Digital meets Culture

compelling screening programs that will be available for all audiences during April 2020

Video Art Miden collaborates with the 1st Painting Studio of Athens School of Fine Arts, participating in this year’s academic project under the theme “ARTificial Intelligence“. In this frame, Video Art Miden prepared a special video art program to be viewed by the students of the 1st Painting Studio of ASFA, which will be also available online for all friends and the audience of the festival, in an attempt to continue the screening of powerful works and to encourage the artistic activity, the artists’ dialogue and the cultural exchange in the unprecedented days of isolation we experience due to coronavirus.

The program will remain open on youtube till end of April 2020, on the following Youtube:
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The selection, curated by Gioula Papadopoulou, presents 8 works that deal with various concepts concerning the “homo digitalis” era and artificial intelligence, exploring the physical detachment and the gradual digitalization and virtualization of our world, our societies and our minds. Either exposing the ironies of our “smart world”, or reaching for an algorithmic emotional intelligence or analyzing the “artificial curiosity” and “self-development” of bots, all works have one thing in common: they are tracing and decoding human behavior in the digital era and explore our relationship with our self and “the other”. What do we have to sacrifice in order to approach a supposedly perfect future world?

Participant artists/works:

Juergen Trautwein & Silvia Nonnenmacher, Meta_Face, USA 2017, 2.09
Di Hu, Les Objets Du Système, China 2019, 4.00
Landia Art and Economy Foundation, Chatbot Dialogs, Germany 2019, 4.58
Landia Art and Economy Foundation, Human Applications, Germany 2019, 13.18
Elliott Nicole J. Waller & Fabian Forban, AEI (artificial emotional intelligence), Sweden/Germany, 2019, 4.10
Yvana Samandova & Borjan Zarevski, Artificial Intelligence VS Aristotle// beta 0.98, France, 2019, 4.21
Katerina Athanasopoulou & Eleni Ikoniadou, Her Voice, UK 2019, 5.32
Sven Windszus, PURE WHITE, Germany 2017, 3.00

[Show as slideshow]

More info, with synopsis of the works, can be found here.

Meanwhile, 2 more screening programs by Video Art Miden are also available online this month:

until end of April, the Greek video art program “Down to Earth” will be screened online, as part of NewMediaFest2020 here (to find it you may choose “WOW.08 – Program units 14-15”). Participant artists: Anna Vasof, Alexandros Kaklamanos, Panos Mazarakis, Yiannis Kranidiotis, Alex Karantanas, Katerina Athanasopoulou, Vasilis Karvounis. Curated by Gioula Papadopoulou.
the online transmission of the Greek video art program “Inscapes” continues until April 22 on VisualcontainerTV, here. Participant artists: Eleni Moustaka, Thomas Vallianatos, Sophia Liarou, Fenia Kotsopoulou, White Dog Films [Dimitris Papadopoulos], Christina Mertzani / free fall company; Aliki Chiotaki & Dimitris Barnias. Curated by Gioula Papadopoulou.

More info: www.festivalmiden.gr

Video Art Miden is an independent organization for the exploration and promotion of video art. Founded by an independent group of Greek artists in 2005, it has been one of the earliest specialized video-art festivals in Greece, setting as basic aims to stimulate the creation of original video art, to help spread it and develop relevant research.

Through collaborations and exchanges with major international festivals and organizations, it has been recognized as one of the most successful and interesting video art platforms internationally and as an important cultural exchange point for Greek and international video art. Miden screening programs have traveled in many cities of Greece and all over the world, and they are hosted by significant festivals, museums and institutions globally.

(*Miden means “zero” in Greek)

Art direction: Gioula Papadopoulou – Margarita Stavraki

Info: www.festivalmiden.gr || www.facebook.com/videoartmiden || https://www.instagram.com/videoart_miden/

But the call for posters and videos is still alive!

REACH Final conference Cancelled!

