Artists, Musicians and the Internet

Presents findings from a national survey of self-described artists and an online survey of 2,755 musicians that assess how artists and musicians use the Internet, what they think about copyright issues, and how they feel about online file sharing

Assessment of Regranting Intermediaries Strategy: Exploring the Ecosystem of Support for Individual Artists & Small Arts Organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area

In March 2014, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation engaged consultants from Olive Grove in partnership with Informing Change to assess the effectiveness of the Foundation's approach to support regranting intermediaries as a means to resource small arts organizations, individuals artist, and communities or arts disciplines with which program staff have limited experience {for instance, folk and traditional arts). The purpose of this study was three-fold:- To forecast the fluctuating funding environment for the Performing Arts Program's (the Program) current intermediaries;- To better understand which artists, organizations, and communities benefit from the Program's current intermediary funding strategey and where gaps or overlaps lie; and- To develop a set of recommendations for how the Program's regranting approach could adapt in order to better serve the Bay Area's performing arts ecoystem, according to the goals and priorities o the Program's strategic framework.The primary audience for this assessment is the Performing Arts Program staff, who will use the findings and recommendations to inform decision-making about how to best use intermediary funding to help the Program achieve its goals. The leaders of the current intermediaries are the secondary audience, since the Program staff wants to work in a spirit of partnership with these organizations. The tertiary audience is the larger arts and culture field, which could benefit from excerpted "lessons learned" from this assessment

Narrative music: towards an understanding of musical narrative functions in multimedia

As the computer screen is replacing the book as the dominant medium for communication (Kress, 2003), questions about how meaning is constituted by the multimodal interaction of different media (including music) is becoming increasingly important in contemporary research of pedagogy, sociology and media studies. The overall aim with this licentiate thesis is to explore musical narrative functions as they appear in multimedia such as film and computer games. The thesis is based on three publications. Publication 1 proposes a classification of musical narrative functions, with 6 narrative classes(the Emotive, Informative, Descriptive, Guiding, Temporal and Rhetorical classes) and 11 categories. The relational interplay of music with contextual factors is emphasized. Publication 2 describes the design of a software tool, REMUPP (Relations Between Musical Parameters and Perceived Properties), to be used for experimental studies of musical expression. REMUPP is used for real time alteration of musical expression, by the manipulation of musical parameters such as tempo, harmony, rhythm, articulation, etc. Publication 3 describes a quasi-experiment using REMUPP, where a group of young participants (12-13 years old) were given the task of adapting musical expression – by manipulating 7 parameters – to make it fit 3 visual scenes shown on a computer screen. They also answered a questionnaire asking about their musical backgrounds and habits of listening to music, watching movies and playing computer games. Numerical data from the manipulations were analyzed statistically with regards to the preferred values of the musical parameters in relation to the different visual scenes. The results indicated awareness and knowledge about codes and conventions of musical narrative functions, and were to some degree affected by the participants’ gender, musical backgrounds and media habits

Enhanced associations with actions of the artist influence gaze behaviour

The aesthetic experience of the perceiver of art has been suggested to relate to the art-making process of the artist. The artist’s gestures during the creation process have been stated to influence the perceiver’s art-viewing experience. However, limited studies explore the art-viewing experience in relation to the creative process of the artist. We introduced eye-tracking measures to further establish how congruent actions with the artist influence perceiver’s gaze behaviour. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that simultaneous congruent and incongruent actions do not influence gaze behaviour. However, brushstroke paintings were found to be more pleasing than pointillism paintings. In Experiment 3, participants were trained to associate painting actions with hand primes to enhance visuomotor and visuovisual associations with the artist’s actions. A greater amount of time was spent fixating brushstroke paintings when presented with a congruent prime compared with an incongruent prime, and fewer fixations were made to these styles of paintings when presented with an incongruent prime. The results suggest that explicit links that allow perceivers to resonate with the artist’s actions lead to greater exploration of preferred artwork styles

