Cultural Digital newsletter #129
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week we have excavations, lamentations, and demystifications.
Below the Surface has been shared around a lot in the past week, but then it is pretty great. The website lets you pick through 700 years of objects that were found when a canal in Amsterdam was drained. Check out the 'create your own display' thing.
Mechanical Kubler. "Collecting different visual pathways through time, using the collection of the Rijksmuseum along with computer vision and nearest-neighbor searching". This is from Matthew Lincoln.
Copy Culture - Sharing in the Age of Digital Reproduction (PDF). This is from the ReACH project, which you'll remember is the global research programme exploring the digital reproduction of cultural heritage.
Measuring physical responses
Live Nation rigged an entire concert to measure the biometrics of music. They "hooked up a venue full of concertgoers with EEG wearable headbands and skin sensors, and let St. Vincent rip. They then measured the concertgoers’ biometric response".
Listen and weep: 'Audiobooks outdo films in emotional engagement'. A UCL study backed by Audible finds "unconscious responses to the same book scenes, witnessed in adaptations across different media, are strongest in the auditory format". Backed by Audible? Huh. You don't say.
VR corner
Museo Del Prado VR. Not their first foray into this sort of thing. They did a VR version of The Garden of Earthly Delights a couple of years back too.
Immersive Reports. Digital Catapult has commissioned "three reports from industry-leading companies to help demystify some of the common questions around the creation of immersive content".
Other stuff
Hari Kutty makes smartly edited videos that prove the point about it not being the tool/software that matters, but your imagination.
S.E.I.N.F.E.L.D. by Imaginary Advice. Ross Sutherland tries to train a neural net to do stand-up comedy. This is excellent.
American Theatre published a piece lamenting a lack of online discussion following a potentially contentious NYT article. That prompted Theater's Online Community Is Dying. Can We Save It? That piece spends quite a lot of time discussing American Theatre's Token Theater Friends YouTube series without pointing out nobody seems to be promoting the thing.
How can you sing a song if you have no voice? Disabled musicians, activism, technology, and the authenticity of creativity. "For many disabled people, prior to the advancements in technology in the 1980s, music making was limited at best and impossible for many. Consequently, the convergence of activism with the music technology revolution over the past thirty years has played a fundamental role in the creative development of disabled musicians".
Are we all using the wrong tools? Sam Freeman has been playing with Spektrix data in Tableau and likes what he sees. I wish more people working in venues/performing arts wrote about doing this sort of thing. Is anyone else doing this sort of thing?
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at the Photographer's Gallery, Royal College of Music, Natural History Museum, Southbank Centre, and more.
There we go. Have a good week.
Chris Unitt
The Library is a treasure trove of arts/digital info. It's just been updated with new websites and some extra examples of job descriptions. Find out more about The Library.