Cultural Digital newsletter #146
Cultural Digital
Hello
We're back again. With heartbeats, skills, and errors. There are a couple of things to play with too, including this…
ANTLITZ.NINJA by Leander Seige won awards for most technical and most innovative at Coding da Vinci, a cultural data hackathon in Germany. Well deserved too - it's good fun.
Museums and tech
This museum wants your fingerprint and heart rate for the sake of art. Will people actually do it?. "I was walking into “Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse,” where the artwork is powered by visitors’ fingerprints and heartbeats. Hand sensors and finger scanners collect the varying rhythms of visitors’ pulses, which are then visualized in the exhibition".
Want to See All the Vermeers in the World? Now’s Your Chance. "The Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, which owns what is perhaps Vermeer’s best-known masterpiece, “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” has teamed up with Google Arts & Culture in Paris to build an augmented-reality app that creates a virtual museum featuring all of the artist’s works". No link in the article, so here's where you can Meet Vermeer.
Augmented reality promises to rescue dying museums – so why don't visitors want to use it?. Wait, it promises to what?
Lots of projects to gawp at
2019 Sundance Film Festival" New Frontier Lineup Announced. "This curated collection of cutting-edge independent and experimental media works are by creators who are pushing artistic innovation across new mediums that include VR, AR, mixed reality (MR) and AI".
New immersive designs to transform audience experiences. "Projects have received funding to apply human-centred design to understand user needs and create new immersive experiences and products".
Music
I'm an orchestra conductor. Tonight I wore a heart monitor while I conducted a performance of The Nutcracker.
CultureCase - Exploring why people use social media to engage with music. "this study found five motives for using social media to connect with artists and other fans: accessing content, feeling a sense of affinity, making content, sharing that content, and fostering a social identity. It also made suggestions for social media strategies that takes account of the motives revealed in the study".
Various things
My ‘viral’ moment – A Street Near You & the power of linking First World War data sources. "A Street Near You started as an idea to demonstrate the potential of combining and enhancing large datasets focused on the First World War".
Aliza Elkin on Twitter has "collected literally hundreds of examples of error from mass digitization projects found in google books, hathi trust, and internet archive as instances of preserving the traces of digital labor". They're collected in a zine with a name that wouldn't get past your spam filter.
Discover and book the best theatre tickets in London without lifting a finger! London Theatre Direct have built an Alexa skill for booking tickets. I'd love to know the sales numbers this thing drives.
When Art and Technology meet - the rise of Digital Arts in the MENA Region. "Following are the inspiring stories of four digital artists from Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco".
Heritage Dot is a new event that "focuses on the ways in which heritage practitioners, professionals and researchers can work together in delivering innovative and effective digital cultural heritage".
Christmas Experiments is an advent calendar featuring a new experiment by a digital artist every day.
That'll do for this week. I'm going to do one more before Christmas, then I'll be back in the new year with a 'best of 2018' edition, seeing as how that went down well last time.
Have a very good week.
Chris Unitt
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