Assessing Learning Through the Arts

Within the past several decades, the emphasis in public education nationwide has steadily moved away from arts-rich and creativity based learning toward more standardized, test-based learning. In recent years, budget cuts and the "No Child Left Behind Act" have pushed the education climate even further toward high-stakes testing, narrowing curriculum. In line with this, Washington State has enacted the Washington Assessment of Student Learning standards, shifting local schools' priorities toward meeting test-based standards. At the same time, public education in Washington state faced significant budget cuts. By 2005, Washington ranked 42nd in the nation in public education spending.Public schools have had to cut many rich program offerings including in-school arts classes. In 2005, nearly 60 percent of Washington State principals reported one hour or less of music instruction per week in their schools. Worse yet, 60 percent of Seattle Public School elementary schools offered no visual arts program that same year.During this time, several existing organizations in King County and countless more practitioners were growing to meet a new demand for the arts gap through diverse, innovative programming both in and out of the school day. Seattle's nonprofit arts education organizations were natural advocates for more creative learning opportunities but remained somewhat disconnected from each other, lacking a cohesive, persuasive message to more effectively advocate for arts education. In response to these challenges, among others, seven of these regional nonprofit youth arts education organizations formed the Seattle Arts Education Consortium (Consortium), a collaborative, two-year project, in the summer of 2005.Reflecting on the work of the last two years, the Consortium offers several key findings and lessons learned related to both the process and the product. These findings may be an excellent resource to any group starting a similar process and especially for arts education programs hoping to elevate the rigor and public understanding of their programs' impacts. This report will also be useful to foundations interested in encouraging collaborations among their grantees.The sections that follow include descriptions of the process, outcomes and findings for each project activity including: Evaluation Planning & Implementation, Professional Development for Teaching Artists, Arts Education Communications & Messaging as well as What's Next for the Consortium

Supporting a Thriving Bay Area Performing Arts Ecosystem: A Mid-Point Assessment of the Hewlett Foundation's Performing Arts Program

As one of the largest institutional funders of performing arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Hewlett Foundation's Performing Arts Program (Program) plays an important role in the arts ecosystem across California. The Performing Arts Program works to "ensure continuity and innovation in the performing arts through the creation, performance, and appreciation of exceptional works that enrich the lives of individuals and benefit communities through the Bay Area." Monitoring and evaluation are integral to the Strategic Framework. It outlines metrics, short (2013) and longterm (2017) growth targets, and activities and strategies for each component of the Program, taking into consideration economic conditions, the arts landscape in California and current demographic trends in the Bay Area. Program staff built in evaluation activities that would enable the Program to determine if its strategies are effective, to measure how much progress has been made toward its goals, and to identify opportunities for learning and improving outcomes. In 2015, the Foundation partnered with Informing Change and Olive Grove to conduct a mid-point assessment of the Program's six-year Strategic Framework. The evaluation centers on four core questions, each of which has additional sub-questions (see Appendix A for a full list of the questions and subquestions). In partnership with Program staff, Informing Change and Olive Grove developed a plan to assess these questions using a mixed-methods approach. A primary data source for this assessment is interviews that solicit insight and feedback from six types of constituents: grantees from all three of the Program's component areas, peer arts funders, community-based arts leaders, and artists and cultural entrepreneurs (Appendix A includes a list of all interview informants and Appendix B provides interview protocols). The interview informant sample includes individuals and organizations connected to the Program as grantees or partners, as well as other key leaders in the arts ecosystem that do not receive funding. This assessment also draws heavily upon quantitative analysis of data about the portfolio funding (i.e., GIFTS, the Foundation's grant tracking software), grantees' work (i.e., Cultural Data Project (CDP), Audience Research Collaborative (ARC) and Grantee Perception Report (GPR)), and arts education (i.e., California Department of Education (CDE)). A review of existing literature and research studies provided data on changes in different fields and contextual information (Appendix C provides references for all works cited)

Designing mobile augmented reality art applications:addressing the views of the galleries and the artists

