“For The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the new film from the Coen brothers and the first title Netflix is distributing this way, the exclusive theatrical release was something of a mirage” — one screen in each of three cities for four barely publicized days. The same thing is going to happen next week for Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. Film fans are not happy.
Building Audiences
Pre-Dawn Silent Dance Parties: A New Path To Community Or Even Bliss?
“An early-morning substance-free ‘party’ held about once a month in 25 cities across the United States …, Daybreaker events are like the compression shorts of Millennial experiences: Sort of uncomfortable, but also uplifting.”
YouTube Videos Are Getting Longer Because…
Not so long ago, YouTube videos resembled long-form Vines more than anything approaching a 22-minute sitcom. But as more people watch video via mobile, the lines between highly produced television show and a rough YouTube vlog have blurred. These days smartphone users spend a whopping 54 percent of their video-viewing time on videos over 20 minutes long—that’s up from just 29 percent in the beginning of 2016.
Why Feedback Ratings Make Things Worse, Not Better
Today’s understanding of feedback has reversed those terms. Positive ratings are a kind of holy grail on sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, and negative reviews can sink a burgeoning small business or mom-and-pop restaurant. That shift has created a misunderstanding about how feedback works. The original structure of the loop’s information regulation has been lost.
Louvre Abu Dhabi Attracts A Million Visitors In First Year
Those visitors were dominated by foreign tourists, with more than 60 percent from other countries — topped by India, along with Germany, China, England, the United States and France, according to the new museum. The crowd figures are still small in comparison to the flagship Louvre in Paris, which is lending its brand through a 30-year government accord between the United Arab Emirates and France.
Calgary’s New Public Library Tries To Bridge The City
As a library, its details are impressive: The building has four floors, 240,000 square feet of internal space, a podcast and YouTube production studio, a performance hall, a grand reading room, a children’s library, a digital commons, heated handrails, an interior blending hyper-modern touches with traditional wood at almost every turn and $500,000 in indigenous placemaking work, mostly in the form of artworks. It also has 450,000 books.
A North Carolina School Gets Freaked Out, And Then ‘Concerned Parents’ Hold A Prayer Meeting, Over Shakespeare
A theatre group was performing – with edits – a high school version of The Reduced Shakespeare Company’s “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged,” when teachers and students started texting the principal. Then the superintendent shut the play down.
Record Number Of TV Subscribers Cut The Cord Last Quarter
More than 80% of pay-TV subscribers in the U.S. come from four cable and satellite providers: AT&T, Comcast, Charter and Dish. Those companies together lost 887,000 subscribers this quarter, mostly driven by big losses at Dish and AT&T.
V&A Museum Offers Special LGBTQ Tours
“Taking place on the last Saturday of each month, the tours are free to all and aim to uncover the queer histories of the objects in the museum’s collection.” For instance, the Flemish sculptor Giambologna’s marble of Samson slaying a Philistine (both unclothed) with the jawbone of an ass — an artwork that ended up in the possession of King James I’s boyfriend.
What’s Unacceptable Audience Behavior? People Have Been Fighting About That For Centuries
“[The larger issue is] what happens when a large number of people are concentrated together in a public space and have different ideas of how we should all behave. … We see these moral panics in other crowded spaces, too.” And sometimes the policing of behavior scares away the very communities that arts organizarions are trying to reach out to. Lyn Gardner meets Kirsty Sedgman, author of The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing and the Live Performance Experience.
How YouTube’s Algorithmic Suggestions Work
YouTube wants to recommend things people will like, and the clearest signal of that is whether other people liked them. Pew found that 64 percent of recommendations went to videos with more than a million views. The 50 videos that YouTube recommended most often had been viewed an average of 456 million times each. Popularity begets popularity, at least in the case of users (or bots, as here) that YouTube doesn’t know much about.
Are Our Theatres Too Intimidating To First-Timers?
What if you have never been to the theatre before? Could the entrance also be seen as a barrier that feels as if it is there to keep you out just as much to welcome you in? Once you get inside, how do you know what to do and where to go? It can make theatregoing feel as if it’s an exclusive club to which you don’t have the right membership, and one that is likely to fill you with rising panic, adding to the sense that you don’t belong there.
When We Say That ‘Art Is A Right, Not A Privilege’, What Exactly Do We Mean?
The statement can mean one of two things: “access to art is a moral right” or “access to art ought to be a legal right; that free access to museums and other institutions housing cultural artifacts should be legally guaranteed to citizens.” NYU art professor Nickolas Calabrese argues that, while the first would seem to be true on its face, the second is far more problematic than most people who favor it seem to realize.
Interactive Theatre? Fine, As Long As I Don’t Need To Participate
“Let me just say that although I don’t mind watching other theatergoers getting into the act — as a longtime observer of how audiences behave, the psychology of these events intrigues me — I hate being compelled to be the show. I’m not shy or anti-social. I simply don’t want to be made to feel that I must cross the line, onto the actors’ playing field, or be a spoilsport if I don’t. “
As Crowds Become Unmanageable, Vatican Considers Limits On Visitor Numbers
“Tour guides claimed that at least 10 visitors fainted each day as slow-moving crowds filed through the long and narrow corridor that leads to the most popular attraction, the Sistine Chapel, while others have suffered injuries and panic attacks. … [There are even] fears among tour guides that overcrowding could provoke a stampede unless security policy is changed.”
How Do You Reinvent Talk Shows For A Post-TV World?
