Cultural Digital newsletter #111
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week we've got some Frenchness, funding, Facebook, and a whole bunch of other things. Let's start with this from a recent exhibition in Lyon…
Mirages et miracles is the work of Claire Bardainne et Adrien Mondot (and others). It's an exhibition "that offers a delicate coincidence between the virtual and the material using augmented drawings, holographic illusions, virtual-reality headsets, large-scale projections".
How can we use technology to connect people to the arts? Knight seeks ideas. "What can we build to help arts organizations expand their use of technology? How can we use the qualities of new mediums to create unparalleled experiences? How can we replicate solutions, so that more in the field benefit? How can we learn more about the people we are trying to reach and design solutions that understand their needs? How can arts institutions provide magic outside of their four walls? How can cultural organizations breathe warmth into technology?" If you've got ways to answers these questions then the Knight Foundation wants to hear from you.
The Space awarded £3 million to support 800 arts and culture organisations. Areas of focus will be:
Training and Skills Development
Digital development services
Sector strategic support
Creative broadcast and digital R and D investments
Tools for Show "streamlines exhibition design, making museum professionals’ work leaner, faster and more collaborative". This article - This Is What The Future Of Museum Technology Looks Like - talks about it as part of a wider discussion about in-gallery tech.
Facebook are creating tools for VR artists. Quill was a VR painting tool, but now it can do animations too. Goro Fujita has been trying it out.
Exciting developments in the world of ticketing system-related email platforms. Wordfly Pages are landing pages that connect to Tessitura, while Spektrix have developed automations that work with Dotmailer.
7 innovations numériques pour les musées du futur. If you want to brush up on your French vocab then read on pour des chatbots, cobots, selfie-sosies, la réalité virtuelle, and les hackathons.
A Lifetime of Making Art, but New to Selling It Online. A piece about over-50's selling their online.
Orwell's 1984 is worth £58,318, according to Google AdWords. "Artist Pip Thornton runs poems through Google's AdWords keyword planner to show how it reduces words to a monetary value". Nice execution, but I'm not quite sure the concept stands up to scrutiny.
In which we get deeply nerdy about museum dates… Computers need precise dates, but sometimes you've only got a rough date range for an object. What to do?
A space oddity. A piece about Trevor Paglen who, among other things, has been training artificial intelligence systems on certain types of images and then getting them to produce their own. With interesting results.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at various very good organisations.
As I always say, if there was something in this email that you thought was good, then please share it around. Otherwise, thanks for reading and I'll be back next week.
Chris Unitt
The Library is a treasure trove of arts/digital info. In the latest update: 500+ US arts orgs with their CMS, plus the ecommerce platforms for 350+ UK arts orgs. Find out more about The Library.