Cultural Digital #202
Persia, NFT fact and fiction, digital collections, and more.
Hello again. It’s another round-up of artsy/cultural digtal things that you might have seen elsewhere, but maybe (mostly?) might not. Who knows? Therein lies the joy of exploration and discovery.
Persepolis Reimagined accompanies the Persia exhibition at the Getty Villa Museum, allowing you to "soar over a 3-D re-creation of Persepolis and take an interactive “walk” through the palaces, terraces, audience halls, and chambers of the massive complex in southern Iran".
NFT fact/fiction
Possible Futures, Opportunities, and Risks of Web3 for The Arts and Culture Sector. "The WAC Fellowship will work with eight arts and culture institutions to become Web3 literate. From there they’ll prototype the Web3 solutions they’d like to see in the world".
Royal Albert Hall launches first collection of NFTs in fundraising drive. “For too long, too much of what the Hall has offered has been fungible – and has been avidly funged by our audience. That’s where NFTs come in. Honestly, I would like to see somebody try to funge these”.
Digital collections access
Digital Collections Audit. The Collections Trust audited the digital collections of the UK’s leading cultural heritage institutions. The headlines include:
The UK's digital collections are concentrated in a few institutions
The concept of a 'national collection' is problematic
Collection-level records would be a useful starting point for many
A Culture of Copyright: A scoping study on open access to digital cultural heritage collections in the UK. Dr Andrea Wallace has found that “there is no consensus in the UK GLAM sector on what open access means, or should mean. There is also a fundamental misunderstanding of what the public domain is, includes and should include”.
Prof Simon Tanner has called Dr Wallace’s report “the single most important piece of research conducted on the subject of copyright and cultural heritage in the UK”.
Information is more important than a work (please excuse inaccuracies from Google Translation). Kimmo Levä, Director General of the Finnish National Gallery has been publicly mulling how to pay for digitisation and open access efforts. “With the data we manage, we have primarily wanted to promote the development of society rather than our own economic well-being. The consequences of this choice are beginning to show”.
AvoinGLAM’s response to the writing of Kimmo Levä, Director General of the Finnish National Gallery | by Susanna Ånäs. A restatement of the benefits of openness but sadly not much on the big resourcing problem Levä raises, besides "We should not underrate the resource challenges experienced by museums". Ah well.
Miscellaneous
An Overview of Buying Behaviour & Consumer Preferences in Live Entertainment. AudienceView surveyed over 5,000 Theatremania and WhatsOnStage vistors to understand ticket buying behaviour. Also, I wasn’t aware AV owned those sites.
Future Wife is an interactive play with everything: goats, aliens, and spreadsheets.
Before We Disappear is "an interactive piece that comes from our embodied experience, of being watched, seen, observed and not being able to control that gaze. It came from thinking about how to subvert that".
[Closer Captions]. Christine Sun Kim is an artist who does interesting things with how sound is used and presented. This short piece “shows us what closed captions could be".
If you like this newsletter then please resist the urge to send me envelopes of cash. Knowing you’re happy is reward enough (and do please share it with others).
Also, I know lots of you have already, but there’s still time to take part in the 2022 Cultural Content Survey. We’ve had submissions from organisations big and small from all sorts of countries, and the results already look fascinating.
See you next time.