Cultural Digital #203
Poems, music, generative art, hybrids, and more
Hello there. I’ve got another round-up of cultural/digital curiosities for you. If you’re reading this on a lunchbreak (or during a Zoom call) then I’d skip straight down to Craiyon and have a play with that if I were you.
anonymous animal is an "iframe-elegy browser poem that runs every hour, on the hour". It's by Everest Pipkin who explains more here.
Music
AI Futures: how artificial intelligence is infiltrating the DJ booth. There are parallels between this and the generative art stuff below.
How Memes Changed the Rap Game: From Gunna’s “Pushin P” to Drake’s ‘CLB’. I feel so old.
Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music. It's bad enough when the provenance of an object/artwork changes, but some of these musicians are doing this on purpose.
Music creators’ earnings in the digital era. The UK Intellectual Property Office commissioned research on music creators’ earnings. Here are the findings.
Generative art
I’ve mentioned text-to-image tools before, but they’re having a bit of a moment right now with some more sophisticated versions coming out. The main ones to know about are DALL·E 2, Imagen, and Midjourney.
Some of these have waiting lists or require some technical knowledge. But you can have a play with Craiyon (formerly DALL·E mini).
r/generative on Reddit has various examples and techniques to gawk at.
AI art for writers. There’s lots of discussion about What This All Means. Simon Jones looks at the pros and cons of using AI art to illustrate stories.
Tabbied is a bit different. It lets you generate colourful geometric doodles from pre-made presets.
Hybrid
Navigating hybrid experiences: A conversation between Kwame Kwei-Armah and Seb Chan. Tessitura hosted a chat between the Artistic Director of the Young Vic and Chief Experience Officer of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
Digital leadership - hybrid heritage. Culture24 hosted an online seminar on “the challenges and opportunities that a hybrid, blended future brings the heritage sector”. With Zak Mensah (Birmingham Museums), Lisa Westcott Wilkins (DigVentures) and Mark Bishop (National Trust for Scotland).
Other
Responsabilité numérique et musées français. A study of the websites of the 100 most visited museums in France.
[this is aaronland] continuous partial mythologies. Some thoughts Aaron has spun out of a panel at the MCN Conference 2021. Mostly thinking around what it means for digital activity in cultural institutions to achieve ‘continuity’.
Unlocking our Sound Heritage: Digitising audio collections at Bristol Archives. A Q&A with Katie Scaife, Project Manager of Unlocking our Sound Heritage at Bristol Archives.
Switching to Google Analytics 4 - what cultural organisations need to know. If you’ve not yet heard, all your Google Analytics data is going to disappear and you need to do something about that soon-ish.
things are a little crazy rn. Aren’t they just.
Please share this newsletter with others. They might like it.
Also, 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.