Digital meets Culture

9 October 2019, Brussels

“Smart Specialisation and the Heritage City”, ROCK workshop at the European Week of Regions and Cities

From 7 to 10 October 2019 in Brussels, the 17th edition of the European Week of Regions and Cities will be held, this year under the heading “Regions and Cities: Pillars of the EU’s Future”.
Sessions including Workshops, Participatory labs, Regions’ talks, Q & As on presented themes, Exhibitions will be offered.

Within the framework of this event will be the workshop “Smart Specialisation and the Heritage City”organized by the H2020 project ROCK on the morning 9th October.

The workshop will be a great opportunity to discuss and strength the linkage between Cultural Heritage (CH) and the Smart Specialisation strategies (RIS3) now running all over Europe.

Smart specialization was a poor at city level, and this because local authorities were not involved adequate.

The discussion will focus on two main topics:

technology-driven challenges related to CH – which links to the RIS3 idea of prioritisation;
cross-innovation vectors involving CH – linked to the RIS3 concept of relatedness. (discussion facilitated by Prof. Christer Gustafsson from the University of Uppsala)

The workshop agenda, designed by partners of the Horizon 2020 ROCK project, including EUROCITIES and TASO, will include:

introductory statement by the European Commission (Framing CH at the innovation policy),
keynote by TASO (Talking to cities about S3)
the case study “Bologna and Emilia Romagna´s S3 joint approach to CH”, jointly presented by the Regional Development Agency (ART-ER) and Comune di Bologna.

Further informations: here

Programme and registration: here

Discover online 127 images of lithographic and chromolithographic plates portraiting ancient Indian Chiefs

History of the Indian Tribes of North America, an extraordinary historical heritage

text by Caterina Sbrana.

: img. Public Domain via Wikipedia

“History of the Indian Tribes of North America” is a three-volume collection of Native American biographies and portraits originally published in the United States from 1838 to 1844, by Thomas McKenney and James Hall. McKenney served as Commissioner for Indian Affairs from 1824 to 1830 and during this time he commissioned and collected portraits of Native Americans for his gallery, in the War Department.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs was created on March 11, 1824 without authorization from the Congress. McKenney, formerly superintendent of Indian trade, was appointed to head the office, with two assistants. “McKenney was instructed to take charge of the appropriations for annuities and current expenses, to examine and approve all vouchers for expenditures, to administer the funds for the civilization of the Indians, to decide on claims arising between Indians and whites under the intercourse act, and to handle the ordinary Indian correspondence of the War Department”, it is explained in a blog about the history of the Bureau published in the journal of the American Studies Resources Centre at Liverpool John Moores University.

: Pa She Pa Haw, a Sauk chief

During his duties, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs understood that the future of Native American was at risk, as a consequence of unscrupulous individuals taking advantage of the Native Americans for profit. His many journeys to deal with the Chippewa or Menominee, to define mining rights on their land, allowed him to know the culture of these Indian tribes, and possibly for this reason McKenney decided to publish a record of such vanishing peoples: portraits, biographical sketches, anecdotes and a history of North American Indians. The book was enriched with the portraits he had commissioned.

The oil portraits of Indian leaders, realized on the occasion of their visits to Washington for negotiating treaties with the American government, were made by Charles Bird King and other American painters, while the texts were written by James Hall.

: Ma has kah, chief of the Ioways

Unfortunately, most of the original paintings were destroyed in a fire after the Civil War, so the few remaining copies of this ancient book, containing the lithographies from those paintings, are the only resource left to preserve such an important heritage. But once again digital technology comes to help: in the Digital Collections of the University of Cincinnati we can access the digitized images, each with a wide description of the location, measurements, material, repository, description etc. and the images can be downloaded.

The images were digitized from a copy of the edition held in the Archives & Rare Books Library of the University.