The genre has had an especially tough time adjusting to an era where the TV channel is just one media pathway among many. Who needs a late-night chat with the stars when stars are available on Instagram and Twitter, 24/7 and without intermediation? What is “late-night” talk on a streaming platform, where, as on a casino floor, neither day nor night exist?
Research: Live-Streaming Performances Doesn’t Diversify Audiences
These ‘live to digital’ screenings – which happen either at the same time as the actual performance, or afterwards – were nevertheless found to be popular. Organisations hosting the screenings and the people attending them expressed an interest in this continuing – although a wider take-up is challenged by ongoing capacity and technological barriers across the sector.
Studio Turns To AI To Analyze Movie Trailers To Figure Out What Audiences Will Like
Researchers from the company published a paper last month explaining how they’re analyzing the content of movie trailers using machine learning. Machine vision systems examine trailer footage frame by frame, labeling objects and events, and then compare this to data generated for other trailers. The idea is that movies with similar sets of labels will attract similar sets of people.
Alas – The Internet Is Designed To Spread Hate Faster Than Love
Social media platforms — and Facebook and Twitter are as guilty of this as Gab is — are designed so that the awful travels twice as fast as the good. And they are operating with sloppy disregard of the consequences of that awful speech, leading to disasters that they then have to clean up after.
Social Media May Be Squashing Human Spirituality, Not To Mention Hope
At least, that’s one thing that Silicon Valley expert Jaron Lanier claims – and it’s because of, well, Silicon Valley companies. “This whole architecture is on every level based on sneakiness and manipulation, often using weird behaviorist, hypnotic, unacknowledged techniques to get people more and more engaged or addicted and persuaded, or to get them into compulsive behavior patterns that aren’t necessarily in their own interest.”
This Festival Is Building A Theatre Audience From Scratch In Burkina Faso
“Founded in 2002, Les Récréâtrales takes place in a residential area of Ouagadougou. Plays are developed, rehearsed, and performed in family courtyards, bringing theatre to the people. Whereas non-festival performances at downtown cultural centers … attract audiences composed of Europeans, other artists, and the artists’ family members and friends, the festival’s audiences are locals of all ages who would not usually have access to or interest in theatre.” Writer and translator Heather Jeanne Denyer talks with the festival’s artistic director, playwright Aristide Tarnagda.
The Public Theater Lives Up To Its Name With A Tour Of Lynn Nottage’s ‘Sweat’ To Devastated Midwestern Cities
Five states, 18 cities, free performances – and a plan that reaches far beyond the play itself; “Along with community organizations, public libraries, Rotary clubs, humanities councils, and whoever else is interested, it has encouraged lectures, discussion groups, story circles, and art pieces in the weeks before and after staging a free performance of Sweat. The tour is now over, but the project is not.”
Will Tiny Books The Size Of Your Hand Change The Way We Read?
The tiny editions are the size of a cellphone and no thicker than your thumb, with paper as thin as onion skin. They can be read with one hand — the text flows horizontally, and you can flip the pages upward, like swiping a smartphone.
Galleries Pile On The Amenities As They Compete For An Audience
For large and now even midsize galleries, custom architecture has become as important as it has long been for museums, with all-new or re-engineered spaces to add restaurants, kitchens, gift shops, bookstores, and black box spaces and auditoriums for performance, film screenings and staged events.
Virtual Reality Promises To Give You Experiences Outside Your Experience. But Can It Cultivate Empathy?
VR researchers tell us that simulations can let us see what it’s like to experience the day-to-day indignities of racist microaggression, of becoming homeless, or even of being an animal primed for butchering. The hope is that this technologically-enabled empathy will help us to become better, kinder, more understanding people. But we should be skeptical of these claims. While VR might help us to cultivate sympathy, it fails to generate true empathy.
MPAA: More Than Half Of All Movies In The Past 50 Years Have Been Rated “R”
The breakdown: Since 1968, the first year of the ratings classifications, there have been 17,202 movies rated R, 5,578 rated M/GP/PG, 4,913 rated PG-13 and 1,574 rated G. Just 524 movies have been rated X or NC-17, reflecting the reluctance of exhibitors to carry those titles.
Growing Consensus In Tech World About The Mal-Effects Of Screens On Kids
Some of the people who built video programs are now horrified by how many places a child can now watch a video. For longtime tech leaders, watching how the tools they built affect their children has felt like a reckoning on their life and work.
You Want To Talk Site-Specific Theatre? How About A Play In Your Car?
No, really: Missoula hosted a series of 10-minute plays in cars last weekend. “The concept was novel but simple enough. You showed up at the Northside KettleHouse and were handed a map, roughly a 2-mile walking loop around downtown Missoula and the Westside. You headed to a specific car and arrived at an appointed time, hopped into the backseat, and a play began with no introduction.”
The Short-Sightedness Of Killing FilmStruck And DramaFever
Sure, WarnerMedia claims that FilmStruck, DramaFever (a Korean drama service), and Super Deluxe is just a way to shutter anything that doesn’t get enough data for the new behemoth that is the combined AT&T and Warner. But that was, honestly, not very smart. “If WarnerMedia had eventually rolled FilmStruck into its bigger service, it would have been an enticing add-on for movie lovers, who are largely underserved by the big streaming services.”
Museums Are Now Using AI To Engage And Manage Visitors
“Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used today by museums of all sizes worldwide, which employ it to develop everything from robots, chatbots and websites, to tools that help them analyze visitor data and their collections, and determine admission policies and exhibition content.” One notable example, a fleet of robots, called Pepper, used by five Smithsonian museums to interact with visitors.