Following on my post from yesterday about anticipating the kinds of experiences people will want from concerts comes this article from Wired about virtual reality and music. Evidently creating content for virtual reality is proving to be a challenge and music is so far the best showcase for VR. Outside of games, music is almost certainly the most popular content type in VR right now, which makes … [Read more...]
Artists Erased From The Web And Our Growing Problem With Facts
Artist and author Dennis Cooper got his blog back this week. Google had suddenly removed the 14-year-old blog a few months ago without warning and had refused to answer Cooper's repeated attempts to find out why. After the takedown got attention "from international media outlets, a statement of support from PEN America and a petition to recover the blog," Google finally responded to Cooper's … [Read more...]
TV Dying, Video Streaming Surging – So This Is How People Are Getting Their News (Uh-Oh)
A flood of stories this week show how TV is dying and video is on the rise. You think changing audience behavior is tough on arts organizations? Try it when you're a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate like NBCUniversal Comcast or Verizon. Olympics TV ratings were down 18% from 2012. NBC had paid $1.23 billion for rights to the broadcast MTV Video Awards ratings this week fell 30 percent … [Read more...]
In The Church Of Big Data, Artistic Judgment Is Just A Data Point
A piece by Yuval Noah Harari in the Financial Times this weekend delves into our fascination with Big Data. The tech industry has made so many billions of dollars being able to track, quantify and insert itself into our behavior that many have signed on as adherents to the Church of Big Data. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised … [Read more...]
Why Aren’t We Driving Self-Driving Cars Yet? It’s All About The Culture
Driverless cars are here and they work and by all accounts they make driving safer than when humans are piloting. So why aren't they already in showrooms? Not so fast. It's not just about whether they can be made and work and are safe. It's about a cultural shift that will have to take place before they are successfully sold. Like anything that's a significant part of our lives, there's a … [Read more...]
How Dance Will Help Teach Us About The Next Transformative Technology
Dance is the most physical art. Bodies moving, yes, but physical also because of how bodies relate to the spaces they're in. Much of the energy in tech innovation right now is directed to exploring the edges between physical and virtual worlds, and how we perceive spaces and interact with them. Much of the work is in new interfaces for our machines - voice control, facial recognition, biometrics, … [Read more...]
When All The Culture Around Us Starts To Look The Same
One of the biggest comforts of fast food is its familiarity. Generic from location to location, you know not only what the food will be and how it will taste, but that the ritual of the experience will be familiar too. It isn't that fast food people are necessarily unadventurous; but at least some of the time, they're drawn to the familiar. There's a parallel on the internet. Remember the sense … [Read more...]
When We Allow Technology To Police Our Culture…
Last year I was producing the live streaming of the Ojai Music Festival and we decided to use YouTube to carry the streams. In a small outdoor venue, the number of seats is limited to a few hundred, and streaming the concerts greatly increases the number of people who can hear/see the concerts. Typically, in the 48 hours after the stream, the audience about doubles the number who saw it … [Read more...]
Is Opera The Real 21st Century Art Form?
A 2015 survey by blogger Mae Mai reported that 260 new opera companies started since 2000 in the United States. There are 80 opera companies now working in New York alone. Over the past couple months the New York Opera Fest showcased many of the New York companies. For the most part, these don't look like your grandpa's operas - just clicking the website confirms that. New opera embraces the … [Read more...]
Do Artists Have A Vision For The Future?
Around the beginning of the 20th Century, some French artists were asked to design a series of cards that would imagine what life would be like 100 years in the future in the year 2000. The first cards were created for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris and eventually there were at least 87 of them. This was the mechanical age, the dawn of automation. So it's not surprising that the artists' … [Read more...]
Culture-crashing – Is The Internet Killing Our Creative Class?
Scott Timberg, an arts journalist and author of the CultureCrash blog on ArtsJournal, has a new book out called... Culture Crash. It's Scott's attempt to look at how the digital revolution has impacted artists. The tagline of the book - "The Killing of the Creative Class" - gives you an idea of what he thinks has happened. His premise is that artists are having a more and more difficult time … [Read more...]
Live Versus The Machine (Let’s Not Take The Live Experience For Granted)
The promise of virtual reality has intrigued science fiction writers for years. But the technology for VR has been rather disappointing. Until now, writes Wired. A headset called the Oculus Rift has gamers excited. But also movie makers and artists interested in new forms of story-telling: What is known is that the ways that perspectives can change thanks to virtual reality are remarkable. … [Read more...]
The New Literate?
Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material. - Wikipedia Literacy at its most basic is the ability to read and write. Someone is judged "literate" by what they've read or written, and notions of literateness (as opposed to "literacy") have changed over time. Time was when definitions of literate … [Read more...]
The Lang Lang Experience, Live And In 3D
Is the future of live classical music recitals to turn them into a multimedia experience that is somehow more "familiar" to a generation raised on video screens. Here's a report from Lang Lang's concert in London over the weekend:He is not the first classical pianist to give a solo Albert Hall recital but few of his predecessors brought along in-your-face amplification and multiple screens … [Read more...]
When Technology Blows Up Your Strategy
Often when people talk about using technology, what they're really talking about is platforms. A blog is a platform. A Facebook page is a platform. A YouTube channel is a platform. They aren't technology strategies. Platforms are constantly changing, and if you're locked into one, it's difficult to keep up when the next one comes along. A smart technology strategy isn't dependent on a platform, … [Read more...]