Due to the movement restriction measures adopted by all European Countries to avoid the spread of Covid 19 pandemic, the REACH Project decided to cancel its final conference planned for the 4-5 June 2020 in Pisa.
However, the Consortium is deeply determined to maintain alive the possibility to share experiences and expertise related to participation in culture and resilience. It is with this specific purpose that was decided to keep the call for posters and videos alive: all contributions will be posted on a digital gallery hosted by the REACH project’s website, available on the same date when the Pisa conference was planned, on 4-5 June.
In the mean time, it is also planned to publish online the contributions expected to be delivered by the speakers.
The REACH Project wishes to be able to organise a one-day event to conclude the project as soon as possible, meanwhile it warmly encourages the entire community of cultural heritage to keep acting and answer to the call by sending posters and videos.
In order to stay up to date with the progress of the publications, visit periodically the call for posters & videos webpage

Technologies and tools for better access to cultural heritage

New booklet of ROCK: how can cultural heritage be accessible to everyone?

The accessibility allows to fully live in the city and to fully understand and experiment with it, but, how can Cultural Heritage be accessible to everyone?
The third booklet of ROCK project, published last February, addresses this question.

The urban accessibility must be considered not only in relation to places but also in relation with people: it is not only the possibility to easily access places, making life in the city more fluid, but it is also the access to experiences able to connect different cultures.

The urban accessibility will be really universal if be discussed within communities and not only inside the traditional institutions.
The book debates how to improve accessibility and experience of cultural heritage using various tools and technologies.

ROCK considers all the aspects that determine and influence the full participation in urban life:

physical and economic barriers,
equal access to institutions,
cultural productions,
participation (including cultural events, meetings with other people, etc.) and empowerment of citizens,
information and opportunities
digital services and digitally shared content

The ROCK project aims to understand and test actions that make the perception and experience of cities open to everybody; in this publication it presents 5 examples of cities, where ROCK has studied approaches to improve accessibility in urban districts:

Bologna (Italy): U-Area for All – Cultural heritage for all five senses
Lisbon (Portugal): Marvila and Beato Interpretive – Centre Citizen engagement for cultural heritage in distant neighbourhood
Lyon (France): Let there be light! – Cultural heritage and light management
Turin (Italy): Abbonamento Musei – Heritage in everyone’s hands
Vilnius (Lithuania): The colour of data – Using open data and neuroanalytics to strengthen cultural Heritage

Further information:

ROCK Project.

Booklet “Technologies and tools for better access to cultural heritage”.

ROCK reports.

Thanks to impressive technology, the blue planet, seen from outer space, shows its own fragility

Earth pictures of the Nasa archives, now in the Internet Archive

Text by Caterina Sbrana

Can you imagine a library where anyone can go to learn and explore our shared human experience from books, web pages, audio, television and software ?

This place exists. Its name is: the Internet Archive.

I was astonished when I read the amount of materials and data that the archive contains: 330 billion web pages, 20 million books and texts, 4.5 million audio recordings (including 180,000 live concerts), 4 million videos (including 1.6 million Television News programs), 3 million images, 200,000 software programs.

Archive Home page

As in a real library, even in the virtual one it is easy to get lost. And I assure you that if you go into the Images section, you will easily find the TOP subsection with NASA images, and it will be difficult to get out of it.

Each photograph represents an immersive sensory experience. I chose this section of the Internet Archive because I think that the observation of the Earth from space is fundamental above all to make man more aware of his choices. Living on Earth many people do not have the perception of its fragility. I have already spoken about it in a recent article “Anthropocene, a multimedia exhibition that investigates the impact of human footprint on the Earth” , so it seems useful to me to continue to emphasize the role of technology in spreading the knowledge of our planet and the effects of human action.

If we think about the technology that brought us into space, or what men have been able to do in 60 years of space exploration, it’s a veritable drunkenness of wonders. And today, thanks to the internet, thanks to the work of a staff of excellence, thanks to the availability of archives and libraries, these materials can be available to all.

I confess that I was surprised to see that the image of Niagara Falls had 8077 views and that of Europe illuminated at night only 980. I asked myself how it is possible that this photographic documentation, which is also rich in in-depth descriptions, has not so many views, since the potential users are billions.

Well, meanwhile we can enjoy this opportunity that Internet Archive is offering us cataloguing of an extraordinary amount of documents.

