Cultural Digital newsletter #116
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week there's VR (again), email (not revolutionary, but at least it's not more VR), and fancy ways of looking at museum collections (but not using VR, I promise). There's a competition too. But we'll start things off with some comedians.
Will Ferrell and Joel McHale visit the Hammer Museum for a tour of 'Stories of Almost Everyone'. Sure, it's easy to laugh at contemporary art but a) this does it better than most, b) it's nice to see a museum poking fun at itself, c) there surely wouldn't have been much of a platform for this sort of thing pre-internet.
And while we're at it, A Brief History of John Baldessari is great, and narrated by Tom Waits.
VR stuff. Again.
You'd never guess, but I'm starting to feel a little VR fatigue at the moment. Anyway, this week we have Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers' Bloom Open Space, the NYT with European Museums Get Adventurous With Virtual Reality, and a VR project brings late Picasso work to life.
Email
On the subject of boring arts marketing... is Will Norris complaining about email subject lines and preview text. Meanwhile, Sam Scott Wood has written a cultural org-centric 30 minute email marketing roadmap.
Google
Capturing 20,000 objects in 2 shoots: the making of a Google Museum View. Rob Cawston at National Museums Scotland says "I’ve captured some of the lessons we learned to help others understand what’s involved in creating a Google Museum View".
Google's Art Palette "works as a search engine that finds artworks based on your chosen color palette. Using this tool, you can explore how the same five colors from Van Gogh's Irises can be related to a 16th century Iranian folio or Monet's water lilies".
MoMA & Machine Learning by Google Arts & Culture. They used "an algorithm to comb through over 30,000 exhibition photos, looking for matches with the more than 65,000 works in our online collection in. In total, it recognized over 27,000 artworks in these images, and we used those results to create thousands of new links between our exhibition history and online collection".
Other stuff
Visualizing Cultural Collections. This follows on from the previous couple of links. "The aim of this research has been to study new forms of graphical user interfaces to support the exploration of digital cultural heritage".
Designing a new welcome experience at the V&A. "I struggled with the term ‘digital welcome’ – it conjured up visions of Blek Le Rat’s Computer Man. I feared it would entail potentially clunky digital additions to the physical experience.".
Web Traffic Is the New Foot Traffic: Why Galleries Are Investing Big to Chase Digital Natives. "As foot traffic to brick-and-mortar spaces dwindles, a growing number of dealers are hiring experts to overhaul their websites and social media accounts. Some are now even monitoring web traffic as carefully as online publications do".
Perchance is a tool for creating random generators. Thought I'd throw that in here.
Win a ticket to CultureGeek
CultureGeek brings together leading organisations from around the world to share how they are adapting to the changing digital landscape. It's coming up in just a few weeks - on 9 May at the Royal Geographical Society in London.
Want to win a ticket? You just have to answer one question.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at English Touring Theatre and others.
Ok, that's your lot for this week. As always, if something was interesting or useful then please pass it on.
Chris Unitt
The Library is a treasure trove of arts/digital info. Find out more about The Library.