Cultural Digital newsletter #159
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week there's a whole load of policy-ish funder-related stuff. I'm not sure why, but there seems to be a lot of that sort of thing around at the moment. There's the usual random selection of other things, and also this insanity…
Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models. Otherwise known as Doing Some Computer Cleverness to Animate Photos of People. Interesting that the YouTube description has a very defensive section that starts with "We realize that our technology can have a negative use…".
And while we're at is, you may have seen this: Deepfake Salvador Dalí takes selfies with museum visitors. "Using archival footage from interviews, GS&P [the ad agency who did this] pulled over 6,000 frames and used 1,000 hours of machine learning to train the AI algorithm on Dalí’s face. His facial expressions were then imposed over an actor with Dalí’s body proportions".
Policy-ish stuff
A list of cultural / digital development programmes. I put this together to try and keep track of all the times money and resources have been thrown at cultural organisations to get on and do something digital. I've focused on the UK but would be happy to add others. What have I missed?
smARTplaces is "a visionary, long-term European audience development project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and aiming to revolutionise the way culture and art can be perceived and consumed using digital technology and new forms of cultural mediation". Pretty sure you're only allowed to call yourself visionary if you're either some kind of wizard or a 'misunderstood' villain. Otherwise it's weird.
They have a questionnaire to "understand how we can start a conversation about digital activities in the cultural sector through real experiences not just hypothetical use cases" which you might like to complete.
GIFT is a research project funded by Horizon 2020 "exploring hybrid forms of virtual museum experiences".
One by One - Phase 2 findings. This part of the project "explored the digital skills and literacies that people who work and volunteer in museums need".
Digital doesn't mean technology. Some reflections on how funders need to do and lead on digital stuff, from Tom Steinberg at the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
What we’re learning about how the sector understands “digital”. Cassie Robinson is at the National Lottery Community Fund, but this is very applicable to the arts/culture/heritage side of life too.
Miscellaneous
Dreams becomes reality: the game that can make an artist out of anyone. "Digital artist Dan Hett explores the Dreamiverse, a galaxy of games, music, art and ideas created by players in a limitless virtual art studio".
Coding Da Vinci was a recent cultural hackathon held in Germany. cover.boutique is a nice little project.
Eventbrite Powers New Ticketing Functionality for Facebook Events. Not the first ticketing company Facebook has worked with. Back in 2017 SeatGeek had a tie-up with Facebook.
Opening up arts listings. At Nesta they think that "it’s time for arts and cultural listings to be made available as open data".
The Rise and Fall of Internet Art Communities, from DeviantArt to Tumblr is a trip down memory lane.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at London Symphony Orchestra and others.
Thanks for reading, and please pass on the stuff that made you go 'huh'.
Chris Unitt