Page 123 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

small tool for generating a random sentence or tweet from popular terms used on the network to help collective creation get o to a start.21 In other words, the festival is designed on the basis of more than with everyone’s participation. It is spread through retweets (tweets or messages that are shared and reposted on the same site) and above all by generating new related content.Another approach to a festival is that of Porchfest (which started out in the New York area and later spread to Oakhurst, a suburb of the city of Atlanta, in the US). It is an original idea that is owned and operated by the local community: a music festival without stages in the traditional sense, as musicians perform in the porches of the typical homes in the area. According to one of the organisers, the aim is to bring the community together22 rather than attract loads of people from other places.To achieve this, the website23 has various buttons with links to di erent forms to be lled out by residents who want to o er their porch as a stage, music groups interested in performing,or volunteers willing to help out. And as is to be expected, anyone can attend free of charge. Last year’s edition (2015, which lasted a day) featured as many as 130 di erent performances.Therefore, there are many ways of enrichinga festival and of helping and encouraging the audience to take part as opposed to inhibiting and concealing it. There are many social and cultural bene ts (the cost could also be assessed, but as we have seen these tools are generally free or low cost). In view of the abovementioned shift towards a concept of an audience that resembles a community, and of the festival as a meeting place for exchanging and showcasing ideas, it could be in our interests to implement an appropriate strategy.2.4. Online content (digitisation) and use of streamingDigitisation processes are being fully embraced by many cultural organisations and institutions, though the needs of each speci c sector and case are di erent and therefore so are the types of digitisation employed. The 2015 AC/E Annual Report discussed content digitisation as an increasingly necessary process in museums in order to bring these institutions’ content closer to local and global audiences and broaden its cultural and social impact.Digitisation is equally important to festivals, but in a di erent way. Because, as we have seen since the beginning of the report, festivals are based not only on showcasing content (dance, music, ideas...) but also on creating experiences (sensory, intellectual...) and providing a meeting place. Their ephemeral and seasonal nature (they run for a very short period during a particular time of year/month) requires a di erent approach to digitisation.We thus nd that some visual arts festivals such as Artfutura, a digital art and creativity festival, have been publishing and sharing their catalogues24 in English and Spanish openly and freely (philosophy of open culture) for a considerable number of years.This festival shares its catalogue through Issuu,25 which functions as a platform for viewing,AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2016123