Cultural Digital #012 - the last one of 2015
Cultural Digital
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Hello
It's me again. This'll be the last one of these for a few weeks, so let's see out 2015 in fine style, shall we?
The pic above is from Daily Donut by Matthias Dörfelt. It's a contribution to an online group exhibition called it's doing it. The artworks are all computer generated and update autonomously every day throughout the exhibition.
Links
The results of the 2015 Digital Culture Survey are out. I've not read it yet but here's a snippet from the post announcing it: "This year’s report shows that while the positive impact of technology on organisations remains high, there is a gap between the ambition of arts and cultural organisations in relation to digital technology and their ability to execute on those ambitions". Can you ever imagine a day when that's not the case?
The survey's produced by the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts. Seeing as that fund has come to an end now (right?) I wonder if anyone will keep this survey going. I hope so.
In other big news, the Google Cultural Institute now features loads of performing arts stuff, featuring 60+ theatres, concert venues, dance companies and others from around the world. There's a piece about it in the New York Times which features this quote from Amit Sood, the GCI's director: "What I’m hoping is that they will realize that there’s much more to being on the Internet than just capturing a video and uploading it to YouTube". Uh huh.
Throughout December, How We Get To Next are running a series of articles looking at the past, present and future of technology in music. They're all collected together under the Fast Forward tag.
HOLO is a magazine about Tech Art from CreativeApplications.net. "200+ pages of personal encounters with leading practitioners, visits to key studios and institutions around the world, analysis from prominent thinkers and niche experts". Here's the preview of issue 2 (out Feb 2016).
Bringing Your Code to the Streets. Ruth John explains how she made a portable visual projection pack and a piece of video mixing software and created some web-coded street art. Go for the instructions, stay for the sheer enthusiasm.
Tate Gallery : Colour Prototype allows you to bavigate Tate's online collection by colour (mostly). It's a work-in-progress by Geoff Hinchcliffe who says "The idea here is to investigate how colour can work in tandem with other metadata to enrich the browsing experience".
MuseumsEtc are asking for submissions for The Museum Blog Book. The idea being that a lot of valuable new thinking and practice in and about museums is published via blogs, and packaging the best into a book will help bring it to a wider audience.
An interview with Kimberly Drew, aka @MuseumMammy, the online community producer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art (among other things). Talking about "what it means to be a black citizen in a supposedly borderless Internet landscape, the black technologists turning the hacking community on its head, and the anxiety that comes with building personal online worlds".
The Kota ProtoLab is an extension of the Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. A local game design company are in residence "leading visitors in a series of guided activities, research projects, and hackathons in order to delve deeper into the hidden histories of Kota reliquary figures and inspire conversations about the role of data technologies in contemporary life".
Museum data and photo archives reveal shifting climate "Scientists at Boston University, United States, have been […] digging into centuries of data from diverse sources: museum collections, photographic archives and the diaries of field naturalists, among others." Cor.
"The goal of Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things is to build a massive connected crime scene consisting of smart storytelling objects". This happened earlier in the year, but I just came across it via this behind-the-scenes blog post.
A company called Theatre in Paris are providing augmented reality glasses for non-French speakers, so they can see English translations of French musicals while still looking towards the stage.
Magic Flute by Mozart is a puzzle game by LabLike featuring the music and story of… yep, you guessed it.
And so with that we wrap things up for 2015. Have fun over the next few weeks and I'll be back with more in the new year.
Chris Unitt
@chrisunitt / LinkedIn
I work with cultural organisations on projects that involve digital strategy, content and analytics. Visit One Further to find out more (I really need to update that site) or hit reply if you'd like to get me involved in something.