Cultural Digital newsletter #61 - buzzword-friendly
Cultural Digital
Hello
There's loads of interesting eye-candy this week, with a bumper pack of VR/AR/360 degree video-related links. There's also ticketing, photography, Instagram and the usual events, jobs, and so on. Enjoy!
We'll start with a buzzword-friendly weekend project…
What if Different Artists Made This Sculpture? Using Drones to Find Out "Take a bunch of photos encircling an object like you see in the gif, run them through Prisma or your favorite style transfer application (mine is Painnt), and then again through ReMake or your favorite photogrammetry software. Done. Go forth! Be free! Photogram all the things! Style all the photograms!"
The Future Of Photography Is About Computation is kinda related to the above. "Computational photography takes a swarm of data from images or image sensors and combines it algorithmically to produce a photo that would be impossible to capture with film photography or digital photography in its more conventional form".
Breadcrumbs is a thing for doing treasure trails by text message, with lots of London museums featured. This piece about it from Condé Nast Traveler features comments from an anonymous V&A curator.
Eventbrite and REMIX have produced a report exploring "how arts and culture organisations can use technology to sell more tickets and meet customer needs". Including an evaluation of "the pros and cons of building your own box office vs letting Eventbrite do the hard work for you". I bet.
Speaking of ticketing, I've written about how to check if you've hooked up Spektrix and Google Analytics properly. There's even a handy dashboard you can download. I'll eventually do similar for different ticketing systems, but if you're after something sooner then let me know.
A write-up of Digital Works #1, an event organised by Substrakt at Hackney Empire a couple of weeks ago. I led a couple of discussions on procurement/outsourcing and digital analytics.
Lots of VR, 3D and 360 degree video stuff:
Is VR the future of live music? "There's no suggestion that live face-to-face gigs will become obsolete anytime soon but some artists can see VR as an extra layer to the live experience". Seems fair enough.
Interactive Projection Mapping - YouTube "Some new experiments with mapping and smartphones I've been doing, hoping to put this to use in an installation later in the year. I think it has the potential to allow for completely immersive multiuser space design. Maybe a haunted house..."
Google’s AR platform Tango is going to let museum visitors explore exhibits. The title of this piece could've done with a bit more thought, but this is about Google working with the Detroit Institute of Arts to give visitors devices so they can do augmented reality-type stuff as they're wandering about.
Dutch National Ballet's 360/VR ballet Night Fall is now online.
Matterport have done the Reading Room at State Library of Victoria
Zaha Hadid at Serpentine Galleries. Google Arts & Culture and the Zaha Hadid Virtual Reality Group have collaborated to let you explore some early paintings and drawings.
New Iconographies: The Museum Of Internet. This write-up of a Facebook page posting generic meme-y stuff seems a bit overdone to me, but what do I know?
Last week DLNET did a Twitter chat on "how digital technology can aid public access to collections". Go back through the tweets to see what was said.
Someone made a gif breaking down Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time by Agnolo Bronzino and posted it on Imgur. It's good.
New website
Orsolina28
Spectacle, Speculation, Spam on Vimeo
Art Market Mines Gold on Instagram - The New York Times "Instagram has quietly become a commercial game changer for the art market, a force in influencing auction and gallery transactions, especially for younger buyers".
ARTtube is "the online video channel about art and design, with videos by museums and art institutions in the Netherlands and Belgium".
The Movie with a Thousand Plotlines - The New Yorker "Will interactive films be this century’s defining art form?"
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs up for grabs at The National Archives and British Council.
Events
20 March, London: Let's Get Real: Young Audiences
And that'll do us. Please pass this on - I've even managed to include a 'subscribe' link below for anyone who's not on the list yet. Otherwise, have a good week and I'll be back in your inbox very soon.
Chris Unitt
@chrisunitt
I work with lots of really good cultural organisations on projects involving digital analytics and user research. Visit One Further for more on that.