Cultural Digital newsletter #79 - making assumptions
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week we have voice recognition, fashion, lots of money for playwrights, and email courses.
SketchAR with Tango Technology is like a smarter version of tracing paper. Whether your local group of taggers are going to want to jump on this, I don't know.
Los 10 Imprescindibles de Sónar+D 2017. If you're in Barcelona this week then get along to this. I wish I was. Otherwise, have a gawp at some of the things that'll be on display.
Google Digitizes 3,000 Years of Fashion History "The massive “We Wear Culture Project” includes 30,000 online artefacts from over 180 institutions".
‘Alexa — what’s on at The Royal Opera House?’ As much as I like the experimentation here (and that's all this is - they're not as if they're going all in and junking their website), I'm deeply skeptical about whether this really constitutes ROH giving their audiences "the information they want, in the way they want it". Likely take-up aside, I've tried booking cinema tickets via an automated phone line - which is essentially what this is - and it wasn't pleasant. Add in complications like reserved seating, varying seat prices for the same performance, donations, upsells, guest/non-guest checkout, and it gets even messier. Still, I'm making assumptions and they're doing stuff, so good on em.
Audible Creates $5 Million Fund for Emerging Playwrights "not for the stage, but for people’s headphones and speakers".
How data is transforming the music industry "Less understood are the ways that raw information – accumulated via downloads, apps and online searches – is influencing not only what songs are marketed and sold, but which songs become hits".
FEMICOM Museum on Twitter "Thread: For every like, I'll tweet a confession/fact about the history of girls' video games and software".
Everyone's doing drip email courses on their websites these days as a way of getting people to part with their contact details. Someone's now gone and made a platform for them. Here are art courses on Highbrow (other topics are available).
Pix2Pix has been described as the 'Swiss army knife of machine learning for visual art'. I've included quite a few applications of it in previous emails. "This tutorial will guide you on how to use the pix2pix software for learning image transformation functions between parallel datasets of corresponding image pairs."
Digital endorsements from cultural leaders
I'm relying on Google Translate here, but in this interview with Marcus Dekiert, director of the Cologne Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, the standfirst says "the Digital Museum can not replace the encounter with the original" but the quote further down says "The digital museum is, in my opinion, a self-evident part of the museum's self-understanding and will, in addition to the traditional tasks, become equal". Which sounds quite different to me.
This is from Nicholas Hytner, London Theatre Company (previously National Theatre artistic director) "My own experience is that the most significant consequence of the digital revolution for the performing arts is not that it has driven audiences away to computer games, or even that it has opened the door to digital distribution of live performance, but that it has led to a resurgence of the real thing. The instant availability of everything you want at the click of a mouse turns out not to include the thing you want most of all: human contact. You want to be there when it happens".
New website
The Marlowe
Events
23 June 2017, Birmingham: Hello Culture 2017
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at Tincan, JW3, and Marlborough Fine Art.
Thanks for reading. If you wanted to pass it on to others and encourage them to sign up then that would be marvellous.
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.