Niagara Falls, by NASA

A deep caption tells us something more than the extraordinary beauty of photography : “Blue-green veil of water tumbles 51 meters over the rocky precipice of the Niagara Falls in this Ikonos image, acquired on August 2, 2004. Every second, more than two million liters of water plummets over the half-circle of the Canadian/Horseshoe portion of the Niagara Falls, shown here, making it one of the world’s largest waterfalls. The force of the pounding water is sending a cloud of mist up from the bottom of the falls; this same force eats away at the rock behind the falls, pushing them back as much as two meters per year. […]”

Earth at the Turn of the Century by NASA – This first full-disk (hemispheric) image of the Earth after the turn of the century on the East Coast of the U.S. was aquired by a NOAA Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite–GOES-8– at 12:45 AM Eastern Standard Time, January 1, 2000.

The caption of the following photo is portraying part of the world at night, when the lights of the big cities spread in the atmosphere. It’s an extraordinary image that tells us how much human activity has a significant impact on our planet. And while technology brings the world closer and enables us to have a wealth of information at our fingertips, at the same time it has devastating effects on planet earth.

City Lights of Europe by the NASA GSFC svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/ Scientific Visualization Studio

Reading the caption of the photo we find out that it has been taken by using data from the www.ngdc.noaa.gov/dmsp/dmsp.html Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System. Researchers have been able to look at urban sprawl by monitoring the emission of light from cities at night.

Ayers Rock has always surprised me, I don’t know if this is due to the fact that an immense monolith (348 meters high, 3.6 kilometers long, and 9.4 kilometers around ) detaches itself from the Australian desert, or because it changes colour depending on the weather conditions or because it represents for the aborigines a sacred site. It probably depends on the particularity of its physical and cultural characteristics.

Australia: Uluru (Ayers Rock) by NASA

We return to Italy. I don’t know if you can recognize the place represented by the following photograph: it is Vesuvius, in Italy, in Naples.

Mount Vesuvius, Naples, Italy, by NASA

What I read in the description confirms my opinions. Mount Vesuvius is more dangerous than previously thought. The danger the volcano poses is illustrated in this image, captured by the Quickbird satellite on July 12, 2002. Densely populated communities ring the volcano, particularly on the west side, where Mastrolorenzo and colleagues discovered the extensive ash bed. Naples is northwest of the volcano beyond the edge of the image.

Naples has a population of more than three million people and is the third Italian metropolitan city in terms of population, but it is the first in terms of population density. Around the Volcano! This photograph taken from outer space clearly shows what could be the devastating consequences of a volcano explosion.

It is not hard understanding the importance of work that Internet Archive staffers are building. They provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. The main mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge, thanks to Internet and digitization.

I hope that the same technology that brings man to space, that allows us to enjoy ancient and contemporary digitised documents through the internet (wherever we are), allows men to reduce the effects of actions that do not take care of our planet.

https://archive.org

https://archive.org/about/jobs.php

https://archive.org/details/niagarafalls_IKO_2004215

https://archive.org/download/lights_europe/lights_europe.jpg

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6403

https://archive.org/details/uluru_iko_2004017

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=5304

https://archive.org/details/vesuvius_qui_2002193

June 18-19, 2020 Riga, Latvia

International Conference on Social Movement

The event is promoted by the International Research Conference, a federated organization dedicated to bringing together a significant number of diverse scholarly events for presentation within the conference program. With its high quality, it provides an exceptional value for students, academics and industry researchers. The International Conference on Social Movement is addressed to academic scientists, researchers and research scholars and aims to offer a chance for exchanging and sharing experiences and research results on all aspects of Social Movement. It also provides a premier interdisciplinary platform for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns as well as practical challenges encountered and solutions adopted in the fields of Social Movement. In order to encourage participation, the organisers lunched a call for abstracts,papers and e-posters. High quality research contributions describing original and unpublished results of conceptual, constructive, empirical, experimental, or theoretical work in all areas of Social Movement are particularly welcome and will be invited for presentation at the conference.
The conference solicits contributions of abstracts, papers and e-posters that address themes and topics of the conference, including figures, tables and references of novel research materials.
Importan dates:
Abstracts/Full-Text Paper Submission: Deadline March 31^st, 2020
Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: April 15^th, 2020
Final Paper (Camera Ready) Submission & Early Bird Registration:
Deadline May 15^th, 2020
Conference Dates: June 18^th -19^th, 2020
Conference webpage