Access the digital collection: http://digital.libraries.uc.edu/luna/servlet/univcincin~24~24
Blog about the history of the Bureau of Indian Affairs: http://www.americansc.org.uk/Online/indians.htm

Lisbon (Portugal), 27-29 November 2019

Europeana 2019: Connect Communities

Europeana 2019 from Sebastiaan ter Burg on Vimeo.

Europeana 2019 was held at the historic National Library of Portugal, Lisbon, whose vast and diversified heritage covers almost ten centuries of Portuguese history and culture.

Europeana 2019 sold out in record time but if was performed in free live stream. There is a different link for each day. Enjoy the conference and follow via #Europeana2019 on twitter!

Wednesday 27 November
https://youtu.be/KktelA8sYb4

Thursday 28 November
https://youtu.be/r9-QHb7hkps

Friday 29 November
https://youtu.be/l2TCt2cgitE

Website and programme: https://pro.europeana.eu/page/europeana-2019

The Biblioteca digital memoriademadrid will be hosting the 14th edition of the annual PASIG (Preservation and Archiving Interest Group) meeting, 19-21 May 2020

Save the Date for PASIG 2020 in Madrid

The next Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) meeting will take place in Madrid on 19-21 May 2020.

The Biblioteca Digital Memoria de Madrid, Centro Cultural Conde Duque is the event host. The PASIG Steering Committee is pleased to connect with colleagues in Conde Duque, which is the most important cultural center in Madrid and home to some of the city’s main libraries and archives. Like last year in Mexico City, this PASIG will offer bi-lingual translation services in English and Spanish.

The Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) is dedicated to advancing the practice of digital preservation and archiving. It brings together practitioners, industry experts and researchers to share experience on how to put preservation and archiving into practice.

The event website is: http://www.pasig2020memoriademadrid.es. Agenda drafts, sponsorship information, registration, and travel and hotel options will be added in the coming months. The Program Committee is in its initial planning phase, but if you have a topic you want to be considered or would like to enquire about sponsorship, please email (c.mumma@austin.utexas.edu) and the Program Committee Chairs, Gilberto Pedreira Campillo (pedreiracg@madrid.es) and Carlos Villarrubia Rodríguez (villarrubiarc@madrid.es).

The Program Committee for Madrid and the PASIG Steering Committee are working closely together on this event. We would like to thank the members of both for all their effort and commitment! If you have an interest in digital preservation and want to be a part of a great community, make sure you save this date!

PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIRS / PRESIDENTES DEL COMITE DE PROGRAMA

Co-chairs: Gilberto Pedreira Campillo (pedreiracg@madrid.es), Director of Digital Library Memoria de Madrid and Carlos Villarrubia Rodríguez (villarrubiarc@madrid.es), Head of IT Technicians and Assistant in Digitalizing Area

STEERING COMMITTEE / COMITE DIRECTIVO

Natalie Baur, El Colegio de México
Tom Cramer, Stanford University
Ben Fino-Radin, Small Data Industries
Neil Jefferies, University of Oxford
Thomas Ledoux, Bibliotheque Nationale de France
Sarah Mason, Artefactual Systems
Becky McGuinness, Open Preservation Foundation
David Minor, UC San Diego Library
Courtney Mumma, Texas Digital Library
Matthias Razum, FIZ Karlsruhe

How improve resilience and sustainable reconstruction of historic areas to deal with extreme events and climate change

Hyperion: a new European project for the preservation of tangible cultural heritage

Hyperion is a new project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020, it is just started in June and will last until November 2022.

The purpose of Hyperion is to provide an integrated resilience assessment platform that, through the evaluation and understanding of risk, provides guidance on the best preparation for dealing with the danger and offers a faster, adapted and efficient response to the sustainable reconstruction of historical areas.

The deterioration of Cultural Heritage sites is one of the biggest challenges in conservation; landslides and earthquakes as well as climate change could have very strong impact on historic areas.The project, leveraging existing tools and new technologies, will focus on this aspects, considering the role of building technologies/materials, structural responses, preventive measures and restoration strategies, resilience and adaptation methodologies.

