PROVIDENCE – A powerful new force, championing innovation, convergence and collaboration in Rhode Island, will be unleashed Monday night, Nov. 11, when Digital City hosts its open house for its collaborative workspace on the second floor of AS220’s Mercantile Block.

Digital City’s mission is bold and bodacious: to enable Rhode Island to be globally recognized as the East Coast hub for digital media design and production by the year 2020.

The rationale behind Digital City is succinct and to the point: digital media is the language of a knowledge economy, and creating a critical mass of Rhode Island-based companies and digital media-literate workers is the key to achieving a thriving 21st century economy.

For some, it may take a leap of imagination to envision the freshly painted white walls and resurfaced wooden floors as the collaborative, affordable working space serving as the creative home for digital media artists, TV and film producers, animators, video game designers, sound engineers, public relations and design professionals, and software developers.

But it’s not a giant step for Taliesin “Tally” Gilkes-Bower, the director of Digital City. Before he came to Providence, Bower had been working to help musicians and arts and cultural communities better understand how they fit into a larger, global context – in Brazil, in Jamaica, in South Africa, in Ghana, in Morocco.

Rhode Island, Bower said, explaining his vision, “is snug between two real powerhouses of innovation, Boston and New York, with its incredible educational resources.

One of the most exciting resources, Bower continued, is that sense of place and lifestyle. “Everybody in the innovation community who lives in Rhode Island wants to be here,” he said. “Yes, it’s a smaller market and has less opportunity than New York or Boston, but people are leaving those cities to come and work here in Providence and Rhode Island. There is world-class talent here.”

The mythology, he continued, is that the only place to do business is in New York or Boston. The reality is different. In Bower’s view, people are moving back to Rhode Island, even if it means scaling back on the size of the project they work on, because “Rhode Island is exactly the place I want to be working.”

“We have world-class resources and a real spirit of community action – because everyone has chosen to be here,” he said.

Digital City was founded by Garry Glassman, a documentary filmmaker, and is run jointly with Renee Hobbs, director and founder of the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island. It is funded in part by the Rhode Island Foundation.

AS220’s space odysssey
The search for space where to locate was chaired by Lucie Searle, president of the Providence Preservation Society. According to Bower, a number of universities approached Digital City about locating on their campuses. But Bower said he did not feel comfortable doing that, given that the goal was to create an experimental test-bed – to be a beta site for a larger Digital Media Design and Production Center expected to open in 2015.

Then AS220 suggested that Digital City move into the unoccupied space and partner with AS220’s Industries’ facilities, including its community print shop, its industry and its media arts facilities. (Bowser was unaware that the building had once served as the headquarters for a family-run printing company, Cogen’s Printing.)

In deference to AS200, Bower said the new space will be called DC206.

“Digital City is a really good fit,” said David Dvorchak, AS220’s communications director. “We’re giving them the boost to get going,” he continued, calling the new partnership a nice complement to AS220’s Industries facilities, which include 3-D printers and laser cutters.

Dvorchak said that Digital City encompasses some of the big changes underway in Providence. “I’ve lived here in Providence for 16 years. It seems to me that more and more talent is staying here after graduating from Brown and RISD and PC.”

In addition, he continued, “there is an influx of talent and knowledge coming into Providence from other places. For a long time, Providence was a ghost town. That’s changing. Once people were looking to get out, finding opportunities in New York, Boston or Los Angeles.”

AS220 has served as a catalyst in that change, according to Dvorchak. “We see the arts in a broader context, more than thinking of visual arts as just the painting world. We consider someone’s use of a 3-D printer as producing art.”

As an example, Dvorchak cited a recent event where 3-D Printing PVD produced a series of prosthetic limbs and hands that are going to be shipped to Africa.

“It’s all about convergence,” Dvorchak said, describing the intersection of innovation ecosystems in Providence and Rhode Island.

The new pedestrian walkway planned between downtown and the Knowledge District as part of Johnson & Wales new Center for Physician Assistant Studies, Dvorchak continued, “will help people feel more connected. Making it easier for people to go between the two places is a positive thing, leading to more exchanges of ideas.”