Cultural Digital newsletter #143
Cultural Digital
Hello
It's a slightly shorter one this week, you'll be excited to hear.
Stamen have done a visualisation of SFMOMA's Send Me "exploring the alternately poignant, deadpan, and whimsical exchanges that have emerged between users and Send Me SFMOMA". Here's an article that talks it through in more depth.
Behind the Scenes of the Website Redesign. The Art Institute of Chicago have a new site and have released 52,438 images into the public domain.
Scaling the Mission: The Met Collection API | The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Through The Met Collection API, users can connect to a live feed of all Creative Commons Zero (CC0) data and 406,000 images from the The Met collection, all available for use without copyright or restriction".
Selling exhibition tickets online in 2018 is an interesting read from ACMI on buying patterns. Meanwhile, Exhibition News have written a primer on API connections, RFID, and blockchain fantasies in an article called the future of ticketing.
How does the cultural sector’s use of data measure up? Yet another piece from me that's definitely included on merit. This is for the Arts Marketing Association (I'm speaking at their Digital Marketing Day in London on 9 Dec). It's about how, despite how important it is to customer experience, audience dev, & marketing performance, cultural orgs seem to underinvest in analytics and insight relative to other sectors. I dropped in some good case studies to sugar the pill.
How three French students used borrowed code to put the first AI portrait in Christie’s. "insiders say the code used to generate these prints is mostly the work of another artist and programmer: 19-year-old Robbie Barrat, a recent high school graduate who shared his algorithms online via an open-source license".
Everybody Dance Now "given a source video of a person dancing we can transfer that performance to a novel (amateur) target after only a few minutes of the target subject performing standard moves". Holy moly.
Ambient Literature is "a two-year collaboration between UWE Bristol, Bath Spa University and the University of Birmingham, established to investigate the locational and technological future of the book".
If He Does This Met Opera Job Well, You’ll Never Know He Exists. Going behind the scenes with David Frost, music producer for the Metropolitan Opera.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at Tate, Opera North, Art UK, Royal Museums Greenwich, Victoria & Albert Museum, and more.
The end. Please pass on the good stuff, and I'll catch you next time.
Chris Unitt
The Library is a treasure trove of arts/digital info. It's just been updated with new websites, suppliers, and job descriptions. Find out more about The Library.