Currently there is no specific process for understanding and quantifying the effects of climate change on historical areas; Hyperion aims to introduce a research framework for climate and atmospheric composition downscaling.

The project will collect data and perform analyses that will help provide adequate adaptation and mitigation strategies and support sustainable reconstruction plans for CH damage.

A vulnerability map (based on the produced climate risk regional models) will be produced to guide the local authorities in their strategies to preserve heritage sites.

In Hyperion ”resilience” is a fundamental concept that offers an overarching strategy:

risk management,
identification of threats
prevention of damages through protection and preparation
planning and promotion of reconstruction strategies
preparation and promotion of long-term strategic approaches to adapt to Climate Change and to wield policy tools for economic resilience

The project will provide specific tools to support resilience:

physical tools
organizational tools
financial tools.

Hyperion will work closely with Pluggy, another important and successful European project.

More information for the project are available on the project official website: https://www.hyperion-project.eu/

Deadline for application: 28th July

TWA Heritage Digitisation Grant – Increased award amounts for 2019

Following strong interest and some excellent applications from archives and other memory institutions over the last three years, the TWA Digitisation Grant has relaunched in 2019. We are very pleased to be increasing the fund this year and now grants of up to £6000 will be offered for UK libraries and special collections to digitise their holdings.

The TWA Digitisation Grant opens for applications on 19^th June 2019 and welcomes applications from public, private, and special collections libraries based in the UK.

Last year’s esteemed judging panel will return to assess the applications and select the winners: including ARA chief executive – John Chambers; HLF appointed special advisor – Claire Adler; and senior digitisation consultant at TownsWeb Archiving – Paul Sugden.

The Grant can be used to fund the digitisation of bound books, manuscripts, oversize maps and plans, 35mm slides, microfilm/fiche, glass plate negatives, and other two-dimensional cultural heritage media.

The deadline for applications is 28^th July 2019 with announcements of winners at the ARA on 28^th August 2019.

Find out how to apply and for more details please go to:

https://www.townswebarchiving.com/twa-digitisation-grant/

applications are open for video makers and video artists

Fiaticorti, the international short film festival

Applications are now open for the 20^th edition of Fiaticorti, the international short film festival based in Istana, one of the most important short film festival in Italy. You have until 31^th August 2019 to sign up.

Three sections are available:

Fiaticorti: a section devoted to national and international short films.
Fiaticomici: a section devoted to humorous and satirical short films.
FiatiVeneti: a special section devoted to short films which have been shot by directors from Veneto or short films generally concerning Veneto.

You can freely choose the topic of your short film, regardless of the section it belongs to. We will accept only short films lasting up to 20 minutes and shot since 1^st January 2018. We will also accept works which have already been presented in other festivals.

Fiaticorti Jury will choose 4 winners:

Fiaticorti award
Fiaticomici award
FiatiVeneti award
Fiaticorti best actor

You can find further information on www.fiaticorti.it

International award for performing arts, deadline 5th September 2019

CROSS award 2019 – Residency in Italy

LIS Lab Performing Arts – in collaboration with Fondazione Piemonte dal Vivo and Ricola announces the fifth edition of the ‘Internation CROSS award’ for artists and companies in the field of performing arts and music, with particular attention to productions focused on the close interaction between musical composition and action stage.

With the fifth edition the call renews and changes: 4 projects will be selected for a 16-days residence in Verbania with a fee for the production of € 4.000,00 each.

The award aims to promote investigation and artistic expressions related to the combination of different styles and genres, considering multi-language practices and the mix of techniques and codes pertaining to the various performing arts as reward factors. The goal of the competition is to identify new productions – thoroughly unpublished – that put in dialogue the language of the body and of the stage performance with musical composition, without any restrictions or constraints of kind, category or practice. New for 2018 is the formula of “artists in the territories”. CROSS therefore wants to support the productions that will favor the relationship with the territory both through projects that deal with the theme of the landscape, themes that are generally environmental or that can meet the community. There are no limits on how to share with the territory, the practices and the artistic disciplines.

