#175 - The easiest thing
Cultural Digital
Hello
This week I've made a concerted effort to include more performing arts stuff. But don't worry museum folk - there's plenty for you too.
This is the VR trailer for Opera North's production of Britten's 'The Turn of the Screw'. It's a collaboration between creative studio Lusion, composer and sound artist James Bulley, the University of York’s Audiolab, and the Orchestra and Chorus of Opera North.
Incidentally, that was supported by XR Stories which is a "£15 million initiative aimed at making Yorkshire and the Humber region the UK’s centre of expertise in digital screen storytelling".
Music-related
Bjork and Microsoft use AI to create music that changes with the weather. "Called ‘kórsafn,’ which means ‘choir archive’ in icelandic, the composition will be played continuously in the lobby of sister city, a hotel in New York’s lower east side that opened in the spring of 2019".
Old Musicians Never Die. They Just Become Holograms. "Companies are making plans to put droves of departed idols on tour — reanimating a live-music industry whose biggest earners will soon be dying off".
Slides
Museums+Tech 2019: Openness. Presentations from the recent(ish) Museums Computer Group conference.
LinkedIn’s SlideShare is a vast emporium for pirated e-books. "From bestsellers to textbooks, stolen content is easily found on a 14-year-old hosting service operated by Microsoft’s social network".
APIs
ArtPI is apparently the first API that's designed and optimised for art. "ArtPI is aware of the concepts of style, genre, subject matter, composition, light, space, color and other principles and elements of art".
GitHub - art-institute-of-chicago/aic-bash "A bash script to query our API for public domain artworks and render them as ASCII art. Just a small side-project we did to show what could be done with our museum's API".
Miscellaneous
Andrew Ladd: Online ticketing is Kafkaesque – it’s time for smarter systems. I agree with the general thrust of this, because budgets for websites and online ticketing are often pretty meagre. But the rest… not so much. Having "a bespoke ticketing process for every single show and venue in the country" doesn't sound like a good idea. And TodayTix caters for a specific (and vastly simplified) use case so doesn't always make for a fair comparison.
“Technology that has a soul in it”: A chat with Universal Everything founder, Matt Pyke. “The easiest thing to say is ‘Do you know the screens in Blade Runner?’ ‘Well I make videos for those sorts of screens”
Dance videos from L.A. influencers show how the industry is changing. "how the internet is helping nontraditional talent break into the industry".
Cut, Copy, Remix: Call for Artists. "In April 2020 Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Black Hole Club and Cold War Steve will be coming together to explore the creative potential of Birmingham Museums Trust’s Digital Image Resource".
My audience is global. Commissioned by The Space, a bunch of people give their perspectives on using digital to develop relationships with audiences further afield.
Audible is making plays for its digital platform and off-Broadway, with stars like Kate Mulgrew. "You might say that Audible is assembling a digital repertory company, with platforms both on air and on legs". Platforms on legs?
Jobs
There are digital-related jobs available at Cog Design, National Portrait Gallery, Belgrade Theatre, and Town Hall Symphony Hall Birmingham.
And with that I'll leave you. Please share stuff around and if you're not a subscriber then there's a blue button down there just for you.
Chris Unitt