The utilization of mobile augmented reality to display gallery artworks or museum content in novel ways is a well-established concept in the augmented reality research community. However, the focus of these systems is generally technologically driven or only addresses the end user and not the views of the gallery or the original artist. In this paper we discuss the design and development of the mobile application ?Taking the Artwork Home?, which allows people to digitally curate their own augmented reality art exhibitions in their own homes by digitally ?replacing? the pictures they have on their walls with content from the Peter Scott Gallery in Lancaster. In particular, we present the insights gained from a research through design methodology that allowed us to consider how the views of the gallery and artists impacted on the system design and therefore the user experience. Thus the final artifact is the result of an iterative evaluation process with over 100 users representing a broad range of demographics and continues to be evaluated/enhanced by observing its operation ?in the wild?. Further, we consider the effect the project has had on gallery practices to enable both augmented reality designers, and galleries and museums to maximize the potential application of the technology when working together on such project

Molto+Media: Digital Culture Funding

This report profiles nine organizations identified by grantmakers and independent research as adventurous in their use of digital media. They represent a mix of arts disciplines, geographies, organizational sizes and media purposes. Some are using digital tools to extend organizational capacities in new ways while others are creating, documenting and disseminating the art itself.Conversations with these nine organizations revealed common themes:Organizations describe the work as building capabilities, not "doingprojects." Digital tools and platforms are now essential building blocksin an organization's work and need to be created accordingly.Leading digital culture entrepreneurs want grantmakers to makebigger bets on organizations with strong track records. Building newcapabilities is expensive, particularly at the scale of large culturalinstitutions.There is a sense that, globally, U.S. organizations lag. The E.U. hassupported open culture, digital initiatives aggressively, making Europe,in particular, a hotbed of digital cultureOrganizations are looking for much greater risk-taking from thefunding community. "Grantmakers still expect only home runs," saidmore than one organization, and they point out that in for-profitindustry many tech projects failDigital culture projects are helping organizations reach massaudiences as well as niches. Both are important.Several of the organizations in our profiles had received no dedicatedfunding for their work. "Our funders are not ready to do this, so wehave to do it ourselves," said interviewees.The most important theme of this report, though, is the incredible creativity and energy of these digital culture entrepreneurs. Cultural organizations and artists are using digital media to invent new ways to create and distribute art and to reach and engage audiences

ROAM: a Rich Object Appearance Model with Application to Rotoscoping

Rotoscoping, the detailed delineation of scene elements through a video shot, is a painstaking task of tremendous importance in professional post-production pipelines. While pixel-wise segmentation techniques can help for this task, professional rotoscoping tools rely on parametric curves that offer the artists a much better interactive control on the definition, editing and manipulation of the segments of interest. Sticking to this prevalent rotoscoping paradigm, we propose a novel framework to capture and track the visual aspect of an arbitrary object in a scene, given a first closed outline of this object. This model combines a collection of local foreground/background appearance models spread along the outline, a global appearance model of the enclosed object and a set of distinctive foreground landmarks. The structure of this rich appearance model allows simple initialization, efficient iterative optimization with exact minimization at each step, and on-line adaptation in videos. We demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively the merit of this framework through comparisons with tools based on either dynamic segmentation with a closed curve or pixel-wise binary labelling

Liquid simulation with mesh-based surface tracking

Animating detailed liquid surfaces has always been a challenge for computer graphics researchers and visual effects artists. Over the past few years, researchers in this field have focused on mesh-based surface tracking to synthesize extremely detailed liquid surfaces as efficiently as possible. This course provides a solid understanding of the steps required to create a fluid simulator with a mesh-based liquid surface. The course begins with an overview of several existing liquid-surface-tracking techniques and the pros and cons of each method. Then it explains how to embed a triangle mesh into a finite-difference-based fluid simulator and describes several methods for allowing the liquid surface to merge together or break apart. The final section showcases the benefits and further applications of a mesh-based liquid surface, highlighting state-of-the-art methods for tracking colors and textures, maintaining liquid volume, preserving small surface features, and simulating realistic surface-tension waves