The call is open to individual artists, professionals and companies. The project must be submitted as a production that can be developed during the different phases of the residency and that could include the most diverse expressive practices (as such: dance, music composition and interpretation, DJ-set, live soundtrack, composition of a soundtrack, activity of noise music, theatre, body performance, singing, new technologies, video art, motion-capture, readings, site-specific design).

INFO

e-mail: info@crossproject.it

website: www.crossproject.it

JR's Mural at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The art to connect people “The Chronicles of San Francisco”

With his digital mural “ The Chronicles of San Francisco” the French artist JR tryied to capture a whole city.

The mural,107 feet long and 16 feet tall, is installed in a ground-floor gallery free to the public at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The experience of the previous murals has growed into the artist the need to include video and audio in the work, therefore, thanks to a meticulous organization, with a work of about two months (at the beginning of 2018), JR and his team set up one mobile study in twenty-two locations around San Francisco.

They invited anyone walking by to participate, people were not chosen, it was completely random.

In addition, JR invited those who could not meet on the street (the firefighters, the governor ….) , sometimes making use of the contacts of the participants, who also participated through suggestions and connecting other people.

A total of 1200 citizens, from across the city’s multifaceted communities, posed for the camera and told their stories.

The purpose of the murales is exactly to connect people, as explained by the artist himself: “The whole piece is about creating interaction” and “It’s to create more interaction to make sure that people reconnect with one another, and really that’s the purpose of this thing, and that’s what I did it this way”.

Also the choice of location, in the museum rather than on the street, is aimed at the “inclusion” and “participation” of peolple. That part of the museum is free, so anyone can come in and spend some time and listen to audio.
At the same time, the people who participated in the murals, having their photo in a museum, feel part of the history of the country and they can realize what they are part of. The people in the suburbs sometimes come from second-generation immigrants: they were citizens, but they never felt welcome; being in the museum, they feel part of the history of the country.

The Chronicles of San Francisco was introduced by JR on the 23rd of May; on this occasion the over 1000 participants captured by the JR’s team in the streets, met for the first time and shared their experience with the artist.

Further informations:

The Chronicles of San Francisco

In Tokyo one of the most extraordinary digital museums created by the collective of artists TeamLab Borderless

MORI BUILDING digital art museum

Text by Caterina Sbrana.

The International Council of Museums defines the Museum as A permanent, non-profit institution serving society and its development. It is open to the public and carries out researches concerning the material and immaterial testimonies of humanity and its environment; it acquires them, preserves them, communicates them and, above all, exposes them for the purposes of study, education and pleasure.

However there is a museum in Tokyo’s Odaiba district that has no floor maps, no glass or ropes around the exhibits, has nothing at all in fact to distance the viewer from the viewed. That’s because the some 60 works on display are all digital, projected onto surfaces or shining out from screens (except from the text).

The creators of the museum define themselves as a group of artworks that form one borderless world. Artworks move out of the rooms, communicate with other works, influence, and sometimes intermingle with each other with no boundaries.

An art, then, without border that covers 10,000 square meters where we admire a three-dimensional world.

We explore this extraordinary virtual museum. We can move in the Universe of Water, or admire the beauties of Crystal World, walk in the Flower Forest, try to capture the Spirit of the Flower etc. immersing ourselves in environments that involve all our senses.
It is not simply an observation of a work of art, it is a continuous interaction with those close to you, it is a continuous perception of a world without borders, it is an immersion without sense of time.

forest of resonating lamp

We can’t be surprised if Swizz Beats chose this location to make the video of the song Echo, or why it is used by the photographer Miko Ninagawa. Miko says that taking photographs inside this virtual museum was like going into the forest for an adventure even though this forest was digital.

Takashi Kudo, responsible for communication for the collective TeamLabBorderless explains that it is not only technology the core of the TeamLab’s work, but rather the desire to create digital art for “changing people’s values and contributing to the progress of society”.
We too, readers and users of art in all its forms, are interested in keeping an eye on the future developments of “digital art”.