Cultural Digital newsletter #81 - tech wizardry
Cultural Digital
Hello
There's all sorts this week. Geocities, Spotify, data, (dis)content, business models, and text messaging.
Giorgio Cam is fun, albeit in an 'assisting in the demise of the human race at the hands of the robots' kinda way. It's from Google Creative Lab and you'll need a webcam and sound to get the most out of it.
If Google Teaches an AI to Draw, Will That Help It Think? "Humans made a huge cognitive leap when they first sketched figures onto rocks—now, computers are learning to do the same".
We Wear Culture is the latest big thing from Google Arts & Culture, bringing together fashion collections to tell 'The stories behind what we wear'. There's a lot in there. There are ~180 partners in this and the V&A's contribution alone includes eight online exhibitions, some new gigapixel imagery, and this fancy virtual reality thing.
Interface, Exhibition & Artwork: Geocities, Deleted City and the Future of Interfaces to Digital Collections
"In 2009, a band of rogue digital preservationists called Archive Team did their best to collect and preserve Geocities. The resulting data has became the basis for at least two works of art: Deleted City and One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age. I think the story of this data set and these works offer insights into the future roles of cultural heritage organizations and their collections".
MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE is a weekly mailing list looking at the future of music, media & tech.
(Dis)content: Creative Direction in the Audience Age. Anna Higgs from NOWNESS has written up her D&AD Festival keynote.
How Mia’s new strategy uses data to create personalized visitor experiences From Clare Regan "Mia built its own in-house analytics team, developing four new roles over the past year. I’m proud to say I’m part of this new team, and our goal is to lead the museum into being data-driven and in line with current and best practices when it comes to audience research, analytics, and digital marketing. The team crosses multiple divisions and departments, and our roles work together to gather, clean and organize, analyze, and use data".
data.carnegiehall.org "Carnegie Hall's performance history as linked open data can be explored using this SPARQL endpoint". I don't think I knew about this. And here's the scripts they use on GitHub.
Museum business models in the digital economy From Chris Michaels, who's now at the National Gallery in London. It's a good read, but this line "The digital economy has urgent lessons to teach the arts and culture sector – lessons that we are a decade or more late in learning" is very true. Two of the three examples - dynamic pricing and variable donation levels - won't be new concepts to many of the performing arts venue people on this list. I'm really not convinced by the third suggestion - replacing annual memberships with monthly subscriptions a la Netflix and co doesn't make much sense to me. Now, if you were to talk to me about introducing subscription based, digitally-delivered services, then I might be on board with that.
Send Me SFMOMA "Text 572-51 with the words “send me” followed by a keyword, a color, or even an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text message".
ArtLens Exhibition is the latest version of the tech wizardry at the Cleveland Museum of Art. "Transitioning away from the touchscreen technology that Gallery One relied upon, the Exhibition interactives use barrier-free, gesture-sensing projections that respond seamlessly to body movement and facial recognition as you approach, immersing you in the experience".
The Secret Lives of Playlists. "What are we looking at when we open Spotify? How did it get there, and on whose dime? Who owns visual real estate on Spotify? How do major labels control what the average Spotify listener is being fed? Who is shaping Spotify’s so-called “editorial voice”? Why is it so hard to tell which playlists are curated by humans and which are curated by algorithms? And how is the latter increasingly shaping the former?"
New websites
Amsterdamse Kunstraad, Creative Industries Federation.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at the RAF Museum, National Portrait Gallery, and Opera Holland Park.
Thanks as always, and please forward this email or any tasty links on to people who might appreciate either.
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.