Digital Culture

The Digital Dark Age is coming

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Can it really be a year since I blogged last ? It is. Maybe it’s time to move to Medium for these kind of thoughts or at least find where a small amount of feedback can be had these days.

It’s been a pretty full on year for me, but the chaps at Create Hub have once again invited me to join their #IndustryExperts panel to publish three articles over the course of the year covering the state of Digital as far as I see it. This, despite my appalling record of delivering previous articles to deadline. (I write from experience, which takes time – rather than just make stuff up y’know )

Anyway, one of the things that I did was build my relationship with the Google Cultural Institute to research and publish some previously unseen archive material from London Philharmonic Orchestra.

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Digital Culture

Open for Disruption

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I wrote a new blog article for Create Hub, exploring the apparent stasis of innovation in the established culture sector. Probably familiar territory to anyone exposed to my rants on a regular basis, but I sometimes think of the challenge as being particular to an industry that delivers content through bricks and mortar buildings. The digital proposition is that maybe that content could be shaped for other modes of delivery, and maybe that might suit some members of the audience better.

Cue crys of “But Theatre will never change” “The smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd“. Exit stage left.

“This year’s report shows that while the positive impact of technology on organisations remains high, there is a gap between the ambition of arts and cultural organisations in relation to digital technology and their ability to execute on those ambitions.” Sam Mitchell, Native, NESTA

Rant on at Create Hub

Digital Culture

Google Cultural Institute

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I went over to Paris to visit the Google Cultural Institute Lab with some work colleagues from The Place this week.

Visiting Google cultural Institute labs in ParisGreat to see their facilities and demo the gigapixel technology of the Google Art Project at large size. Zooming in to brush stroke-level detail of the classic paintings on a wall sized screen is pretty impressive.

The thing that struck me most is the focus in terms of identifying the techniques or products that have the most potential and pushing them as far as possible. The innovation of the 360 Street View cameras is still moving forward with the new 360 performing arts presentations on the Google Cultural Institute and of course the DIY VR technology of Cardboard – proudly flagged as being invented at the Lab in Paris.

We got a small insight into other areas of research, but I can’t help but be curious about what secrets might be cooking in the Lab.