Cultural Digital #214
AI and art, digital music, sector data, and more.
Hello
This has turned out to be a very data-heavy edition of Cultural Digital. Although it’s mostly to do with creative uses of data and there’s also a game(?) to play, so that’s nice.
Bureau of Multiversal Arbitration. This is… pretty tricky to explain. It's sort of a game played on Discord with an AI image generator. And it'll only be online for a few more days so get in quick if you want to try it out.
More AI and art
How Is Artificial Intelligence Changing Art History? An article neatly summed up in the final sentence: "to find a definitive answer to what DALL-E 2’s place is in art history requires a limited view of what art history is, and a reductive understanding of the technology’s potential".
Incoherent, creepy and gorgeous: we asked six leading artists to make work using AI – and here are the results. Those artists being Gilbert and George, Gillian Wearing, Mat Collishaw, Elizabeth Price, Polly Morgan and Lindsey Mendick.
Digital music
Holly+. Artist and composer Holly Herndon is releasing a ‘digital twin’. It’s “the first tool of many to allow for others to make artwork with my voice, and will distribute ownership of my digital likeness through the creation of the Holly+ DAO”.
Tone Transfer. "Google and the Magenta team collaborated with musicians around the world to turn their instrumental performances into machine learning models".
NYC 311 Rodent Complaints. TwoTone is a “free open-source web app to turn data into music”. Someone thought to use it for this.
Sector data
ACE hands audience data contract to consultancy firm PwC. "A variety of sources have told Arts Professional they have concerns about the change, its implications for the sector, and whether the new platform will be ready by April".
Five questions with… Sanj Jagait. An interview with Arts Council England’s Chief Data Officer about “the Arts Council’s new audience data platform and how the creative and cultural sector can benefit from it”.
Spektrix Ticket Sales Dashboard is “designed to help you benchmark your sales against current sector-wide booking patterns, updated every month to track recovery across the arts industry”. Fascinating to see how current booking data compares to 2019.
Other
Apollo Awards 2022 - Digital Innovation shortlist. Shortlists are always way more interesting than just finding out the winner.
Digital Leadership for Libraries is a free online course from CILIP intended to “create engagement with the principles and values of being a digital leader in public libraries”.
Matt White on Twitter downloaded an archive of his data and had a poke at it. “In theory, this should mean organisations can move tweet data into a collections management system as digital objects”
glammr.us is a Mastodon server for “folks interested in productive conversation about, well, galleries, libraries, archives, museums, memory work and records”.
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