Cultural Digital newsletter #136
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week we've got hissy fits, linguistic torture, competitive museums, and insulted curators. The drama!
ENHANCE.COMPUTER isn't the most cultural thing ever, but you get to pretend you're in Bladerunner, so I guess it could count as theatrical, maybe?
AI
The first piece of AI-generated art to come to auction. Christie’s will become "the first auction house to offer a work of art created by an algorithm". Surely the algorithm is the medium not the artist (in this case a French collective called Obvious). As kottke points out "This fails to note the artwork's resemblance to the botched Monkey Jesus painting".
What algorithmic art can teach us about artificial intelligence. The main thing being that AI isn't always all it's cracked up to be.
Reading
Insta Novels is a new Instagram thing from the New York Public Library. Hyperallergic covered it, explaining that "“Stories” are being given new meaning on the social platform, with full-length prose being posted on the library’s Instagram story with accompanying animated illustrations and graphics".
How a cabal of romance writers cashed in on Amazon Kindle Unlimited. Dirty tricks and toys thrown from prams.
Collections
Reaping the Benefits of Digitisation: Pilot study exploring revenue generation from digitised collections through technological innovation. "This paper introduces and discusses early results from IMS (i.e. the Infinite Museum Store); a project assisting museums generate revenue from their digitised collections".
Museums in the Digital Age: Opening up at Birmingham Museums Trust. The question of monetising digital collections also comes up in this interview with Linda Spurdle, BMT's Digital Development Manager.
Other things
TRACES – Together Reaching Audiences. Free workshops for European museums looking to improve their digital audience development. But really though, what is it with academics and torturing words into acronyms? TRACES has no inherent meaning here, so is it just some kind of sick game to them?
International Journal of Culture Technology "will be the most comprehensive international journal on the various aspects of culture technology and its applications". From the 'go big or go home' school of thought.
British museums have spent today making super-niche memes. That round-up doesn't include the one from the National Science and Media Museum whose curators (at least publicly) took it in good humour.
Hirshhorn Eye is a web app from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden that gives you additional content when you scan one of their artworks. Mashable reckon it's "a museum smartphone guide that's actually cool".
The Maas Museum Digital Studio team have been optimising their website and here are the results comparing themselves to a bunch of other Australian museum and gallery websites. If you want to check your own, the metrics come from Google's Lighthouse.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at Art UK, Royal Academy of Arts, Manchester International Festival, Sage Gateshead, and the Barbican.
All done for another week. I'll be back with more in a week or so.
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.