#3 The Shock of the Old
This week: London's new Creative R&D epicentre | Slow innovation | Entertainment's digital twin | What to see and do this week...
Institutionalising Creative R&D // East Bank
I started this newsletter to capture the collision of new kinds of creativity and 21st century technologies are bringing about new kinds of artistic practice, new forms of production and new kinds of institution. Three weeks in, it’s clear how fast things are moving.
Last week, we looked at new studios where the coming together of 5G and virtual production will.enable new ways of making content in and between distributed media labs.
This week: a critical example of how new institutions are forming both because of and to enable new intersections between creativity, ideas and technology.
The openings of UCL East and the London College of Fashion in Stratford matter. They are heralds of a long-term structural change that places the intersections I’m interested in at the heart of 21st century London.
The first major steps towards the completion of the East Bank development, these openings are a culmination of the biggest investment in new cultural venues and institutions since South Kensington in the Victorian era.
Everything happening there is in some way about a new encounter between creativity and technology. At UCL East, digital media, robotics and smart cities research collide. At the London College of Fashion, digital styling for avatars in the metaverse meets development of the next wave of smart fabrics. Sadlers Wells is launching a hip hop academy. BBC Music Studios will be a hyper-technologised hub ready for all music genres from symphony orchestras to avant-garde rock.
Together, they are forging new models of what cultural and academic organisations can be.
But yet I feel disappointed about the pitch for East Bank. I don’t think it’s importance has been well articulated - in part I think because we don’t have a well-established political language to describe the value of creative-technology innovations.
But this is my take:
East Bank marks a historic re-definition of London’s cultural and economic geography, that will institutionalise Creative R&D as a critical driver of the 21st century economy.
There’s lots of themes here i’ll come back to in the weeks ahead: of a new wave of institutions creating a new London; of the types of research this could lead to, of what new kinds of art and artist they might make.
But now, simply: this matters.
What to do this week // Gazelli Art House; DiModa; Artifacts
In London, New York or online this week? Here’s three shows from the sharp edge:
Gazelli Art House is the most interesting commercial gallery in London. Last year they acquired the estate of AI art pioneer Harold Cohen - a major figure who’s career reappraisal at the Whitney in New York next year will mark a critical shift in our appreciation of artist-AI collaboration. Get down to the Gazelli project space in their Dover Street basement to see Generative Generations a group of the hottest young generative art talent respond to Cohen’s work. Free and on display until the 7th October.
Over in New York, Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s curator of digital art (and i’m guessing the curator of the Cohen show to come there) and DiModa (the mostly online-only Digital Museum of Digital Art) are staging Dis/Location at Onx Studio. A super-cool looking coming together of architects, designers, artists and musicians it will be another proof of why Christiane’s work is so vital to the development of digital artistry.
And last, a very beautiful, very thoughtful web 3 project to dive into online. Artifacts by RightClickSave editor Alex Estorick and poet Ana Maria Caballero recasts the NFT as impossible Byzantine coinage, carrying images of family life in shapes both strange and familiar. LOVE.
And a bonus for your diaries - coming soon to Canning Town’s brilliant Arebyte Gallery - a delve into religious belief, artificial intelligence, and the California tech industry.:
Enjoying “Creative R&D”? // Help me build the community
In its first three weeks, this newsletter has begun to reach the artists, researchers, policy makers, funders and technologists who are shaping tomorrow’s creativity - and those who want to find out about what they’re doing and what it means.
But we have a long, long LONG way to go. So please, if you’re enjoying what I’m trying to do, please share this newsletter or consider subscribing.
Slow innovation // Edgerton, Abramovic, the Louvre
We tend to think about innovation in the hyper-present - what’s new that’s happening right now that might reshape tomorrow?
But as the brilliant historian David Edgerton in The Shock of the Old tells us, it’s often slow, sometimes small but epochal changes that matter most.
I’ve been thinking about this working with Oxford University (and Creative R&D readers Alexandra Vincent and Erin Gordon), on their Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities and then noticing examples of hugely important but slow and under-heralded change everywhere i’ve turned.
It was in the background throughout my visit to the Marina Abramovic show at the Royal Academy of Arts on Friday. Brilliant show, but perhaps most notable that this is the first exhibition by a woman in the main galleries of the Academy in its 250 years - a story picked up in the Guardian. That Marina herself, the intense subject and object of her own work, is absent, leaves the show a ghostly simulation of 50 years of provocation and risk. It creates an ironic absence in what is a moment of triumph I found hard to overcome.
