#170 - Wild and weird
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week we have joint projects, data, fashion, and no strings attached.
Artbreeder was made by Joel Simon and it allows you to "Create beautiful, wild and weird images" by using a generative adversarial network (or GAN to us cool kids in the know) to mash images together.
Interested in how cultural organisations value and measure digital impact? Of course you are. Kati Price and Dafydd James are looking into it but need you to fill out a quick survey https://bit.ly/definingdigital
Collaborations
Opportunity for a Programme Director for Towards a National Collection: Opening UK Heritage to the world. A job ad that mentions "the first steps towards creating a unified virtual ‘national collection’". Funded by UKRI, led by AHRC, and described as a multimillion-pound five-year research programme.
museum4punkt0 "links seven cultural institutions nationwide in a joint project. In close exchange, we are testing and evaluating innovative applications of digital technologies in museums".
Data
Data and the dress: what Christopher Wylie can teach fashion. This is a bit more retail-y than fashion-y, but interesting still.
Data Foundry. The National Library of Scotland‘s Digital Scholarship Service publishes the Library’s collections in machine-readable form here.
Leading online database to remove 600,000 images after art project reveals its racist bias. "Artist Trevor Paglen and AI researcher Kate Crawford have investigated the troubling ways in which ImageNet classifies people". Oops.
Miscellaneous
MacArthur Fellowship winner Annie Dorsen mixes tech and theater. That's the one where you get $625k, no strings attached over 5 years.
Les miracles de l'art et de la tech. A series of articles in collaboration with the ArtTech Foundation.
Festival of Maintenance talk: Apps, microsites and collections online: innovation and maintenance in digital cultural heritage. Notes from Mia Ridge's talk.
Mondo Museum on Steam. "Do you have what it takes to design and curate the world’s greatest museum?"
Measuring the Impact of ARTLENS Gallery. Some discussion of a project to analyse "the overall impact of digital interactives on museumgoers".
Art and Blockchain: Where to Start? This round up of "resources about art and blockchain, crypto art, new online art marketplaces and emerging artists" is good, but I'm still not convinced by the overall concept.
Web design & art history. I admit this thing exhausted my patience after a while, but it's pretty well put together. After a run through of various artistic movements, it's sort of making the claim that web design has taken up the mantle.
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at The Royal Society and other jobs besides.
Thanks for reading. Please share the good stuff around and do that quick defining digital success survey if you haven't already.
Chris Unitt