press release: culture hack scotland | geeks-in-residence 2012
TRANSCRIPT
PRESS RELEASE For Immediate Release
Monday 16 April 2012
Innovative event that challenges participants to make amazing new digital project in just 24 hours
Culture Hack Scotland 2012 & Geeks-In-Residence launch
Friday April 27 / Saturday 28 at SocietyM, Glasgow
After its hugely successful inaugural event in Edinburgh last year, Culture Hack Scotland is back, bigger and better than ever. It has moved west this year to Glasgow, and takes place on Friday April 27 & Saturday 28th at SocietyM, the beautiful new workspace in Central Glasgow.
Culture Hack Scotland is a fast-paced and highly creative event that challenges designers, technologists and artists to make innovative culture-related projects in just 24 hours. Usually without much sleep.
Co-producer of Culture Hack Scotland Rohan Gunatillake said: "One of Culture Hack Scotland’s goals is to foster collaboration and practical partnerships between cultural organisations and digital and design talent. Scotland has world-class cultural and digital sectors but currently they don’t do enough amazing work together…that is what Culture Hack Scotland enables"
The theme of this year's Culture Hack Scotland is Data, Sound + Vision. As well as data, the event will provide lots of visual, audio and literary information as inspiration for participants to build on and remix. It is expected that 100 developers and designers will make really creative use of the rich media provided by the cultural partners they are working with. There is music from Arika's archive, field recordings from National Museums Scotland. The Demarco Digital Archive have contributed some stunning images, as have Perth Museum & Art Gallery and the University of Glasgow Library. Other data providers include Glasgow Museums, University of Edinburgh, The Scottish Poetry Library and Glasgow International.
For the first time this year there is a newly styled coding workshop for arts professionals, plus some inspiring guest speakers and performers.
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After 24 hours of non-stop creating, building and making using the data supplied by our cultural partners, everyone will come together for a Show and Tell. This is followed by an awards ceremony. Judges include Kath Mainland, Chief Executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
One of the most successful stories to emerge from last year is an app created at Culture Hack Scotland for the Edinburgh International Book Festival by Edinburgh-based developer James Newbery (see Appendix 2 for case studies).
James Newbery said: "Culture Hack Scotland was a fantastic event. The range of data available was impressive, and the quality of the work produced was phenomenal, I am very much looking forward to 2012"
Culture Hack Scotland 2012 is part of Sync, an innovation programme for the cultural sector funded by Creative Scotland (see Appendix 3 for more information). The event is sponsored by Soundcloud, KILTR, Dog Digital, Storm ID, Pusher.com and the Amazon Developer Centre in Edinburgh.
Geeks-in-Residence
At this year’s Culture Hack Scotland, the Sync team will formally launch Scotland’s first ever Geeks-in-Residence programme. Geeks-in-Residence pairs up creative technologists with forward-looking organisations to make new, valuable and stretching projects. It’s all about collaboration & experimentation, with senior staff working with their dedicated teams to explore and make. By creating low-risk environments, Sync are enabling an opportunity for creative digital thinking to be embedded within the cultural fabric of each organisation.
This year, Sync are working with a stellar team of cultural organisations, ranging from a national organisation through to a new creative workspace in the Hebrides. Participating organisations are: Scottish Opera, macrobert, Eigg Box, The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, Stills.
There is an open call to find this year’s creative technologists, applications are being accepted until 8 May. This is an incredible chance for creative people to join creative organisations in order to make a real difference to the way we think about and work with with digital tools.
Sync, Culture Hack Scotland and Geeks-in-Residence are produced by an experienced team of producers based in Edinburgh and Glasgow: Erin Maguire (Beyongolia), Suzy Glass (Trigger), Rohan Gunatillake and Devon Walshe (see Appendix 1 for biogs and links).
For more inspiring stories, biographies and background on Sync and Culture Hack Scotland 2012, please see the appendices attached and visit www.welcometosync.com.
Ends.
For more information, interviews and images, contact: Catherine Murtagh, Director, The DollsHouse (Marketing & PR)
T 0141 271 4788 M 07818 281763
Appendices for this Press Release
Appendix 1. Team behind Sync & Culture Hack Scotland- Producer Biographies, Funders & Sponsors
Appendix 2. Case Studies, Culture Hack Scotland 2011
Appendix 3. Sync & Creative Scotland Cultural Economy Overview
Appendix 1. Team behind Sync & Culture Hack Scotland
Producer Biographies
Rohan Gunatillake looks after strategy and design. Wired magazine named him in 2012 as one of 50 people who will change the world. He has produced a highly successful wellbeing-related mobile app and led the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab – whose ground-breaking work has provided much of the inspiration for Sync.
Suzy Glass looks after liaison with the cultural sector. She is a cross-artform producer, and has worked with organisations including Central Station, C4, the BBC, the London Transport Museum & the Museum of London. She is one of the directors of Trigger, a producer-led company that makes creative happenings where artforms, sectors and interests collide.
Erin Maguire looks after events and logistics. She runs Beyongolia, combining leading edge tech savvy with top quality technical production skills.
