Page 13 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

define the work of one of the most highly rated living artists on the planet.” The redistribution of the work – even if it is purpose-built to be shared on social networks like those mentioned, is one more aspect of a phenomenon that even museums are taking into account by making data and installations specifically to be ‘Insta- grammed’.
The classic cultural spaces where operas and plays etc. are performed still serve a traditional purpose if they have managed to resist being taken over by malls and have broadened their potential. Now many plays [performed in such venues] are broadcast live around the world and sent, even by personal cameras, to Twitter and Facebook dispensing with the need for big radio and TV channels. In this way, public participation goes beyond the here and now and the review of the performance can be produced from beyond the brick and mortar of the auditorium.
The potential for ‘sharing’ on social media is also prompting buildings to search not only for new ways of staging a real performance, but how to reach the public through social networks.
But performances are also being modified by
the effects of technology – from machines that compose symphonies aided by current public emotion and which evolve with the public’s mood with live adjustment using algorithms,
to new digitally-created sounds that have the capacity to surprise because they behave in a way that acoustic instruments can’t. The famous theremine has given birth to something similar to it in computers that generates new types of sound waves.
The potential for ‘sharing’ on social media is also prompting buildings to search not only for new ways of staging a real performance, but how
to reach the public through social networks6. The public expects and seems to adore these formulas that allow them to watch performances remotely.
This is not a book
Magritte presented us with an interesting visual paradox when he came up with the painting of a pipe with a phrase below telling us it wasn’t a pipe. Magritte is right. It’s not a pipe, but a paint- ing of a pipe. But not even that, because now, through digital reproduction, we’re probably seeing the drawing too. In the world of books, the relationship between digital books and printed books is similar.
Books today resemble the books of the past in terms of name and, of course, at times content but there are also differences as substantial as what there once was between manuscripts and the first printed editions.
On one hand, the collective notation system turns some of these books into a common pub- lication. The books are highlighted collectively, not just by the person whose hands it is in. There is also the fact that the book can be read on multiple screens; you may read a few pages on your tablet at home, then keep reading outside the home on the screen of your cell phone while you’re taking public transport; then when you get off the bus you ask your phone to read the book to you while you cross the streets and focus on the traffic. It’s the same book jumping from screen to screen and format to format.
The notion of an actual page has disappeared. How can we number pages that are different in any case depending on the size of the letter the
AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2018
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Digital Trends in Culture