Cultural Digital newsletter #64 - dinosaur cats
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week we have cats, data, music, and… you just want to know about the cats, don't you? Fine.
So stick with me here. Christopher Hesse has made an interactive image translation demo that uses pix2pix-tensorflow.
Click that link, scroll down to edges2cats and click 'clear' under the left-hand box. Draw your own kitty and click 'progress' to see the magic happen. If you're like me you'll be trying it out on terrible line drawings of dinosaurs in no time. And wondering why.
Want to see what the pros have been doing with it? Check out these from Louis Hudson and Eimhin McNamara.
Google things to play with
X Degrees of Separation by Mario Klingemann. You pick two objects/paintings and this will use other objects/paintings to connect them visually.
AI Duet. Play the piano (you can use the keys on your computer's keyboard) and the piano will respond to you. Clever.
Internet culture
Terrible Energy Drink Music Academy's H∆SHTAG$ Season II looks at 'internet music phenomena and digital culture'. So far they've covered HealthGoth, Kawaii, Grime, and Gqom. On that last one, skip to the 5min mark for some digital music distribution interestingness.
Democratisation of culture "This environment has created a new wave of celebrities - creators and makers who have found a voice and following online without the support of traditional media channels but whose influence now extends beyond digital channels into mainstream media".
Things with data
fitteR happieR "Finding the most depressing Radiohead song with R, using the Spotify and Genius Lyrics APIs". Which I enjoyed all the more because I'm trying to learn R at the moment.
Seeing through Data: Visiting the Museum with the Eyes of an Information Designer This lives at the other end of the technical scale and is a write-up of a MoMA 'Draw Your Visit with Data' workshop.
Illuminating facts about the UK's art collection. BBC News have been running wild on Art UK's data to come up with some stories.
From the IxD Awards
MusiClock 'makes jamming and learning scales easy"
Vochlea is 'a revolutionary project to enable easy capture and expression of musical ideas'.
Mia Journeys App 'provides the inspiration and mechanism for a new way to adventure through an amazing museum campus that covers nearly eight acres and includes art from around the world and across time'.
Miscellany
Alex Morrison from Cogapp has written a Digital Strategy for Museums Guide.
Kid Koala’s Satellite Concert sounds like a very lovely thing "the audience is seated at stations equipped with a turntable, effects box and a small crate of colour coded vinyl records. Through subtle coloured lighting changes in the room, the audience is cued to play along".
Occasional blog of Tobias Revell: The Potential for Radical Politics in Rendering at From Paper to Pixels. "This paper lays out a brief analysis of the relationship between future imaginaries and the dominant aesthetics of contemporary rendering software and suggests that this software presents a space for developing political imaginaries that can lead change and critical discussion". The plain English campaign might want to have a word, but this is interesting nonetheless.
Data breach hits San Antonio Symphony employees. Be careful out there, folks.
New websites
Stanford d.school, Wellcome Collection - Explore.
Jobs
There's a digital-related job up for grabs at Royal Museums Greenwich.
There we go then. Hope you enjoyed that one. If so, please share it around and I'll be back with more next week.
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.