This week: the opening of a distributed media lab network; two major policy projects; an alternative female history of immersive experiences; critical listening on AI; massive screens at Sphere; three hot jobs; one great book on experimental soundscapes and the rise of the micro-theme park
Distributed Media Labs // Digital Catapult
This Wednesday saw the launch of the Advanced Media Production network, a collaboration between Digital Catapult and Target3D.
The Advanced Media Production network is two studios located in Gateshead and Dock Street in London. Both are setup to explore virtual production, motion capture and real-time rendering - holy grail tech of Creative R&D and innovation over the last couple of years.
This launches the same week as University of the Arts announce the acquisition of new Sony screen-tech to power their own London College of Fashion virtual-production stage.
But the critical differentiator for Digital Catapult is they’re connected: a 10-gigabit line and 5G infrastructure will enable teams 250 miles apart to work together in real time.
The idea of remotely connected creativity has been a long-time brewing.
Back in 2018, my National Gallery X co-conspirator Ali Hossaini along with then King’s Professor, now Ericsson VP of Emerging Technologies, Mischa Dohler, Creative R&D reader Peter Marshall at Ericsson and a brilliant team staged Connected at London’s Guildhall.
Using earlier, more immature versions of the 5G network that now powers the Advanced Media Production studios, they staged performances between a jazz band split between London and Berlin, the low latency of the 5G connection making the geographic and temporal distance between musicians disappear. Mischa capped the night by playing piano in one city whilst his daughter sang in another.
It was touching and open-hearted in a way anyone who’s spent time with Mischa would recognise, and the sheer weirdness of their doing in real-time across enormous physical distance disappeared completely - the uncanny became instantly routine.
Five years later, the idea of geographically distributed, simultaneous creativity has reached a milestone in its path to adoption.
The distributed creative media lab based around virtual production technologies is key to a current wave of public-led investments into the future of the UK’s Creative Industries. Alongside what’s happening at Digital Catapult and UAL, connected labs are the core concept underpinning CoStar, the £76m public investment in the future of the Creative Industries by the AHRC I worked on last year.
With Jonny Freeman’s i2 Media in late 2021 I audited the emergence of media labs and production spaces that offered virtual production, motion or volume capture and other key technologies for the future of screen and performance. We got to 130 spaces in the UK - and knew there were likely more.
This is the promise of connected creativity we now need to realise: If we can connect the nodes of this national network of distributed creative production, and leverage their networked potential, the possibilities for new forms of inclusive, experimental creativity are HUGE.
But for it to happen these labs will need to produce new use cases at speed, and the costs of 5G private networks will need to come down faster than they are right now.
But this is an amazing start.
Critical Listening | 3 Podcasts on AI
Feeling good about where AI is going? Check this: Kyunghyn Cho talks about the likely detrimental impacts of AI on minority languages and cultures, and suggests some smart, doable ways to fix it on Technically Optimistic.
Horrified at the AI future? Meredith Walker charts the hidden origins of our approach to computation and AI in early-tech pioneer Charles Babbage’s writings on slavery and plantations in The Smoking Gun of Capitalism. Brilliant, urgent, angry stuff.
And this series of 3 dialogues on AI and Art at National Gallery X led by Ali Hossaini, King’s College London academics and Gallery curators takes me back to happy days. Required listening.
IMMERSIVE HerSTORIES | Haus Der Kunst
As digital art and immersive experiences become ever more popular, I have a real worry it’s at risk of becoming a macho, boys space.
Refik Anadol is brilliant, but there’s a kind of Wagnerian, Kubrick-y machismo to his magnificent, swirling data sculptures, most recently seen taking over Sphere in Las Vegas. He’s the digital art Christopher Nolan, and Sphere is where his data art goes nuclear.
I get the same deeply boy vibes with TeamLab with its 1000 programmers and animators producing their gesamtkunstwerk of sound and light. There’s something very big, very male and very “tech” to it all that needs counterbalance.
Well, if it’s counterbalance you crave, get straight to Munich and the Haus Der Kunst. Their show Inside Other Spaces continues an amazing couple of years where Director Andrea Lissoni, Chief Curator Emma Enderby and their teams have traced a near-invisible history of immersive experiences in female art from the 1950s to the 1970s.
I advise the HDK, so I’m blissfully biased, but I honestly can’t see anywhere where the grounds of our present-day fascination with immersion are being more radically questioned than inside the walls of the Haus.
This bringing together of female environmental artists builds on the quite brilliant retrospective of Fujiko Nakaya from last year. Her clouds of steam - check the video below - were like an exorcism or rebirth, taking over the central galleries before the back doors opened and they were sucked outside to nothingness.
I spent an amazing morning with Andrea last November looking at how they’d built this - cutting through walls and floors to stick through pipes of heated water would that would pass by before becoming steam. It was technology at its rawest, sequenced on a single server in a cupboard that was a very fragile brain.
The lesson the Haus Der Kunst’s shows seem to be teaching is that experimental creativity doesn’t start with what, it always starts with “who” and these magnificent shows remind us that female artists from the across the world have a massive and still largely unrecognised centrality to both their history and future.
Go see.
FUTURE POLICY // UAL and “Creative Corridors”
University of the Arts is one of the world’s boldest universities, reshaping creative practise in the face of technology and creative market change.