Then I listened to Creative R&D reader and former culture minister Lord Ed Vaizey interview Sir John Leighton, Director General of the National Galleries of Scotland about their soon to be finished refurb, and the need to find a new answer to an old question, what does it mean to be Scottish; what is Scottish art? Hard questions that in galleries have to be answered from and for the longue-duree.
And then I read an interview with Louvre Director Laurence Des Cars in the New York Times. Des Cars is of course the first female Director of the Louvre - a first that’s yet to happen at the Met, the British Museum, the Uffizi or the Hermitage, the other great early examples of the encyclopaedic museum.
If you’ve not read Edgerton’s alternative take on the history of technology, go get it. But to me all of this is a reminder of the old Aesopian wisdom reframed brilliantly here in the NY Times: when it comes to making real change, sometimes slow and steady wins the race.
Project of the week // A portrait of Tenochtitlan
I LOVE this.
Thomas Kole’s digital recreation of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire, is an outstanding piece of both research and imagination.
A visual tour of a lost city, it’s a portal back to 1518 and a world that’s gone.
Someone, please, go make the movie now, the virtual set’s been built for you.
A word about our sponsors // Preview Tools
I’m delighted to have Preview Tools as the first sponsor of “Creative R&D”. If you’re a gallery, museum or immersive experience, Preview Tools lets you make videos inside a digital twin of your spaces. CHECK IT OUT.
Entertainment’s digital twin // Baseball, Marker, Lu Yang
If UCL East and East Bank are new physical institutions born of the intersection of creativity and technology, then we must also note new kinds of virtual institution emerging as digital twins of the real world.
This week’s example: Major League Baseball, which staged a first live game inside its virtual ballpark.
Last weekend saw the streaming of the first live baseball game into its virtual twin - real players morphed into their avatar equivalents in real-time, and viewers could move the camera freely throughout the virtual stadium.
As a demonstration of the rapid speed of development of the kind of marker-free motion-capture of a brilliant pioneer like Move.AI, it’s a huge step in itself. It was less than a year ago that Artificial Rome, so often a first mover in digitisation, first demoed their Soil project which transformed a real-time digital twin of a football match into a Speedball (one or the Amiga lovers out there!) of the future:
And now there’s a real commercial service out there doing this from one of the world’s major sports. Things are moving QUICK.
But as they move fast, let’s not lose sight of where this comes from.
On one hand, recognise baseball as a key pioneer in digitisation. They were the first to offer an over-the-top streaming service to fans way, way back in 2002. 2002! And the technology guts of that service then went on nearly two decades later to become Disney+ - a brilliant story you can read here.
On the other, we need to stand up and shout that it’s the creative domain - music, theatre, art , film - which has already been doing this for years. Not just Travis Scott in Fortnite, though that remains pretty cool, but the legions of virtual art exhibitions in online 3d spaces (like this one I won a webby for!) or Dream by the RSC, or hell, the entire digital universe made by documentary genius Chris Marker in Second Life.
As elsewhere, whilst the money maybe bigger in other domains, it is the artists who are the pioneers - where they go first the world follows.
Of all those artists exploring this intersection of real and virtual space, it’s the brilliant Lu Yang who I think does it best. Their work is about the collapse of binaries, and their show at the Zabludowicz Collection in Kentish Town was my absolute favourite of the last few years. In their performance work, motion capture and dance come together, Lu Yang and their avatars playing back and forth. Whilst the technique is familiar, Lu Yang splits and reforms fluidly, becoming multiples. They are the best contemporary artist in Whitman’s spirit, containing multitudes.
Jobs of the week // RSC, UCL, National Gallery
This week, three brilliant early career roles in pioneering organisations.
Sarah Ellis at the Royal Shakespeare Company is a major figure in the UK Creative R&D ecosystem AND a lovely person. So when a job comes up working for her - get applying! This coordinator role for their artists, fellowships and research programme is super cool.
Another key figure (also super-nice) in the ecosystem is Brigitta Zics, Professor of Digital Media at UCL, her team need a whole range of postgraduate teaching assistants
And last but not least, my old stomping ground, The National Gallery are looking for a digital administrator. And yes, Lawrence Chiles, Head of Digital is also super-nice.
(Conclusion: In Creative R&D, everyone is super-nice.) GOODBYE!