
We’ll offer people the chance to try out things they might not get to do in their everyday life and bring generations together sharing skills and ideas. You might be a retired carpenter, a teen gamer, an artist or an aspiring electronics wizard – we need everyone!
First Steps
The first step of our project is to run free making projects for locals. We’ll spend a couple of Saturdays generating ideas together (the madder the better), figuring out designs and then building them! We have a team with plenty of skills and a well equipped creative space to make it happen – all we need now is you!