Category Archives: Digital media

Blunted Points [updated]

21.02.2012 posted by Category: About Illuminations, Digital media, Television
Blunted Points [updated]

Tomorrow Arts Council England and the BBC announce the projects to be funded for this summer’s exciting digital arts project The Space (see my earlier post Make it new). I did some initial consultancy for The Space but then decided that I wanted to pitch an idea. This entailed pulling back from any contact with those who were judging the applications. The idea, which I called Points, was turned down in the first stage of applications because it was felt that Illuminations did not qualify as ‘an arts organisation’. I appealed this call, successfully, and Points went forward to the second round. But we learned today that it has not been successful. So I thought it might be interesting – in part because people rarely acknowledge their failures in these processes – to reproduce below the core of the Points first-round application, written back in November. The application at this stage was seeking a grant, including all rights costs, of £73,400.
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Postcard from the battlefields

4.02.2012 posted by Category: About Illuminations, Digital media
Postcard from the battlefields

For a project about the First World War to be released later in the year (when I’ll blog it), I have been filming in Belgium and France. The weather was bitterly cold and our car got caught in a scary blizzard, but we had a fascinating time. On the Menin Gate in Ypres I discovered a trace of a Wyver (above) who was entirely unknown to me, and I was pleased to visit Edwin Lutyens’ vast memorial at Thiepval. From the generous and gracious historian Piet Chielens I learned a lot about the way in which cemeteries write histories across the landscape, and I developed a deep respect for the work of Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). So having not done a ‘postcard’ for many a month, here is one from the battlefields.
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Cool for catalogues

18.01.2012 posted by Category: Digital media, Visual arts
Cool for catalogues

As I have blogged previously, the Reading Room initiative from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is terrific. This makes available for reading online a selection of the museum’s past catalogues. The ‘flippingbook’ format is perhaps not the easiest to use but crucially it preserves the illustrations, layout, typography and something of the materiality of these historical records. Now the Guggenheim has launched a similar initiative (the press release is here; thanks to @RebeccaJLittman for pointing me in the direction of this) as well as, intriguingly, a number of eBooks for the Kindle (priced at $1.99 each) created from curatorial essays. The e-book collection is a smart publishing initiative complementing a very smart and valuable free-to-access resource – and I can’t think of anything comparable from a British cultural institution.
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Happy 20th birthday, NVAP

5.01.2012 posted by Category: Digital media, Performance
Happy 20th birthday, NVAP

The National Video Archive of Performance (NVAP) is a great and glorious resource – and shamefully little-known. Thanks to a generous agreement with theatre unions (which permits taping without the payment of fees to artistes and others), the NVAP creates high-quality archival recordings of theatre shows. These can be accessed by researchers (and back in 2009 Annette Brausch contributed a wonderful guest post here about this process), but for the most part – because of the terms of the agreement – they are not publicly screened or otherwise distributed. To mark twenty years of the NVAP, however, the V&A, which is where the archive is based, is mounting a series of showings on Sunday afternoons – including on 12 February Gregory Doran’s recent Cardenio in Stratford (above). All the details are across the jump. (I know we don’t usually do announcements of forthcoming screenings here, but these are rather special.)
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Hand-held exhibitions

14.12.2011 posted by Category: Digital media, Visual arts
Hand-held exhibitions

At The British Library Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination (until 13 March) is an exhibition of medieval bibles and prayer books, histories and genealogies. Many are objects of astounding beauty, as well as being of profound historical significance. Complementing the compelling show there’s an iPad app with multiple images drawn from fifty-eight of the manuscripts. The app does one thing brilliantly well, but in other ways it’s disappointing. Another current exhibition with its own app is Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (until 22 January). Created with the same mobile content system, toura, this app is both more engaging (filmmaker John Waters acts as host) and somehow more substantial. Taken together, they are a good introduction to the state of the app for major exhibitions.
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Make it new

14.11.2011 posted by Category: Digital media, Performance, Television, Visual arts
Make it new

Arts Council England and the BBC today launched a hugely exciting initiative called The Space. As they describe it, this is ‘an experimental digital arts media service and commissioning programme that could help to transform the way people connect with, and experience, arts and culture. the arts and media.’ You can read more about it here – and on the same site you can read my ‘Inspiration essay’ (their title) suggesting how important The Space might be. I’ll blog this project’s development over the coming days and weeks, but to kick things off here’s my essay.

The arts on television have long been defined by forms and formats established more than fifty years ago. The documentaries and magazine shows of the 1950s and ‘60s still set the terms for mainstream media presentation of the arts on our screens. In those fifty and more years, the arts have changed, technologies have changed, audiences have changed – all to the most extraordinary degree – while media about the arts, by and large, has not.


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Leonardo half-live [Updated]

8.11.2011 posted by Category: Digital media, Television, Visual arts
Leonardo half-live [Updated]

Well, that really was very curious. I’ve just sat with around one hundred others in one of smaller screens at Clapham Picturehouse watching a live Sky Arts HD broadcast from a party at the National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci exhibition. Perhaps the first thing to say about Leonardo Live is that it was in truth only half-live, since I would guess (it was a bit dark for a stop-watch) at least fifty per cent of the 73 minutes was composed of pre-recorded packages. Yet even the live elements felt more than a touch over-produced as the show made its breathless, relentless way around the galleries. Which is not to say that it wasn’t a treat to see the paintings VERY BIG in HD – when, that is, the camera kept still for long enough. Co-host Tim Marlow was his usual polished, expert self (with only one intriguing and engaging lapse) and some of the guests insisted on making interesting and provocative points in their allotted brief span (Fiona Shaw – what a star!). So I appreciated the visuals and learned quite a bit about Leonardo, but I never really got beyond how, well, curious it was to be watching this curate’s egg of a television programme – in which, you’d have to say, nothing actually happened – on a cinema screen in Clapham.
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