Cultural Digital #032 - Hamilton and the machines
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week there's some Hamilton (because everyone loves Hamilton), some random bits and pieces, and a load of stuff about machine learning. The latter is a bit of a hot topic at the moment and I've decided I should know what it actually is.
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This is Sky Magic Live at Mt.Fuji : Drone Ballet Show by MicroAd, Inc. It's quite striking but then, y'know - you can't go far wrong when you've got Mt Fuji as your backdrop.
Links
How does ‘Hamilton,’ the non stop, hip-hop Broadway sensation tap rap’s master rhymes to blur musical lines? The Wall Street Journal’s Graphics team created an algorithm to help analyse 'Hamilton' the musical. Here's an article about how they did it.
History is being locked away. Google's museum is changing that. Wired rounds up some of the things the Google Cultural Institute is getting up to.
How do you skim through a digital book? Interesting stuff from Chloe Roberts at the Wellcome Library.
Virtual Scenography. Henry Cooke in the BBC R&D dept on some of his research into VR & 360 video: "The more I thought about this, the more it felt like there's a big reservoir of ideas and techniques used by theatre-makers that we can learn from to to make more engaging, sophisticated VR experiences".
KeyboARd is basically augmented reality Guitar Hero but for the piano.
Magnus is kinda like Shazam for art. The trailer amused me.
Machine Learning and AI
If you'd like a primer on this, Gene Kogan taught Machine Learning for Artists and has put his presentations online.
Sidenote: that was at NYU's ITP, a 2 year graduate programme "whose mission is to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people's lives".
Where Are All the Robot Artists? "They may be coming for factory workers, day traders, and even journalists, but robots aren’t close to competing with starving artists. At the School for Poetic Computation, they're trying to fix that".
alt-AI was a conference exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence and art.
A guy trained a machine to "watch" Blade Runner. Then things got seriously sci-fi. "In other words: Warner had just DMCA'd an artificial reconstruction of a film about artificial intelligence being indistinguishable from humans, because it couldn't distinguish between the simulation and the real thing". Good grief, the future is complicated.
A digital god for a digital culture. "I'd like to talk today about a few projects and ideas that are connected by this thread of surveillance, artificial intelligence, data dramatization, poetry, and digital deities". Memo Atken's talk from Resonate 2016.
New websites
Getty Research Portal, La Triennale di Milano, and Talegate Theatre Company.
Event
28 June, New York: The Art of AI - where machine learning & storytelling collide
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs going at the National Theatre and The Postal Museum. The same ones as last week (in case that saves you a click).
That'll do. Thanks for reading, and thanks to the lovely people who shared this email with friends, colleagues and fond acquaintances.
Chris Unitt / @chrisunitt
When not sending newsletters like this, I work with cultural organisations on projects that involve digital strategy, content and (mostly) analytics. Visit One Further if you're at all interested in that.