Cultural Digital #036 - catch em all
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week! Dancing bears, making art with computers, what young people are up to, digital archiving, and (inevitably) Pokémon Go.
Procedural dancing using music & physics! Come for the computer-generated dancing bears, then ponder if/when/how this is going to impact on choreography as we know it.
Links
Pokémon
Everyone else is jumping on the Pokémon bandwagon, so why not me? In the past few days artnet played at MoMA, there was random speculation about what it means for the British Museum, the US Holocaust Museum asked people to have some decency, and so much more.
For a more considered slant, Pokémon Goes to the V&A looks at "the underlying data used in the game and how this relates to our collections". Wayfinding, too.
Making art with computers
Prisma is the app that uses neural networks and artificial intelligence to "transform your photos into artworks using the styles of famous artists: Van Gogh, Picasso, Levitan, as well as world famous ornaments and patterns". You've probably seen it by now. Funny how quickly people seemed to tire of this - something about reducing(?) art to an industrial process.
Painting with AIs is an interesting piece about how these new processes and be wrapped into, rather than replacing, an existing process: "this year I started painting, and recently I began collaborating with deep neural networks as part of my artistic process"
Digital archiving
Should Prince's Twitter account be archived in a museum? Yes, clearly. Barely related: I once advised Prince's team of some social media tactics. That's my second best claim to fame right there.
"The challenges of maintaining digital archives are as much social and institutional as technological". The Atlantic on a similar theme, in The Irony of Writing About Digital Preservation.
Young people nowadays
There's so much to love in Luke McKernan's article Shakespeare and awkward teenagers. It's all about people - mostly teenagers - turning Shakespeare into web series. Featuring links to:
BardBox "A selection of the best and most interesting examples of original Shakespeare-related videos available on YouTube and other online sources".
Jules Pigott is responsible for making Twelfth Grade (or whatever), and Like, As It Is and this video shows her film-making equipment and process.
Technology, Artists, Money - and You. Notes following the first Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI), with a bit of musing about (mostly young) artists/technologists' approach to their work.
Other things
Display At Your Own Risk is "a research-led exhibition experiment featuring digital surrogates of public domain works of art produced by cultural heritage institutions of international repute". Hyperallergic explain it a bit more clearly in their piece How User-Friendly Are Museum Image Rights?
Moosha Moosha Mooshme is the blog of Barry Joseph, Associate Director For Digital Learning, Youth Initiatives, at the American Museum of Natural History. If you're into digital media and museum-based learning then it may be of interest.
The DeVos Institute are putting on a series of debates under the banner of Generation Elsewhere: Art in the Age of Distraction looking at the impact of 21st-Century technologies for cultural sector.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs going at the British Museum and Shakespeare's Globe.
Thanks for reading and for forwarding this to others (hint!). I'll catch you next week.
Chris Unitt
@chrisunitt
When not sending newsletters like this, I work with really good cultural organisations on projects involving digital analytics, user testing, measuring content performance, and wider digital strategy. Visit One Further for more on that.