Culturegeek Conference 2021, day 1

Wildrumpus is an organisation that brings together art, culture and the environment in event such as the Timberfestival: Wild Rumpus CIC is a social enterprise producing large scale outdoor arts events, most often in wild natural landscapes. We believe that when audiences engage together in the highest quality arts in the great outdoors, something quite amazing can happen. During the Covid19 lockdown Wildrumpus developed a participative Global Forest Sounddmap on the basis of the mapbox tool and soon went far beyond 50.000 listens a month. Artists would download and use the sound as well for their work.

 

May Abdalla is one of the founders of the storytelling studio Anagram. The project Messages to a Posthuman Earth is based on a story by Stanislaw Lem in which he proposes that the knowledge about nuclear waste could be stored in the DNA of plants. This Audioguide wants to inspire  us to see nature with new eyes. It plays on the notion that plants can communicate with the help of ROS (reactive oxygen species) (> the work of Monica Gagliano). It is a 2 person experience for a park. Here again one of the challenges was how to enter the story. An audiowalk does not come with learned rituals such as included in the cinema experience (buying popcorn, cuddling into comfy seats, etc…). The project starts with the question «who is older, who is younger?», a reflection on status and age. Another point is the role of the smartphone which has the tendency to «suck out the energy» of the user.  Accordingly they reconsidered its role: It turns from a Geiger Counter to a Breathalyser, to a Stethoscope (> research on embodied interaction with tools). With regards to storytelling Abdalla points out that museums must aim at finding contemporary relevance in their own content and objects.

 

The Cut Copy Remix festival is an attempt at encouraging people to make use of museum archives going open access as Linda Spurdle, Head of Digital –  of the Birmingham Museums Trust explains. They cooperated with the artists ColdWar Steve, BlackholeClub and Mix Milk  and invited the public to do they their own remixes of the artworks.  Particularly charming: ColdWar Steve’s reinterpretation of PreRaphaelite paintings.

 

Several institutions developed specific online formats to actually transfer their usual content into the digital domain:

The Skirball Cultural Center which would normally have a series of summer concerts instead developed an episodic series called the Skirball Stages which would always feature one band from LA and one from afar.

The Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums came up with a successful Audio Podcast about Heavy Metal Music called Heavier Faster Louder and asks why can’t we start seeing this as a form of entertainment and escapism see ourselves (Museum) as a publishing house. 
The Little Angel Theatre in London also didn’t just replicate their shows but produced material specifically for the screen. Even with performances in Zoom, they would have the performer greeting people before the show in person and they offered workshop afterwards. This ritual provided for a scheduled performance in which people had to show up in time.

 

The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle develops a lot of its programs in cooperation with its audience. It has a teacher advisory board as well as a teen advisory board. Similarly the Drents Museum in the Netherlands asked its audience and particularly the schools what they would need from them. They developed a historical online performance and an immersive online game. They would also have a 360° film of every room in which actors would talk about the interior and its history. The online game was a story of Romans colliding with Germanic warriors. Due to the low budget they changed from the initial idea of an animation to a series of illustrations which would be accompanied by a live narrator. Groups of students would then each get objects such as a spearhead with which they would have to solve a problem.

 

Emily Simpson Head of Marketing of the Opera North explained how they made accessible a lot of music and videos from the archive during lockdown. Even more successful was an online course of singalong workshops for people over 55. The project was called from couch to chorus.