Broadband for culture, a culture for broadband?

The augmentation of cultural participation in Flanders is one of the major cornerstones of the current cultural policy. Digital technologies offer a wide range of opportunities to achieve this goal, as the internet is often seen as a way to augment the number of visitors for arts centres. However, the availability of digital information technologies and the willingness to adopt these new ways of processing cultural material, is a prerequisite for this (r)evolution. This article is based on data collected in three surveys, one for each of the cultural actors; cultural organisations such as museums, arts centres etc, individual artists and art lovers in Flanders. Despite that most artists and cultural organizations are sufficiently equipped with up-to-date technological infrastructure, most websites lack true interactivity with a strong one-to-one relationship between audience, artists and cultural institutions. We therefore conclude that, although there are plenty of broadband connections and other digital tools available to the Flemish art scene, artists and cultural organisations lack a mind-set (or culture) to truly embrace and benefit from the potential of the current digital technologies

The listening room, Camden Arts Centre

This version of The Listening Room is minimal, one microphone and two loudspeakers in the Reading Room of Camden Arts Centre, a relatively small space for this work. The Reading Room is the former entrance to the building, this entrance has been bricked over to create three highly reflective wall surfaces in the room. The room resonance is so pronounced that my usual placement of microphone and speakers would tend to fix on one pitch and stay there - to introduce more of the available frequencies from the space I left the Reading Room table in the space to allow an additional reflective element and used an asymmetric placement of loudspeakers, one at the side and one under the table

Collaborative pedagogy and digital scholarship: a case study of 'Media Culture 2020'

This paper presents an educational case study of ‘Media Culture 2020’, an EU Erasmus Intensive Programme that utilised a range social media platforms and computer software to create open, virtual spaces where students from different countries and fields could explore and learn together. The multi-disciplinary project featured five universities from across Europe and was designed to develop new pedagogical frameworks to encourage collaborative approaches to teaching and learning in the arts. The main objective of the project was to break down classroom and campus walls by creating digital learning environments that facilitated new forms of production, transmission and representation of knowledge. Media Culture 2020 was designed to pilot a novel mode of ‘blended learning’, demonstrating a number of ways in which ‘Web 2.0’ networked technologies might be adopted by academics to encourage open and collaborative modes of practice. The project utilised a number of social media platforms (including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Google Hangout, Google Docs and Blogger) to enhance the learning experiences of a diverse set of students from different cultural and international contexts. In doing so, Media Culture 2020 enabled participants with a diverse range skills and cultural experiences to develop new working practices that respond to the convergence of digital media and art, as well as the internationalisation of media production and business, through the use of open, interactive software

Digital archiving of manuscripts and other heritage items for conservation and information retrieval

Expression of cultural heritage looking from the informatics angle falls into text, images, video and sound categories. ICT can be used to conserve all these heritage items like; the text information consisting of palm leaf manuscripts, stone tablets, handwritten paper documents, old printed records, books, microfilms, fiche etc, images including paintings, drawings, photographs and the like, sound items which includes musical concerts, poetry recitations, chanting of mantras, talks of important persons etc, and video items like archival films historical importance. To retrieve required information from such a large mass of materials in different formats and to transmit them across space and time, there are several limitations. Digital technology allows hitherto unavailable facilities for durable storage and speedy and efficient transmission / retrieval of information contained in all the above formats. Hypertext and hypermedia features of digital media enable integrating text with graphics, sound, video and animation. This paper discusses the international and national efforts for digitizing heritage items, digital archiving solutions available, the possibilities of the media, and the need to follow standards prescribed by organizations like UNESCO to enable easy exchange and pooling of information and documents generated in digital archiving systems at national and international level. The need to develop language technology for local scripts for organizing and preserving our cultural heritage is also stressed

The hunt for submarines in classical art: mappings between scientific invention and artistic interpretation

This is a report to the AHRC's ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Programme. This report stems from a project which aimed to produce a series of mappings between advanced imaging information and communications technologies (ICT) and needs within visual arts research. A secondary aim was to demonstrate the feasibility of a structured approach to establishing such mappings. The project was carried out over 2006, from January to December, by the visual arts centre of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS Visual Arts).1 It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as one of the Strategy Projects run under the aegis of its ICT in Arts and Humanities Research programme. The programme, which runs from October 2003 until September 2008, aims ‘to develop, promote and monitor the AHRC’s ICT strategy, and to build capacity nation-wide in the use of ICT for arts and humanities research’.2 As part of this, the Strategy Projects were intended to contribute to the programme in two ways: knowledge-gathering projects would inform the programme’s Fundamental Strategic Review of ICT, conducted for the AHRC in the second half of 2006, focusing ‘on critical strategic issues such as e-science and peer-review of digital resources’. Resource-development projects would ‘build tools and resources of broad relevance across the range of the AHRC’s academic subject disciplines’.3 This project fell into the knowledge-gathering strand. The project ran under the leadership of Dr Mike Pringle, Director, AHDS Visual Arts, and the day-to-day management of Polly Christie, Projects Manager, AHDS Visual Arts. The research was carried out by Dr Rupert Shepherd

Reflections on preserving the state of new media art

As part of its work to explore emerging issues associated with characterisation of digital materials, Planets has explored vocabularies and information structures for expressing the properties integral to the value of digital art. Value encompasses those qualities that must be understood and captured in order to ensure that art works’ sensory, emotional, mental and spiritual resonance remain. Facets of interactivity, modularity and temporality associated with digital art present some critical questions that the preservation community must increasingly be equipped to answer. Because digital art materials exhibit fundamental multidimensionality, validating the successful preservation of creative experience demands the explication of more than just file characteristics. Understanding relationships between objects also implies an understanding of their respective functional qualities. This paper presents a Planets’ vocabulary for encapsulating contextual and implicit characteristics of digital art, optimised for preservation planning and validation

The Transformation Of Archival Philosophy And Practice Through Digital Art

In many ways, digital practices have precipitated remarkable changes in the global accessibility of art. However, the digital revolution has also radically influenced the conservation processes surrounding art, including archiving, preserving, and remembering. This paper explores the conservation of digital (or “variable media”) artworks for the future benefit of culture, with particular peference to creators and viewers of art, as well as participants in interactive artworks. More specifically, this paper focuses on the philosophical and technical approaches adopted by creators, conservators, and philosophers involved in the preservation of variable media artworks. Issues of programming, interoperability between archival systems, and enhanced public access increasingly inform the design of digital archives. Indeed, the continuously shifting technological landscape—marked by the centrality of digital technologies to everyday life—problematizes the preservation of digital art through mainstream museological paradigms. Part of this analysis of digital art conservation will be drawn from the archival philosophies of Boris Groys and Rick Prelinger