Digital meets Culture

the Observatory is an intersectoral platform that brings together researchers and professionals from the cultural/creative and tourism sectors

Collaboration established for synergies in cultural tourism, between INCULTUM and CREATOUR Observatory

The CREATOUR Observatory – Observatory on culture and tourism for local development is an initiative coordinated by the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra.

It focuses on 3 thematic fields: 1) Ecologies of Culture and Creativity; 2) Cultural, Creative and Regenerative Tourism; and 3) Local, Regional and Community Development, adopting a transdisciplinary perspective and critical reflection. Focusing on extra-metropolitan areas of Portugal, the Observatory is an intersectoral platform that brings together researchers and professionals from the cultural/creative and tourism sectors, in a logic of training, evaluation and co-production of knowledge with practitioners and public decision-makers. The Observatory also serves as the hub of an emerging international network – CREATOUR International.

It is a common goal for INCULTUM and CREATOUR to support cultural tourism development at local level, and for this reason a collaboration agreement was recenty established netween the two for cooperation and synergies.

Caldas da Rainha (Portugal), 21-25 March 2022

Cultural Mapping and Connecting with Place – summer school

Cultural mapping as a methodology and paradigm holds tremendous power to create conditions for change by bringing communities together in new ways to co-create new knowledge and understanding. At its core, cultural mapping aims to make visible the ways that local cultural assets, stories, practices, relationships, memories, and rituals constitute places as meaningful locations, while bringing a diverse range of stakeholders into conversation about the cultural dimensions and potentials of a place. With the design of cultural mapping projects tightly linked to local needs, issues, and aspirations, cultural mapping practices vary widely and the field is characterized by a high degree of experimentation. Its interdisciplinarity perspectives, techniques, and processes emphasize participatory approaches, which require an ethics of care with the communities engaged in these projects.

This 5-day intensive summer school offers a unique opportunity to learn how to design and conduct cultural mapping projects, enabling participants to enhance their knowledge on cultural mapping approaches and processes, gain skills applying cultural mapping techniques in practice, examine ethics of care in this community-engaged work, and explore how to connect findings to cultural/creative tourism and local development policy. This is a unique opportunity to learn from internationally acclaimed scholars and practitioners.

Coordination team | Nancy Duxbury, Tiago Vinagre de Castro, Sílvia Silva, and Cláudia Pato de Carvalho (CES), Mariana Calaça Baptista (author and promotor), and Nicola Henriques (SILOS Contentor Criativo)

Website: https://ces.uc.pt/summerwinterschools/?lang=2&id=28189

For any questions, please contact us at: creatour@ces.uc.pt

The summer school will include daily visits, learning seminars, and hands-on workshops where participants will actively learn about and engage in cultural mapping projects while addressing place-specific real-life local development issues. Cultural mapping approaches will address cultural assets and resources, both tangible and intangible; heritage and history; and living narratives and voices of the community and place. Application areas to be discussed in the summer school include: community-based cultural and creative tourism, cultural planning, local territorial and strategic planning, and engaged social change working with communities.

The mapping exercises will examine, discuss, and bring new ideas to existing development activities aiming to attract and sustain a local cultural and creative critical mass in Caldas da Rainha. Connected to this, the work will link these initiatives to broader local development issues, to the city’s UNESCO Creative City designation, and to the fostering of cultural and creative tourism in the municipality.

This CES Summer School will take place in Caldas da Rainha, a UNESCO Creative City of Crafts and Folk Arts, with an Art Nouveau and rich artistic history and a lively contemporary arts scene. The course will have various tangible outputs and culminate in an artistic public presentation of the findings to the local population, curated by the participants in collaboration with SILOS Contentor Criativo and Destino Caldas Association.

Thematic area(s) of the course:
Cultural mapping processes and methodologies
Art-informed cultural mapping
Place-based meanings
Cultural/artistic heritage
Creative tourism
Dimensions of care with communities

Grand prize of the European Commission honoring Innovation in Technology, Industry and Society stimulated by the Arts

STARTS Prize 2022 Open Call

STARTS is an initiative of the European Commission to foster alliances of technology and artistic practice. Since 2016, the STARTS Prize has organised a yearly competition to single out innovative projects at the nexus of science, technology and the arts that have what it takes to make a significant impact on economic and social innovation. Every year, the two most pioneering projects win the prestigious award generously endowed with €40.000 in prize money and are prominently featured at the events organised by the project.

The STARTS yearly competition is back to award two innovative projects at the nexus of science, technology and the arts that have what it takes to make a significant impact on economic and social innovation. Two prizes, each with €20,000 prize money, are offered to honor innovative projects at the intersection of science, technology and the arts: The emphasis of both prizes lies on the creative appropriation and employment of technologies as well as the search for unique constellations of collaboration from the STARTS fields.

Submission deadline: 3rd March 2022

More information: https://starts.eu/opportunities/starts-prize-2022/

Science, Technology and Arts (=STARTS) form a nexus with an extraordinarily high potential for creative innovation. And such innovation is considered to be precisely what’s called for if we’re to master the social, ecological and economic challenges that Europe will be facing in the near future. The role of artists thus is no longer seen to be just about propagating scientific and technological knowledge and skills among the general public but much more as a kind of catalyst that can inspire and trigger innovative processes. The artistic practice of creative exploration and experimental appropriation of new technologies has a wide reaching potential to contribute to the development of new products and new economic, social and business models. Accordingly, the STARTS Prize focuses on artistic works that influence or change the way we look at technology, and on innovative forms of collaboration between the ICT sector and the world of art and culture.

Current consortium: Ars Electronica (coord., AT), Bozar (BE), Waag (NL), INOVA+ (PT), T6 Ecosystems (IT), French Tech Grande Provence (FR) and Frankfurter Buchmesse (DE).

Street art as a decorative element and tool to fight smog

An artistic approach to solve the environmental challenges of cities

Always more frequently, many cities within and beyond Europe, are approaching the issue of pollution in a creative way.
Street art becomes not only a decorative element, but also a tool to raise awareness on issues related to environmental sustainability and concretely help the environment: thanks to special paints which work on a principle comparable to the photosynthesis process in plants, the murals have the ability to purify the air.

“Eco-murals” are achieving great success in Poland, as one of the countries struggling the most with air pollution.

Source: Bydgoszcz City

One of the last cities that is fighting smog with art, is Bydgoszcz, where the eco-mural “The Source” realized by Marcin Czaja from Krakow, covered a wall of 374 square meters. According to the city website, one square meter of anti-smog paint absorbs 0.44 g of nitric oxide, the same absorbed by one tree per day: the area of the wall is equivalent to planting 374 trees, in an urbanized area where this is hardly possible.

Warsaw also hosts a similar mural, as part of a collaboration project with Converse City Forests in September 2020.

The cities of Bielsko-Biała and Katowice and Zabrze have also decided to tackle air pollution by creating a wall painting for air purification

These environmentally friendly murals are increasing all over the world.

From https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine

In Milan (Italy) the “AnthropOceano” eco-mural by street artist Iena Cruz, underlines the beauty and fragility of the marine environment.

On 5 June 2021, on the occasion of World Environment Day, the colorful “Stand with us” mural was inaugurated in the Holland tunnel of Jersey City, the route that connects New Jersey with New York. “Stand with us”, created by the artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, in addition to the ecological skill it also launches a strong message against racism.

Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya’s digital illustration for “Stand with us” mural

Deliverables D2.6 D2.7 and D3.1

New results of UNCHARTED are available on the website

The latest outputs produced by the scientific work packages of UNCHARTED, WP2 Identifying the Emergence of Values of Culture” and WP3 “Measuring and Imagining, are available on the site for free download.
The Work Package 2, led by the University of Porto, is dedicated to the analysis of the emergence of values related to culture in practical contexts and in the field of cultural policy and cultural administration.
After the release of the first 5 deliverables, the last two deliverables D2.6 and D2.7 are now available.
The first, D2.6 Synthetic summary of the debates at the first workshop, presents a summary of the debates at the first workshop “Cultural values in the cultural sphere: a European perspective” which was held in Porto on the 16-17 September 2021. During the two days of events the case studies of WP1 and WP2 were presented and discussed. Details of the broad debate on the conflicting plurality of values in cultural participation, cultural administration, cultural production and heritage management are presented in this report.
The second, D2.7. Overview of the multiplicity of values of culture and its controversies, embodies the concluding phase of the WP2 work and reflections based on the 26 case studies developed within the four research fields of UNCHARTED (cultural production and heritage management, cultural participation in live arts and culture, cultural participation through media, cultural administration).
Work Package 3, led by University of Bologna, addresses the central challenge of understanding the tensions relating to how different actors in the cultural field construct, measure, compare and rank the values they attribute to culture.
The firs deliverable of the team, the D3.1 Report on WP3 case studies, is now available to present and compare the WP3 topics of investigations: grammars of valuation and evaluation in cultural practices of consumption, practices of evaluation in cultural production and heritage management, the influence of public administration evaluation methodologies on cultural production and heritage management, the representations of cultural value in cultural information systems.

Further information:
Download the full text of each deliverable in the UNCHARTED download area.
Links to the WP2 and WP3 webpages.

an upcoming LabDay of the WEAVE Capacity Building series will be dedicated to dance research together with project coordinator prof. Monica Dantas from Brazil

The Eva Schul Archive: Constructing Dance Memories in the Southern Brazil

text by Mônica Fagundes Dantas, UFRGS and Rosa Cisneros, C-DARE Coventry University.

Carne Digital: Arquivo Eva Schul (Digital Flesh: The Eva Schul Archive) is a digital dance archive about the life and work of choreographer and teacher Eva Schul, consisting of texts, documents, photographs, and videos provided at Lume – Digital Repository of Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. The archive also contains a Library of Digital Movements, developed through the digitalisation of movements from Eva Schul technique, using motion capture. The Eva Schul Archive is part of the Research Project “Digital Archives in Performing Arts: building memories and technological innovation” and has been developed at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), at Porto Alegre, Brazil. Eva Schul Archive won the “Açorianos” Dance Award 2021 in the category memory. The prize is given from the City of Porto Alegre/Municipal Department of Culture.

The digital archive is organized in sections whose titles refer to Eva Schul’s choreographies. In the corner of time/Biography; How to catch an instant/Choreographies; Metamorphosis/Teachings and Creation Process. It also presents the history of the Ânima Companhia de Dança and the Library of Digital Movements.

In an upcoming Capacity Building WEAVE LabDay, the general coordinator of the archive Professor Mônica Fagundes Dantas will join us to explore some open questions around dance and archives. We will look at themes such as:

How do we give visibility to the works/archives outside of Europe/North America; the questions related to language (English as lingua franca)
How do we recognise the social and the personal in the archive? How much can we access the lived experience of social subjects through archival material when the subject might be untraceable or deceased and what is the role of archives in this?

The Eva Schul Archive will be central to this LabDay.

In the current phase, there are three choreographies available, representing different moments in the choreographer’s career: Um Berro Gaúcho (1977) created to the Grupo Mudança; Catch ou como segurar um instante (2002), and Acuados (2016), both created with Ânima Companhia de Dança. By the end of 2022, the cataloging of ten more choreographies is planned.

In 2021 Eva Schul completed 73 years of age and 58 years of dance life, from which stands out the pioneering in contemporary dance teaching, the creation of more than 100 choreographies, the dissemination of creation procedures based on improvisation and collective actions, the training of artists of national and international projection, pioneering the teaching of dance at university, working in management roles and setting up environments for the practice of dance and the arts, and the foundation and maintenance of Ânima Cia. De Dança that carries nearly 30 years of existence.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Eva Schul continues to teach her dance classes in virtual mode. Unafraid of the body limitations in front of a computer, Eva Schul demonstrates some sequences that she creates for her students in Brazil, and for those who are isolated abroad. In 2021 she also developed a project entirely online, that brought together three dance companies and independent artists in a cast of more than 20 dancers, who were challenged to dance and create choreographies from their own homes.

