New Real Research Projects: Supporting Recovery in the Cultural Sector
Two new research projects on transformative cultural experiences are supporting resilience and post-lockdown recovery in the UK's world-leading cultural sector. By Drew Hemment.
Last year saw Edinburgh's Festivals cancelled for the first time in their 73-year history. Now they are looking to bounce back, and the University of Edinburgh, which has been involved in the festivals since 1947, is playing its part in the recovery.
Each year the festivals deliver over 3,000 events, reaching audiences of more than 4.5 million and creating the equivalent of around 6,000 full-time jobs. The University of Edinburgh provides 65 festival venues annually; this year, as part of its support for the festivals' recovery following the pandemic, it is presenting The New Real.
This University of Edinburgh initiative, working with Edinburgh's Festivals and the Alan Turing Institute, highlights the extraordinary creative potential of AI to imagine and deliver novel artistic experiences, fuel new business models, and maintain and build new audiences.
The coronavirus pandemic has meant a significant transition to life online – we are all more dependent on digital interfaces than ever before. This goes beyond the wider use of technologies such as live streaming to profound and potentially lasting changes in the arts, society and wider economy.
Two research projects have been funded as a part of The New Real initiative to support recovery in festivals and the arts:
Experience in The New Real
This project explores how the design of festival experiences fuelled by AI can equip cultural organisations to engage audiences in the ‘new real’ of post-pandemic life. A pilot festival experience will be developed to test strategies for festival and cultural events to generate new kinds of cultural content and activity that combines the physical and digital. This will focus on climate action and local understanding of global climate data and is funded by the Scottish Funding Council as a part of Design Lab.
Resilience in The New Real
This project will support the UK's world-leading cultural sector to both delight audiences and develop critical literacies to enable post-COVID-19 recovery. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, it aims to equip cultural producers and audiences with the knowledge and tools to navigate this new landscape. It will look at the ways systems make use of our data, how truth and experience are constructed online, the exclusions that are created, the management of IP, and the ways value circulates.
Industry partners in the research projects include: Edinburgh International Festival, Edinburgh International Science Festival, Edinburgh Art Festival, Edinburgh Book Festival, Ars Electronica Festival, From The Fields (Bluedot, Kendall Calling), The Space, Creative Scotland, City of Edinburgh Council, and Edinburgh 2050 City Vision.
Two artistic commissions launch the New Real initiative during March 2021 in a special ‘out of season’ Edinburgh International Festival event. The featured artists are machine-learning experts Anna Ridler and Caroline Sinders, and Jake Elwes, who explores the algorithms, philosophy and ethics of AI.
Each artwork presents an astonishing cultural experience during lockdown, and showcases a novel form of artistic content created for an online audience. The two artworks are presented alongside a series of online discussions and explorations on the ways data systems and artificial intelligence reflect and shape our social reality. These New Real Pilot art commissions and an associated research study were supported by Edinburgh Futures Institute, Creative Scotland, Creative Informatics, and the Data-Driven Innovation programme of the South East Scotland City and Region Deal.