Participate in the ECBN Survay

Effects of COVID-19 on the European Culture and Creative Industries

The European Creative Business Network (ECBN), an advocacy institution for the European culture and creative industries, denounced the economic impact due the spread of the corona virus on the cultural and creative industries (CCIs).
The entire sector seems to be closed to collapse as all festivals, fairs and concerts have been cancelled, clubs and theatres are closed. Not only organisers are affected, but also agencies and numerous freelancers in performing arts, film and music, basically all who are active in the broadest sense in the event business. The aspect that contributes to worsening the general situation is the lack of insurance coverage in the case of force majeure, which only increases the instability and economic uncertainty of the sector.
In this critical and unsafe scenario the ECBN lunched this survey addressed to all actors of the cultural and creative industry with the aim to assess the potential impact of the Covid-19 on the cultural sector in the coming weeks in order to be able to formulate current support and relief recommendations to European Policy Makers.
Click on SURVEY and leave your contribute.
More information about ECBNetwork at http://ecbnetwork.eu/

explore the new look of Europeana, and your feedback is welcome

NEW! Europeana portal updated for a fresh experience!

After much work on improving the beta version, the updated Europeana collections website is now live and available.

VISIT! www.europeana.eu

As the Executive Director Harry Verwayen just said “We now feel confident that we are releasing a much-improved website that is faster, easier to explore, more accessible, and offers exciting new ways to discover collections. Further improvements will be introduced in the coming months and we invite you to continue sharing your comments and thoughts on making this a superior user experience. We hope you enjoy it, and we welcome your feedback to help us make it an even better experience.”

If you are nostalgic for familiar features, the previous version of the website remains available under classic.europeana.eu.

Find out more about the new website and the latest improvements on Europeana Pro.

image from Europeana – Ajuntament de Girona/CRDI, Public Domain.

The survey of NEMO to collect information

How are European museums managing COVID-19?

NEMO, the Network of European Museum Organisations, represents the museum community of the Council of Europe member states .

Since its founding, in 1992, it promots the work of museums and their value to policy makers and provide museums with information, networking and opportunities for collaboration.
It includes museum networks as well as individual museums; currently it has more than 30,000 affiliated in 43 countries across Europe.

In this difficult time, NEMO is following the spread of COVID-19 closely and to better assist the European museum community, NEMO finds that it is important to gather and compile information of museums’ actions in regards to the coronavirus.

For this purpose, it created a short survey and it is asking the European museum community to fill it out.

Help NEMO to collect information! Leave Here your contribute .

Read more information here.

A dynamic investigation of common interest for the entire scientific network

Paris 8 University lunches the UNCHARTED project

The choice of Paris 8 to dedicate a page to UNCHARTED project in the university website is a key contribution for the promotion of the project among researchers and experts of the academic world.
The showcase has been included in the section reserved to the “actualités” and it is easily accessible by all visitors of the university website. The description, clear and precise, enhances the kick off meeting of last 7^thFebruary, presents the main topics of the research and identifies the members of the consortium highlighting the scientific and technical knowledge that will support the implementation and outcomes of the project.
Visit UNCHARTED project on Paris 8 website
Visit UNCHARTED website

the Digital Archive is an extraordinary example of common search system and user interface

More than 53000 photographs by the National Archives of Norway online

text by Caterina Sbrana.

“Na na na heyana, Hahiyaha naha ..”

This is how Frozen, the Walt Disney movie directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, begins. The film has no relevance to the National Archives of Norway but who wrote the opening music, Vuelie, is the Norwegian musician Frode Fjellheim, who inserts the Joik into the song. By doing research on Joik popular music, I have deepened, through this extraordinary archive, the Sami culture. Joik is the Sami folk music, one of the oldest traditional songs in Europe. It has particular vocal characteristics and it is performed as a dedication to a person or an animal. While in the mid-fifties of the twentieth century, the Joik was long condemned as a sinner and it was forbidden to use it in schools in the Sami area, today many young artists include Joik as an element in contemporary music. But this is not the most important topic. The Sami music was the pretext to tell you about this extraordinary photographic archive which, as I wrote, I discovered almost by chance.

Two reindeer Sami on Finnmarksvidda. The photograph comes from an album donated to the National Archive by Nurse Marie Lysnes. In the spring of 1945, she participated in the creation of a field hospital in Finnmark. Lysnes documented her stay in Finnmark through texts and images.

On the National Archives Digital Photo Archive, I found over 200 photographs depicting the daily life of the Sami people with the capture of reindeer, the festivals, the construction of sleds. Photos of the mid-20th century and contemporary ones.

As the project staff says, the National Archives use the Digital Archives as a channel to publish parts of their archive material, primarily that which is in highest demand. On the Digital Archives internet site, most of these source materials are open to all for searching and browsing. The Digital Archives present archive documents in digital form and are free to use and open to all; they are built around the notion that archive users should be able to access as much source material as possible, from one location, presented through a common search system and user interface.

Samelandsmøte, 1962. Photo taken on the occasion of a sightseeing trip to Finnmark for Billedbladet-ORA

From the home page of the Norwegian Digital arkivet, clicking on the National Archives Digital Photo Archive we are returned to the page “Fotoweb 8.0” from which you can start the historical-photographic search.

We find out that the photographs “originate from different archives, both private and commercial, as well as organisations and public sector entities. Some of the photos are taken by professional photographers, others by amateur photographers and individuals”.

I suggest you to read the instructions of the creators of the digital archive before beginning the research: in the middle of the page a search box allows you to write a free-text necessary to find a particular photo. The photographs include the information which has been provided in the archives themselves, are categorized geographically by region and country. “Identification of featured individuals is a time consuming process and for this reason, many photos will contain little or no such information, even if it could have been of great interest”.

Photo taken on the occasion of a Sami wedding; approximate dating 1962; maker Klaeboe, Lasse

People, institutions, as well as organizations can create his own albums, by registering a user account as volunteers in the photo archives. The group of experts working in Digital Archives has set as a rule the usability of the digitized material, and this means that it can be published for free usage on all pages.

The majority of photos in the National Archives Digital Photo Archive can be used freely, and without restriction, but some are restricted for commercial use. Every picture in the photo archives has a tab which says “Rules for reuse”, where we can find the usage rules that particular picture.”Rules for reuse” explains whether a picture is in the public domain; and if not, which licensing conditions apply.

A shepherd of reindeer. Photo by Koji Tsuda, taken from Samisk arkiv, 1974-1986

A few months ago, in September 2019, other Norwegian archives outside of the National Archives will be offered the opportunity to upload and publish their scanned archive material online on the Digital Archives.

I can assure you that in this digital archive we find photographs of extraordinary beauty and interest not only in the field of historical research.

Shortly, I’m going to show you a series of beautiful black and white photographs, from the middle of the twentieth century preserved at the Borgarsyssel Museum, Sarpsborg, and now digitized, concerning daily life and much more.

It’s in front of everyone how much digital technology allows a large number of people access to cultural resources. The researchers themselves claim that the Digital Archives are built around the notion that archive users should be able to access as much source material as possible, from one location, presented through a common search system and user interface.

https://www.digitalarkivet.no/en/

https://foto.digitalarkivet.no/fotoweb/

https://foto.digitalarkivet.no/fotoweb/archives/5001-Historiske-foto/

https://foto.digitalarkivet.no/fotoweb/archives/5001-Historiske-foto/Indekserte%20bilder/PA-0873_U1_1_160.tif.info#c=%2Ffotoweb%2Farchives%2F5001-Historiske-foto%2F%3Fq%3D%2520reinsdyr

https://foto.digitalarkivet.no/fotoweb/archives/5001-Historiske-foto/Indekserte%20bilder/Fo30141604010042.tif.info#c=%2Ffotoweb%2Farchives%2F5001-Historiske-foto%2F%3Fq%3Dsamisk

https://foto.digitalarkivet.no/fotoweb/archives/5001-Historiske-foto/Indekserte%20bilder/3119_026_8050248.tif.info#c=%2Ffotoweb%2Farchives%2F5001-Historiske-foto%2F%3F80%3DTsuda%252C%2520Koji