The elaboration of digital archives in dance must consider the contexts of globalization and the needs of products fabrication that meet the social and cultural demands of Brazil. In this sense, the development of the Eva Schul Archive should be an example of how Brazilian dance practitioners can appropriate technologies for their own benefits, contributing to the construction of memories of the Brazilian scene and expanding the understanding of the cultural role played by the performing arts in Brazil.

The project has been developed with a small budget from CAPES Foundation/Ministry of Education/Brazil, that permits to engage undergraduate and PhD students to work on the archive. The Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul provides access to the Lume – Digital Repertory and hosts the archive on their web system. The Library of Digital Movements is being developed in partnership with Locomotion – Laboratory of Biodynamics/School from Physical Education, Physiotherapy and Dance School/UFRGS.

Team

General coordination: Professor Mônica Fagundes Dantas, PhD

Assistant coordination: Professor Suzane Weber da Silva, PhD

Consultancy: Eva Schul

Digital organization and cataloging: MS Verônica Prokopp

Conception and website creation: Pedro Rocha

Librarian/Reviewer: Ana Griebler

Library of Digital Movements

Assistant coordination: Professor Aline Haas, PhD

Assistant researchers: MS Fellipe Santos Resende, MS Daniel Silva Aires

The European TexTOUR project

How can cultural heritage, tourism activities and local communities be integrated in a sustainable way to improve deprived areas in Europe?

The EU-funded project TexTOUR, Social Innovation and TEchnologies for sustainable growth through participative cultural TOURism, aims to co-design sustainable cultural tourism strategies and policies with the goal of producing social and economic benefits in deprived areas in Europe and beyond while preserving tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

To achieve its goals, the project sets up Cultural Tourism Labs at eight pilots located within and outside Europe. The selected pilots have different and complementary characteristics, they face multiple social, economic and environmental challenges. These enable the project’s experts to develop a wide range of scenarios: inland and coastal areas, rural and urban, deprived remote or peripheral areas.

The pilots:

CRESPI D’ADDA, Italy . The best-preserved company town in Southern Europe
NARVA, Estonia, Russia. A post-industrial district on the border between Estonia and Russia
UMGEBINDELAND, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic. Home to half-timbered houses
VIA REGIA, Ukraine, Belorus, Poland, Germany, France, Spain. A symbol for European unification
TREBINJE, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia. Embracing the potential of Balkan diversity
TARNOWSKIE GÓRY, Poland. Historic silver and lead post-mining facilities
VALE DO CÔA – SIEGA VERDE, Portugal, Spain. The most remarkable open-air ensemble of Palaeolithic art in Europe
ANFEH – FIKARDOU, Lebanon, Cyprus. Two heritage jewels placed between sea and sky

In order to integrate cultural heritage, tourism activities and local communities in a sustainable way, the project has several socio-economic, scientific and technical objectives. Among these:

identify the challenges linked to the promotion of cultural heritage
demonstrate that cooperation between regions and countries can encourage cultural tourism development and socio-economic growth
set out sustainable cultural tourism strategies
create a platform in which to gather the generated knowledge to support policy makers and practitioners in assessing cultural tourism strategies and services and test it in the selected pilots
create an adaptable inclusive and modular investment strategy
understand how cultural tourism can promote local socio-economic development
create an overarching, inclusive and modern European identity based on a network of local identities

The main impacts to which it aims:

propose new policies and strategies on cultural tourism as well as sustainable business models with public-private-people partnerships
preserve Europe’s cultural identity, including minority cultures.

