Cultural Digital newsletter #78 - doing digital art all wrong
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week - confirmation bias and fact-checking, a pair of interactive journeys, and a movie written by a recurrent neural network
Someone's making music using old printers, disk drives, and hard drives. They've called it The Floppotron. Bravo.
There was outrage and gleeful name-calling (I mean, really?) when the V&A's new-ish director, Tristram Hunt, was reported as saying "we’ve been doing digital art all wrong" and "digitising museums is a waste of money". Which sounds ridiculous, right? Why would you take that at face value?
Of course, it turned out that he didn't really say those things. Here's what Tristram Hunt actually said about digitising collections.
Somewhat related - I discovered that Hay Festival has an online archive of talks called Hay Player with a mix of paid and free downloads of audio and video going back to at least 1997.
86½ years is "an interactive journey into the world of two unlikely strangers that changed each other’s lives. Made for independent East London publisher, Hoxton Mini Press".
Evert_45 "April 1945. Dutch boy Evert (13y) leaves home to look for his brother who’s in hiding. This site allows you to follow his journey and relive it all in an immersive experience".
Movie written by algorithm turns out to be hilarious and intense Although Ars Technica are promoting it, so they would say that. "To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that's what we'd call it. The AI named itself Benjamin".
What do the best museum websites all do? Cogapp have "analysed 24 museum websites to distill the three groups of questions you need to answer for your visitors". Although the post actually reads more like 'we came up with what we think a good museum website should do, then looked at how 24 museums go about doing those things'. Which is fine, and it all seems pretty sensible. Although I'd question the 'best museum websites' bit though - at least one of the sites featured is awful.
Ben Gammon asks on Twitter "What have been the best research papers from the last 3 years about interactive museum exhibits?" Can anyone help him out with that?
The Space have opened a round of commissioning with two strands - Capture and Lo-Fi Extend.
New websites
Isaac Levitan, Siena Cathedral
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at JW3, Cog Design, Marlborough Fine Art, the V&A, and Historic Royal Palaces.
Thanks everyone. Please share things around and there'll be more next week.
Cheers
Chris Unitt
@chrisunitt
When not writing emails like this, I run a digital analytics and user research consultancy called One Further, working with some truly excellent cultural organisations.