Cultural Digital newsletter #109
Cultural Digital
Hello
Last week I promised you things you could poke, prod, and play with, so there's a trio of those this week. Once you've come down from that sugar rush thrill there's also some stuff about ecommerce, Instagram, and Nic Cage to contemplate.
word.camera will create poetry of variable quality from your webcam. It's made by Ross Goodwin and his Adventures in Narrated Reality – Artists and Machine Intelligence is well worth a read and packed with interesting things.
Andrei Kashcha posted Gaussian distribution on Reddit, creating a histogram of the different coloured pixels that make up an image of Carl Friedrich Gauss (hence the title of the post). He's also made a tool you can use to make your own from any image.
dddance.party is just a bit nuts. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Lessons from The Library #1: Cultural organisations and ecommerce. This one's from me. I looked at over 350 UK arts organisations to see how many have online shops (22% of them) and which ecommerce platforms are the most popular.
20 VR and AR prototypes selected for CreativeXR support to develop immersive projects in partnership with industry leaders. A selection of "theatre, history and social enterprise projects who will benefit from access to immersive labs and virtual, augmented and mixed reality expertise".
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum introduces Curator of Digital Experience. Interesting enough, but further down the article is also says… "In recent months, the Museum received significant grants to develop a digital cataloguing infrastructure; a virtual reference project to record New Mexican viewsheds featured in O’Keeffe’s work; and a 3-D imaging art conservation and engineering collaboration. Museum leaders intend to add soon a data analyst".
The Conversation is saying that Instagram is changing the way we experience art, and that's a good thing. But on the other hand, Quartz are asking Why is Instagram censoring Zoe Leonard's poem from 1992?
Survey: Online harassment of artists. "International Arts Rights Advisors […] are conducting a survey to help them understand the nature and scale of these threats, how they impact on artistic activity in the online space and what steps can be taken in response".
Daniel Pett was the British Museum's Senior Digital Humanities Manager until very recently. There was quite an outcry over his departure.
Digital minister Matt Hancock's app wants to collect all your data. The UK's cultural minister launched his own app and not everyone was impressed.
I linked to something about the potential creative uses of face-swapping a few emails back. derpfakes has definitely taken the concept too far.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at the National Portrait Gallery, Royal College of Music, New Wolsey Theatre, Natural History Museum, Snape Maltings, and King's Place.
Thanks, as ever, for reading this. More next week.
Chris Unitt
The Library is a treasure trove of arts/digital info. Just added: 500+ US arts orgs with their CMS, and the ecommerce platforms (where available) for 350+ UK arts orgs. Find out more about The Library.