To learn more about the project: the leaftlet and TExTOUR website

a cooperation agreement for synergies and stakeholders outreach between projects in the area of sustainable cultural tourism

INCULTUM and TExTOUR join forces

Cultural tourism is about managing cultural heritage and tourism in an integrated way. It’s about working with local communities to create benefits for everyone involved, and this helps preserve tangible and intangible cultural heritage while developing tourism.

It is a common goal that INCULTUM and TExTOUR projects have peculiar ways to address, and for this reason a collaboration agreement was recenty established between them.

TExTOUR is an EU-funded project which co-designs pioneering and sustainable cultural tourism strategies to improve deprived areas in Europe and beyond. It also includes a variety of pilots with diverse and complementary characteristics, which enables the project’s experts to develop a wide range of scenarios for inland and coastal areas, rural and urban, deprived remote or peripheral areas, facing multiple social, economic and environmental challenges.

More about this project: https://textour-project.eu/

The collaboration between the two projects is expected to generate mutual exchanges and benefits and to boost outreach to stakeholder communities in Europe and beyond.

discussing the WEAVE LabDays' engagement with communities in the series dedicated to research methodologies and methods in dance practice

WEAVE mentioned in the ResDance Podcast series

text by Rosa Cisneros, C-DARE Coventry University.

ResDance Podcast series, curated by Dr. Gemma Harman, Senior Lecturer in Dance and Dance Science, Dance Department at the University of Chichester, is a podcast dedicated to research methodologies and methods in dance practice, intended for educators, students, practitioners and performers and interdisciplinary researchers curious to learn more about dance research in action.

All episodes can be heard at the following link. Please feel free to use the link as you wish and in your own work/resources:

ResDance Podcast: https://anchor.fm/gemma-harman

ResDance Series episodes brought together a number of leading thinkers and researchers in the field of dance. A full list can be found below. WEAVE’s partner Rosa Cisneros was a guest on the series and in her episode discusses the WEAVE LabDay methodology and her research with communities. You can listen here: https://anchor.fm/gemma-harman/episodes/ResDance-Episode-9-Collaborative-ways-of-working-e1ci5n5

Enjoy the other episodes all freely available on the ResDance Podcast channels:

Episode 1: Researching Site Dance with Vicky Hunter
Episode 2: Choreographing and Performing with outdoor site with Virginia Farman
Episode 3: Evolving methods in dance research with Imogen Aujla
Episode 4: Dance Health Research with Bethany Whiteside
Episode 5: Dance Health Research: A person-centred approach with Ashley McGill
Episode 6: Reflections on interdisciplinary methodologies with Clare Parfitt
Episode 7: Documentation and digital tools in dance research with Rebecca Stancliffe
Episode 8: Dancing across Screen and in Popular Performance with Sherril Dodds
Episode 9: Collaborative ways of working with Rosa Cisenros
Episode 10: Embodied Inquiry with Nicole Brown & Jennifer Leigh
Episode 11: The intersections between practice and philosophy with Erin Manning

the WEAVE toolkit will be integrated in the Europeana platform to support digital heritage content aggregation, visualization and reuse

Europeana integration of the WEAVE tools, work ongoing

WEAVE project is currently developing a set of tools to support cultural heritage institutions for the activities of digital content aggregation and access. The toolkit consists of several open and reusable tools and technologies employing a mix of AI techniques, machine learning, natural language processing, big data analysis and innovative interface engineering. The tools allow professionals to more effectively store, manage and access 3D assets that have been digitised, and to annotate videos more efficiently. Additionally users can curate easily virtual galleries and virtual exhibitions that can contain a diverse mix of content (including 3D), and can in this way showcase the connection between tangible and intangible heritage. The curated galleries and virtual exhibitions can be accessed by end-users on different devices in more immersive and interactive ways.

These tools will be integrated in the Europeana platform to allow for offering better services both to content providers and to Europeana users. Discussions started since the beginning of the project about this task, and on 28th January 2022 more concrete plans were started during a dedicated online meeting that gathered together all the WEAVE technical colleagues.

The challenge at this phase of development is to find the easiest and more seamless way to integrate the various technical components to grant full compliance with the Europeana core service platform.