Links for October 2013
Lucha Libro is a slice of genius from Peru. It’s writing, Mexican wretling-style. Competitors are given three keywords and five minutes to write a story. It’s a knockout format and losers have to remover their masks.
Arts/digital links
The BBC have announced all sorts of interesting things, including Playlister, new iPlayer functionality, fully digitising the BBC’s Shakespeare archive and making it freely available to those in education and learning in the UK, a new digital vision for live event coverage and a new initiative to get more people coding.
Meanwhile, here’s a job ad for a Launch Director for The Space:
You will lead the development of the next phase of The Space, a joint digital project being created by the BBC and Arts Council England and which is currently scheduled for launch in Spring 2014
And a summary evaluation of The Space [PDF] so far.
Meanwhile, the BFI have launched BFI Player.
Five new projects from the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts fund. These ones seem to be about widening access.
Transmissions by Tate Digital promises to be an email bulletin sharing info about digital activity at other museums, galleries, archives and libraries.
Museum of London axes oral history and community teams deciding to focus on digital collecting, rather than direct life stories recording.
Ticketmaster have released a report called State of Play: Theatre UK, part of a research series on live entertainment in the UK.
Google’s Tom Uglow has posted An epilogue: 21 Things I learnt from Midsummer Night’s Dreaming with the RSC and it’s a very worthwhile read:
My hope is that the next time someone wants to have a non-linear play that leaks across multiple realities in real-time performed physically and digitally simultaneously to a global audience they will not have to explain it from the ground up to blank looks and puzzled faces. They can point at the RSC’s seminal 2013 production and say “like that, but much better”.
An interview with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first chief digital officer, Sree Sreenivasan, in the New York Times.
I like your old stuff better than your new stuff contains some interesting thoughts on 3D mashups, appropriation and irreverence.
Big thanks to Jack Harris for kindly mentioning this blog in the second Strategic Thinking vid as part of his screencasts on Effective Website Development for the Arts Marketing Association.
More top digital/cultural jobs – the British Museum is after a Head of Digital Media & Publishing. The role will involve bringing together a number of teams within the British Museum and British Museum Company (Web, Publishing, Picture Library, and Broadcasting – circa 30 members of staff) to create a new department within Public Engagement.
A quick round-up of other notable things:
- STET is ‘A Writers’ Journal on Culture & Technology’
- Molto + Media: Digital Media and Arts Organizations – Digital Culture Funding Report
- Scopify provides museum visitors with ‘a set of digital tools, similar to those used by museum curators and scientists, to investigate each object in front of them and reveal the larger story it represents’.
- Gertrude offers Salons – intimate experiences to learn, discuss and collect art.
- The Technology in the Arts blog/website has been replaced by AMT Lab.
- Fantrotter is a site that combines tickets, flights, hotels and car rental prices<./li>
Other links
If I’m honest, I preferred it when Twitter was used at conferences as a backchannel for criticising the speaker. Being snarky about regurgitation of vacuous soundbites is fun but not as fun. Still, ZOMG! #SMWLDN INSIGHTS FTW
Speaking of snark, here’s False Medium.
This is what happens when a fax machine calls a Twilio voice number and the message is transcribed.
A load of new Google Analytics features have been announced. Plenty to delve into.
Russell Davies wrote about death to innovation:
They'll need to reorganise and reskill and reprioritise. They could call that innovation if they want, but it's not, it's competence. It's the basics.
Which seems to be a recurring complaint at the moment. I moaned about something similar in a recent post and it’s in a talk I’m giving next week too.
Apps, services, etc
- Web: SiteApps, PicMonkey, Google Web Designer, Lightbeam, Homescreen, Igloo, Lang-8, Anki, Expensify
- iOS: Netbot, Rando, Riposte
, MixBit, Carnegie Museum of Art, QuickMath+
- Mac: GIF Brewery, QuickCast
Finally…
Following on from that link above about appropriation and irreverence, I strongly urge you to check out scorpion dagger. Digital collages made from images found here/there on the internet (mostly northern and early renaissance paintings). It’s very special.
