POLYMATHIC mentees Alex Mansfield and Jacques Desir share their first public presentation of a collaborative interactive work at the Holburne Museum.
At POLYMATHIC, we work within the creative and cultural sector, not around it.
Our business practice is shaped by the same networks of collaboration, generosity, and shared learning that sustain the industry.
Alongside our commercial work, we invest time, expertise, and resources into strengthening the cultural ecosystem around us: supporting creative careers, building shared infrastructure, and backing organisations and initiatives that make the South West more inclusive, resilient, and imaginative.
We work across three distinct strands to support the creative and cultural sector.
Building digital tools and datasets that help the cultural sector understand itself, evidence its value, and make stronger collective decisions.
Supporting emerging creative technologists through mentoring, strategic guidance, and practical signposting. Helping people build sustainable, values-led careers.
Backing third sector organisations and community initiatives through sponsorship, capacity, consultancy and practical support, reducing friction for people doing vital work.
Shared data infrastructure for a stronger cultural sector
At the beginning of 2025, POLYMATHIC was awarded £10,000 to develop a cultural web platform in partnership with Bath Arts Collective. Launched in October 2025, Culture Key is fully subsidised and free to use, supported by POLYMATHIC and Bath Arts Collective.
Culture Key is the first platform of its kind in Bath & North East Somerset:
a secure, anonymised analytics tool that transforms event ticketing data into clear, actionable intelligence for the cultural sector.
By aggregating anonymised data from organisations across the city, the platform creates a shared cultural dataset, enabling the sector to understand its activity not just organisation by organisation, but at the scale of the entire city.
Culture Key helps organisations to:
Through this work, we also surfaced deeper structural challenges including inconsistent approaches to measuring cultural value and a lack of accessible data literacy tools. Culture Key begins to address these gaps by making data meaningful, usable, and collective.
Supporting sustainable creative technology and production careers
POLYMATHIC actively supports the next generation of creative technologists through mentoring and career development.
Through our ongoing partnership with the RE-EMERGE programme at Bath Spa University, we provide aspiring creative technologists with three one-hour mentoring sessions. This relationship grew naturally from POLYMATHIC being incubated there during its formative years, and reflects our commitment to giving back to the spaces that supported us.
Alongside this, we also offer independent mentoring at subsidised rates as part of our wider commitment to developing capacity and talent pipelines within the sector.
Our mentoring focusses on:
If you’re a recent graduate or aspiring creative technologist, we’re always happy to talk , particularly if you’re trying to navigate how to build a viable, values-led career in a complex emergent industry.
Putting our values into practice
Where we can, we financially support third sector and community-led initiatives across the city.
Most recently, we sponsored the “Diversity and Inclusion” category at the Radio Bath Charity Awards, celebrating organisations doing vital work to make Bath more equitable and representative.
We’ve also sponsored food, drinks, and resources for a range of third sector events and initiatives, often quietly, and always with the aim of removing friction for organisers working with limited capacity.
If you’re delivering work that benefits the community and would like to explore sponsorship or support, we’d love to have a conversation.
We’re always open to conversations with cultural organisations, emerging practitioners, and community initiatives.