The Futures of Arts & Museums
In this series on From Complexity to Emergence, we’re recapping IAM Weekend 16 and bringing you everything we learned and explored in one place. At our next edition in April, we’ll be discussing The Renaissance of Utopias across media, education and the arts. Join us!
As we spoke about in last week’s piece on the Futures of Media, digital transformation is forcing a complete rethink of how media organisations operate, and the same can be said of cultural institutions and museums.
Traditionally, these great vaults of art, history and culture have preserved past works so that future generations may enjoy and learn from them, but nowadays, not only is the way we interact with these exhibits changing, but so too is nature of the exhibits themselves. Fewer young people are visiting galleries and museums than previously, and technology is developing both the style, process and scope of much artistic practice.
At IAM Weekend 16, we explored the futures of both arts and museums, seeking to understand the roles played by technology and youth, and their effects on creativity and the Institution.
Across the UK, Tate galleries are some of the most frequented visitor attractions each year, but they certainly aren’t immune to the forces outlined above. Always looking to be more accessible and open to young people. Jen Aarvold and leyla tahir, both producers at Tate, are working to understand and respond to the interests and needs of those who will ensure the long term future of the museum.
One example of this work is Tate Collectives, a group of 15–25 year olds who operate both as a creative collective and often resemble something like the gallery’s internal think-tank. With the group, the museum promotes innovation, diversity, risk taking and making mistakes, creating an open, friendly environment to engage more of today’s youth, and Tate Collectives members also keep the gallery on track to stay relevant and engaging with young people.
Be it through changing the language used to communicate physical artworks, building an online community, embracing underground culture or by commissioning digital collectives and artists to reinterpret historical pieces, Tate not only makes its collection more relevant but also defines how the museum of the future can bridge the traditionally large gap between young people and the gallery.
Exploring similar themes, earlier this year we had the pleasure of partnering with Tate for (random) co:jams, a session of creative improvisation with emerging artists, creative technologists and young people to prototype the futures of museums. You can read more about the collaboration here!
Technology has changed the ways we exhibit art and offered museums and galleries new ways to engage their audiences, but it has also radically developed the creation of art itself. As samim Winiger told the IAM Weekend 16 audience, advances in machine learning and CreativeAI have democratised creativity to the extent that even science-fiction writers and policymakers are now struggling to keep up with reality.
The technological advances in creation can, roughly, be split into two categories: Assisted Creation and Generative Creation. Assisted Creation tools “allow more people to be more creative more of the time” by correcting, focussing and improving original creative acts, accelerating the time it takes to go from novice to expert, while Generative Creation tools are being piloted in fields such as architecture and design, allowing for the representation of complex phenomena in both virtual and physical contexts.
The former has the potential to turn novice practitioners into masters of their fields in no time at all (a far cry from basic functions like autocorrect and autofocus!), while the latter ensures ‘mass customisation’ won’t be a buzzword for long. By extrapolating from these capacities, samim argued, we arrive at the Democratisation and Escalation of Creativity itself.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, digital transformation is having an effect both internally and externally. As a result of its work with digital consultancy firm Made by Many, the V&A has a new, outward-facing website which has improved the way it communicates with its audience, while internally a new CMS has also brought with it a more responsive way of working.
During the session, Kati Price of the V&A and Susan Lin of Made by Many presented the project as a model of how cultural institutions can work with specialists to stay relevant in a digital world. For many, the novelty of ‘creativity’ is difficult both to process and produce, and can often create uncertain, uncomfortable working environments. Museums themselves are even set up to avoid change (with entire Conservation departments!), but the nature of digital transformation means this is unavoidable. As such, Kati and Susan outlined four key rules to help non-specialists navigate this uncertainty:
- give them something tangible;
- let the users speak!
- start small
- get people involved
Combined, these guidelines got everyone at the V&A on board, bringing them on the journey by making change accessible, achievable and responsive to the needs of those involved. As a result, what was once a scary, uncomfortable process had become both accessible and manageable, allowing both parties to direct all their energy at the task in hand.
For new cultural institutions, however, the approach is very different. Where old galleries and museums can trade on their legacies, newer organisations operate within a totally different set of parameters. Rhizome, affiliated with the New Museum, serves as a model for born-digital art institutions, asking ‘what does an art institution look like when it has the network at its core?’ As Executive Director Zachary Kaplan (sailingfanblues) explained, the centricity of digital networks forces art institutions to reevaluate how to connect and engage with contemporary audiences. In response, Rhizome offers a digital perspective with an emphasis on cultivating creative communities.
Arguing that digital networks are about more than just websites, and are in fact a “technical, material and social ensemble”, Zachary emphasised that art institutions must recognise this complexity in order to understand that “the gallery space [is] just another node in a network”. Citing a number of non-traditional institutions as inspirations for Rhizome, Zachary explained that most importantly, across all its operations, they seek to be discursive, evasive, literate and interventionist in generating, developing and preserving digital art.
In the past, much of traditional art entailed painting portraits of famous, rich or important people, yet despite the age of the selfie, Sergio Albiac exemplifies how expertise and excellence can survive in a democratised artistic space. As a portrait artist, he is exploring portals to human identity to reveal who we are individually.
Sergio’s expansive talk highlighted how while the future of art can maintain traditions — such as portrait subjects not smiling — it can also embrace technology to create in a contemporary style. Using code as an art medium, Sergio sees the Internet as a free ‘art supply store’, and despite the development of CreativeAI, the distinctly human ability to create original, dexterous and meaningful work means his process continues to be worthwhile. According to Sergio, these traits form a golden triangle of creativity that forms the basis for great art. Inviting his subjects to provide their own meaning, to communicate their essence themselves, Sergio is asking his subjects to ‘pose’, completely exposed: here lies digital nudity, and so too Sergio’s great art.
We also commissioned Sergio a cloud-based artistic installation for IAM Weekend 16 called “I am portraits”. Watch the video below and read more about it on The Creators Project.
In a post-selfie time where machine learning algorithms convincingly turn photos into imitated masterpieces, how can computer code be used as a medium to tell stories about human identity?
👉 If you want to create your portrait from your own words, you can ask for an invite at www.beyapp.com or try his latest collaboration with Paramount Films for the launch of Arrival.
Across the Futures of Arts & Museums session, we delved deeper into the role of museums and the development of artistic practice, learning that with an ever-changing context, cultural institutions are having to put their audiences first. However, while this means responding to visitors’ needs and expectations, just as important is a constant desire to surprise and delight.
Be it reaching out to young people, harnessing technology, improving communication, experimenting or cultivating a community, museums, galleries and artists must adopt novel, engaging strategies if they are to stay relevant in the Internet Age.