Last week their Vice Chancellor James Purnell gave a great speech on the threats to the sector and announced a Commission to be co-authored by Creative R&D reader Eliza Easton on the future of the Creative Industries. Keep an eye on this, and reach out to Eliza with thoughts through her (very nice!) website.
Eliza was until recently Deputy Director at the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, and her old boss, and inspiration for this newsletter Hasan Bakshi is leading a new PEC project with the Royal Society of the Arts and Arts Council England, “Connecting Creative Corridors” that will “set out ways that the UK’s creative industries could achieve the government’s target to contribute £50bn and a million new jobs to the UK economy by 2030s”.
This is critical stuff - and it’s good to see arts, culture and heritage embedded properly in this thinking from the start alongside the wider creative sector.
GOOD LUCK.
Thought of the week // Mustafa Suleyman
“The first wave of AI was about classification. Deep learning showed that we can train a computer to classify various types of input data: images, video, audio, language. Now we’re in the generative wave, where you take that input data and produce new data.
The third wave will be the interactive phase. That’s why I’ve bet for a long time that conversation is the future interface. You know, instead of just clicking on buttons and typing, you’re going to talk to your AI.”
(The DeepMind and Pi founder on next-gen AI interfaces in MIT Review)
Immersive Institutions // U2 @ Sphere
Coming back to Sphere, and with the world watching (a story well told here in the LA Times), it goes live with its first show opening later this month, an augmented performance based around U2’s classic Achtung Baby.
What that means is unknown at this stage, but the U2 boys (quite old boys these days) played on the back of a bus down the Strip last week (watch them pass by on a live stream here) in preparation, and with tickets going at a juicy $1500 a go, it better be good.
There’s historic synergies in U2 doing this first.
It was U2’s early 1990s tours that redefined the mega-band mega-tour as digital media spectacle, Bono’s brief dip into post-modern irony, like Paul Virilio in wraparound sunglasses, leading a screen-driven frenzy that’s shaped stadium experiences ever since.
Back in 1993 they featured one of the earliest and perhaps still most potent examples of distributed, connected creativity.
Live on stage, Bono satellite video-called in to Sarajevo, then under siege in the Balkan wars. It remains a deeply uncomfortable moment that captured all of U2’s soaring ambition and occasionally cringe-worthy going too far.
Black Swan Director Darren Aronofsky is directing a new show that opens at Sphere alongside the U2 concerts, and talks in this interview about the sheer scale of screen experience inside - 160k square foot of 16k screens. That is a lot of goddam pixels.
Whatever else it is, it will be big in a way perhaps only U2 can do big.
Whilst Bono abandoned his post-modern media Mephistopheles persona in the late 90s, the sheer imperial mega-screen bombast of Sphere feels like the right place to bring it back.
Keep watching and if you’re in Vegas and can afford the tickets: go.
Creative R&D jobs // RCA, Storyfutures, Norwich
Looking for a new gig in the Creative R&D ecosystem? Here’s three to get your juices flowing.
The Royal College of Art’s AI Design Lab is looking for a Research Fellow to work between London and Hong Kong.
Maybe the hottest of all hot Creative R&D jobs: running Creative Technology for Storyfutures as it creates the national media lab for CoStar.
But maybe just as hot, the chance to set up a new institute for Creative Technology at the Norwich University of the Arts
Get applying.
CRITICAL READING // “Haunted Weather”
I’ve been reading David Toop’s “Haunted Weather”, a book about sound production at the beginning of the 21st Century - and you should too.
Toop is a journalist, writer, academic and experimental musician who charts alternative paths through the last centuries of sound.
His Ocean of Sound absolutely blew my mind when I was a teenager. A revisionist history of 20th Century music, reframed as a meeting point between cultures, traditions and technologies that begins with Debussy’s encounter with the Indonesian Gamelan at the Paris World Fair, and then goes EVERYWHERE from King Tubby to Brian Eno to Brian Wilson, the Yanomami Indians, Howler Monkeys, Stockhausen, Miles Davis and more. Along with Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise and Simon Reynolds’ Rip it Up, it’s my favourite book ever written about music. You can listen to most of the four accompanying albums put out by Virgin below:
“Haunted Weather” is narrower, looking at what kind of auditory spaces digital sound production was leading to in the early 21st century. He writes beautifully about the pursuit of silence - or the forever absence of total silence, and the sonic ghosts that emerge out of background noise and random chance recording.
A near forgotten classic.
New Friend or Foe? // Outernet and Micro Theme Parks
As cultural venues struggle for money and attention in a changing landscape - and horror stories like the potential closure of DCA Dundee; Riverside Studios now six months in administration and more continue to spread, where visitors are going instead becomes a key question.
Working with Outernet Global on the Sysco Creative AI Challenge a few weeks back, the sheer volume of people passing through was impressive. A few months back Outernet Global announced visitor figures that already put it in the top 3 of all visitor attractions in the UK. My guess: it will be number 1 by the end of 2023.
And with Sphere - yes Sphere again - pulling the world’s eyeballs, this new age of what I’m calling Immersive Institutions is coming very very fast.
A LOT more to come on this on this newsletter and what it means.
But it’s not just Immersive Institutions. I loved this piece on the spread of Micro Theme Parks in the US - small tactical brand incursions in hard to reach geographies.
As a parent of kids now thankfully too old for it, I can also say very happily: no more Peppa Pig World for me…
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