Digital meets Culture

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”.

the way of the sea, floating nest

MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless
Odaiba Palette Town 2F, 1-3-8 Aomi, Koto-ku, Tokyo, Japan

https://borderless.teamlab.art/

Valletta (Malta), 22-24 February 2020

Artificial Intelligence and Digital Heritage: Challenges and Opportunities – ARTIDIGH 2020

A special session at the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART) is called on:

Artificial Intelligence and Digital Heritage: Challenges and Opportunities – ARTIDIGH 2020

This special session welcomes papers that reflect upon, discuss and present the technical and societal challenges (e.g. labour to produce labeled datasets, heterogeneity of data, bias in training sets) digital heritage professionals and researchers are facing when trying to capitalise on the transformative power of artificial intelligence in the context of digital archive, image, and audio/visual collections. Next to position papers, we are also looking for papers in which project consortia discuss their approach and present first results.

Chairs: Andreas Weber (Twente University), Marieke van Erp (Digital Humanities Lab KNAW Humanities Cluster), Maarten Heerlien (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam).

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Bias and digital collections
Dealing with uncertainty, quality issues and collection gaps
Multimodal collection access
Geographic/spatial enrichment and access
New ways of accessing collections such as associative and serendipitous search
Network Analysis
Natural Language Processing for the Heritage Domain
Trend and change analysis
Automatic collection provenance enrichment
Reflections on the influence of AI on the heritage domain

ICAART 2020 will take place from February 22 to 24 in Valletta, Malta.

Please find the full call for papers at http://www.icaart.org/ARTIDIGH.aspx

The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History accompanies the virtual travellers in the history of art, millennia before Christ

Discovering the Met’s website and online resources

Text by Caterina Sbrana.

Dear readers, I once again speak about New York and in particular about the Met, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which digitized a large number of historical documents in the last two years and made them available to the “World” via their website. The Museum has three sites in New York City: The Met Fifth Avenue, The Met Breuer, and The Met Cloisters.

Those who browse the Mets’s website, millions of visitors, immediately understand what its mission is:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art collects, studies, conserves, and presents significant works of art across all times and cultures, in order to connect people to creativity, knowledge, and ideas.

I will go into further articles on the history of the Met, as well as the various collections on line. Today I would like suggesting the virtual navigation along The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History founded by the Heilbrunn Foundation, New Tamarind Foundation, and Zodiac Fund, that tells the story of art and global culture.

Navigation is made easy by the fact that you can select the period (from 8000 B.C), the geographical area or theme. Take Mesopotamia as an example: A universally accepted chronology for the entire ancient Near East remains to be established.

[…] By 8000 B.C., agricultural communities are already established in northern Mesopotamia, the eastern end of the Fertile Crescent. Early in the sixth millennium B.C., farming communities, relying on irrigation rather than rainfall, settle ever further south along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

I suggest some virtual paths that you can follow along the timeline: the section Key Events describes historical facts in chronological order; Related correlates facts and events; Work of Arts shows archaeological finds of extraordinary beauty. We can study the East, the Middle East, some African countries, Central Europe, America, Oceania.

Take for example the Roman Empire in the period from 1 to 500 a. C. in the Italian Peninsula: after the presentation of the historical period you can browse the images of archaeological finds, each of which presents a detailed description. The section Key events describes historical events in chronological order: the first commented date is 14 A.D. : Augustus dies and his stepson Tiberius (r. 14–37 A.D.) is left master of the Roman empire. His assumption of power is the first step toward introducing the principle of dynastic succession in the empire. One of the last, 476 A.D.: The German Odovacer deposes Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor in the West, and becomes the first barbarian king of Italy.

As I said the Related section, correlates through keywords the events, in this case of the Italian peninsula, with other events of the neighboring countries. In subsequent articles I would like to describe Asian art, especially that of the Batak ethnic group, but also the extraordinary history of Chinese calligraphy and much more.

It is not difficult to imagine how such and numerous documents can be used in the field of education and the possibilities that students could have, not only to carry out interactive research but to understand the richness of the different cultures.

https://www.metmuseum.org/

Amsterdam (The Netherlands), 16-20 September 2019

iPRES 2019 – Eye on the Horizon

In its 16th edition, the iPRES conference will bring together scientists, students, researchers, archivists, librarians, providers, and other experts to share recent developments and innovative projects in a wide variety of topics in digital preservation from strategy to implementation, and from international and local initiatives. Year on year the debate and research profiled at iPRES have moved digital preservation from a technology driven niche specialism of experts to a global challenge with the community to match.

iPRES 2019 is hosted by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network, a collaborative effort of a group of leading heritage institutes, helping to address the challenge of reliable access to digital resources. The ultimate goal is to develop a network of common facilities, services and knowledge base to improve the visibility, usability, and sustainability of the rich digital collections of Dutch heritage institutes. iPRES and the Dutch Digital Heritage Network are all about preserving our digital heritage for the future.

The Conference Theme is Eye on the Horizon, aiming to broaden the voices and approaches participating in the conference, reflecting the venue and looking forward to the future. The future of digital collections but also the future of the iPRES community. This main theme is subdivided into five major themes: