Links for November 2013

Gallery Analytics is:

a site specific installation by Swedish artist Jonas Lund, made especially for the Momentum exhibition as part of the Rewire festival.

Gallery Analytics

By setting up a mesh wifi network and combining it with custom made software, Gallery Analytics is able to track every wifi enabled device moving around in the exhibition area in real time. Similar to how a shopping mall is tracking their visitors to determine how well a window display converts customers, Lund will be able to provide in depth analysis of the exhibition visitor’s movement in the space and from that distill how well the works in the exhibition performs.

The wifi mesh network is connected to an online, openly available, gallery analytics website where the tracking data and analytics can be accessed. This interface is also installed in the exhibition space, to enable the visitors to detect that they are being analyzed.

Arts/digital links

Bad times at the Sydney Opera House hackathon but with some constructive advice here too.

MoMA Seeks an Audience Beyond Its Walls is the title of a WSJ article about a blog. Only, by the way they talk about it, you’d think they’d just invented the Internet or something.

Not read this yet, but it’s on the list: Museum transformation in the digital age Museum transformation in the digital age

In this paper I will discuss Tate’s approach to the delivery of its digital strategy 2013-2015, which emphasises digital as a dimension of everything, drawing on my own work as the Digital Production Lead at Tate.

Speaking of Tate, they put the metadata for ‘around 70,000 artworks and 3,500 associated artists’ on github. Here are some links to what people have done with or said about this.

From the depths of 2008:

As part of a larger Arts Council England funded project [several councils and a museum] are working in partnership to explore how viral marketing might be used to raise the profile of museums in Hampshire.

Please, someone tell them.

DIGITALMEETSCULTURE is “intended as a portal for gathering information about the digital culture in the world, taking into account the different approaches that science, cultural heritage and arts have to the digital age”

Arts Council of Wales have announced their first funded projects for their Digital Research & Development programme.

Alyson Fielding has been having some Digital adventures in theatre:

We’re looking at how technology can create new experiences for audiences, specifically for one of The Other Way Works’ shows which is touring in 2014.

The Other Way Works also featured on Sync’s list of Ten more digital arts projects we love.

Other things that fall under this heading:

Other links

In the past couple of weeks there’s been quite a lot of kerfuffle about how touring artists try to make a living. Bryony Kimmings started it with You show me yours…. The result was a whole lot of blog posts (it was like being back in 2004). Artsadmin have compiled them.

Fiona Romeo’s Can an exhibition be a story? is great and well worth your time, with lots of thoughts and observations on how the stuff that makes up an exhibition is experienced.

This video about the building of a new NFL stadium was intriguing, especially for the line: “Most NFL stadiums can’t compete with the high definition experience fans now get watching football at home”. They’re designing a new stadium not just for ‘fans’ but ‘fans with smartphones who need to be coaxed from their TVs’. But then you read about the effort that goes into an NFL broadcast and maybe it becomes clearer.

Just quickly:

What Screens Want by Frank Chimero is very good, even if I think the ‘we should all just make everything lovely’ sentiment is a utopian step too far from reality. And I don’t think the ‘grain of the screen’ stuff is quite right. Minor quibbles though – lots of goodness in that post.

Apps, services, etc

Finally…

IDIOTS is a charming little send-up of our relationships with our devices.

CulturalDigital: why I’ve started a forum

The week before last, I set up a forum called CulturalDigital. It started when I sent a direct message via Twitter saying:

ChrisUnitt on Twitter

That was sent to Ash Mann, someone who I felt wouldn’t be afraid to point out a massive waste of time and effort. He asked a couple of pertinent questions and then was pretty encouraging so, a few hours later, the site was born.

On the welcome thread I’ve written the following by way of explanation:

This is a place to discover and talk about the areas where digital technology and arts, culture and heritage overlap with each other.

The aim is for this to be the place you come to:

  • Share what you’re doing or what you’ve learned in a way that might benefit others.
  • Find links to the latest articles and reports about digital media and technology in the arts, culture and technology sectors.
  • Ask questions when you’re not sure what the solution to a problem might be (we’re all still learning).

If people were to do any/all of that then I’d call that a success. What I’d really like is for there to be a loyal bunch of people who go to CulturalDigital at the start of their day to make sure they’re up to date with what’s going on. But we’ll see.

Otherwise, it’s all a bit of an experiment and I’m looking forward to seeing how it might be used. I’ve tried to leave it pretty formless for now. If it turns out we could do with a categories for museums, digital publishing, PR, different countries or whatever else, then they can be added later. I’d rather not second guess things if I can help it and I’m hoping ongoing management and moderation can be very light touch.

As for the reasons why I wanted to put the site together, there are a few things:

  • I was talking to someone recently who has a digital media-related role at an arts organisation and he said: ‘It’s kinda surprising that there’s nowhere I can go to talk about this stuff’. I agreed.
  • I’ve been interested in discourse.org, the software running the forum, for a little while and wanted a reason to try it out.
  • Inspiration-wise, I’ve been casting glances at Hacker News, Inbound.org and the MCG email list.
  • It isn’t costing me much; a domain name, some hosting and a bit of time is all. I realise that’s not a reason for doing it – more a reason for not not doing it (if you see what I mean).

With all that in mind, I figured I’d just do something. If it’s useful and it takes off then great. If not (and I know it’s notoriously tough to get a forum going) then it doesn’t matter too much and at least I scratched that itch.

Ash has written a bit about the forum too, expressing much the same sentiment.

So please, have a look around the site, go to the introductions thread and say hello. There’s also a Twitter account you can follow for new topics – that’s @culturaldigita1.

Digital Trends the Arts Can’t Ignore

The other weekend I was invited to the National Theatre to talk at a meeting of Mitos21 PR and marketing managers.

Mitos21 is a group of theatre professionals associated to some of Europe’s largest theatre institutions. They were there to discuss the opportunities and challenges they face and a few speakers had been invited to provide food for thought.

It was a great event and I was quite honoured to have been invited along. I hung around for the day and was fascinated by the other talks and the discussions the attendees struck up among themselves.

As someone with one foot in the cultural sector and another in the ‘digital’ arena, I’d been asked to give a perspective about wider digital trends and to ask some provocative questions about how organisations use or misuse digital.

Here’s my presentation on Slideshare:

There were four parts to my talk:

  1. Arts organisations that do digital
  2. The people who are really good at this
  3. Digital organisations that do art
  4. The world stage

Over the course of which, I spoke about 12 trends:

  1. Mobile
  2. Focus on the user
  3. Print to digital
  4. Competency v innovation
  5. Web-only projects
  6. Lean methodology
  7. Hiring senior digital leaders
  8. New online stars
  9. Unbundling
  10. Competition for attention
  11. Global reach
  12. Digital transformation

Rather than give a slide-by-slide commentary here, I’m going to do a post on each trend and link from each bulletpoint. Do subscribe/sign up/follow me if you want to follow along. Or just check back later.

Finally, thanks to the people who suggested trends to cover off the back of my earlier post.