Cultural Digital #230
Cultural Digital #230
Racing pulses, AI, leadership, and lots more besides.
Hello
In this edition we’ve got all sorts of good stuff. I’m not going to spoil it by telling you about it all here. You’ll have to scroll down a bit. Honestly, I never know what I should write here. Maybe I should change the format.
Art Gallery of Ontario have a new thing called The Art Rate Monitor. "Through your heart rate, see which pieces captivated you the most, uncover patterns in your preference, and relive the highlights about your visit that might surprise you in a free personalized wrap report".
AI again
Loopy. TikTok's parent company have been working on tech for making avatars talk (and sing, raise an eyebrow, sigh, etc) convincingly. The demo features the Mona Lisa and statues too. This stuff keeps getting better…
Herndon, Dryhurst, and Hobbs on Liquid Images. "Three of the world’s leading artists discuss generative art and AI with Alex Estorick".
Experimenting with AI for Collections Management. "I uploaded a few images to ChatGPT and asked it to generate descriptions, tags, and alt texts for them. The results were surprisingly good".
Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots. I've seen a few people saying “Fair play to him”. But, I mean, $10m is pushing it.
Leadership
10 ideas for purpose-driven digital leadership in museums. The Red Cross Museum are aiming to "ignite fresh perspectives on the nexus between digital technology, humanitarian principles and cultural institutions".
How to get your GLAM organisation to invest in digital. London Museum's Trish Thomas is back with another good one. "it has been paramount at all times to be able to clearly demonstrate the value that digital transformation brings. Here’s how we’re doing it".
Other
Culture and Place Data Explorer. From Arts Council England. “This interactive tool is designed to support us and our partners understand the impact of our investment and development work in communities across the country”.
National Theatre should embrace TikTok-style dynamism, says artistic director. “In the old days you might see long scene changes with stage managers walking across moving bits of furniture. You won’t see that anymore because people want the story to move on". Sidenote: this week I learned about the millenial pause and Gen Z shake.
Digital strategy template for museums. From the Welsh Government.
EASE. Alice Bednarova has done some lovely UX documentation for an arts/wellbeing web app (and is interested in finding institutions to partner with too).
BBC Sound Effects has been updated, now with double the number of effects you can download. You can also make your own soundscape.
Daily Bird: a Bird a Day on the App Store. Colin Brooks, Head of Digital Development at the Whitney, has made a nice iPhone app (not related to the day job).
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back again with another before you know it (and it’s going to have games in it).
Oh, and a quick plug - Louise Cohen and I are taking part in MuseumNext’s Digital Collections Summit in a couple of weeks. We’ll be talking about what we’ve learned from the online collections benchmarking study we ran (plus some new follow-up stuff).
See you soon