Devon Walshe is leading on the tech side of things, looking at things from the perspective of the developer. He’s an entrepreneur, publisher and geek, who among other things is the founder and director of The Journal, an expanding local publishing platform for students and young people.
Funders and Sponsors
Culture Hack Scotland and Geeks-In-Residence are part of Sync. Sync is funded by Creative Scotland.
Additional Culture Hack Scotland sponsors are:
Amazon Developer Centre: http://amazondc.com
KILTR: http://kiltr.com
Soundcloud:http://soundcloud.com
Dog Digital: http://www.dogdigital.com
Storm ID: http://www.stormid.com
Pusher:http://pusher.com
Appendix 2. Case Studies
a) James Newbery & Edinburgh International Book Festival
Bookfest App
At Culture Hack Scotland 2011, James decided to focus on the Edinburgh International Book Festival. He thought this festival might be neglected somewhat given the richness of the Edinburgh Fringe data available and the fact that it didn't have its own dedicated data sets. He wanted to produce a resource for people such as himself who seem to be afflicted by a gnawing insecurity of their own cultural viability.
James greatly enjoys books, but would not describe himself as literary. James said "I read plenty, but I don’t take a huge interest in the authors themselves. When attending a book event, the author becomes the centre of focus, and so I wanted to produce a tool that would help attendees discover more about the creators of the books that they have been enjoying."
The end result of this is BookFest, a mobile application for discovering more about the authors of EIBF. It is amazing how few people know what an author looks like, so the app pulls Guardian articles about and photos of the chosen author. There is also a signature facility: if you have forgotten to bring a book by the author and do not wish to buy another copy at the Festival book store, you can simply ask them to scribble on your touch enabled device.
James Newbery Biography:
The Company called Tinned Fruit is inhabited by Jim Newbery, an independent web and mobile developer based in Edinburgh.
James has been a web interface developer since 1996, he has been involved in a large number of projects for media corporations, government and the voluntary sector.
He provides hands-on and strategic consultancy work in all areas of front-end development, with a particular focus on complex, high-traffic web application interfaces, progressive enhancement and multiple device support.
b) Yann Seznec, Lucky Frame & Edinburgh Festivals
Festipods
Festipods is a fun and quirky visualisation of Edinburgh Festivals Data. In a nutshell, Festipods lets you create a petri dish full of little musical creatures that represent the events you have attended (or will attend) at the Edinburgh Festivals. It went on to full production through a commission from Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab after Culture Hack Scotland 2011.
Yann Seznec & Lucky Frame Biography:
Lucky Frame is an Edinburgh-based company specialising in innovative interactive musical systems. Founded in 2008 by Yann Seznec, Lucky Frame has received awards and support from the University of Edinburgh, NESTA, The British Council, Creative Scotland and Channel 4.
The work includes iPhone apps, desktop computer software, games and performance systems, all of which aim to find new ways to encourage creativity through technology.
Recent projects include: working closely with Love Music Festival to design, develop and deliver a set of accessible music creation software to schools across Scotland; developing a music composition game for iPhone funded by channel 4; building an interactive musical pig sty for Matthew Herbert's world tour.
The company was born out of the success of the Wii LoopMachine, creative music software for Nintendo Wii remotes. The LoopMachine has grown into a family of software focussing on fun and intuitive motion controlled music tools for the wii.
c) Alex Waterston & National Museums Scotland
Collect It
The Idea behind Collect it is to mash data together in a fun, cheeky way. Using collections data from National Museums Scotland, Alex collaborated with designer Jen Davies to create an app that maps some of their 1066 items onto Festival venues throughout Edinburgh and encourages players to find (steal!) them. Each item has a value attached to it, so you can work out how much your heist is worth as you play.
This is how Alex describes the game:
Being the master criminal that you are, you’re slightly perturbed that the target of your next heist seems to have gotten wind of your crafty plans. Probably shouldn’t have tweeted about it, checked in on Foursquare at a hardware shop and then tagged yourself as shopping for Heist Materials on GetGlue. Damn Social Media.
Anyway, National Museums of Scotland have sent their top collections protector out to hide all their exhibits around the city of Edinburgh. You’ve been keeping an eye on his GoWalla checkins and they all seem to be at Fringe and Festival venues around the city.
Lucky you made this iPhone app earlier to help you steal that stuff and track your swag. Wait, what? You accidentally uploaded it to the app store? EVERYONE ELSE IS STEALING THAT STUFF TOO? Better get going!
Steal It was developed by Alex Waterston (@moggy) and Jen Davies (@jendavies) and uses Edinburgh Fringe venue data as well as National Museums Scotland collections data.
Alex is in discussion with the National Museums of Scotland to develop this app further.
Alex Waterston Biography:
My name is Alex. I have ideas and I make things. I like to solve problems in interesting ways using creativity and technology together. I work as a mobile strategist for a mobile development and consultancy agency called Kotikan based in Edinburgh. I like to apply mobiley, creativey thinking to find solutions to all sorts of issues from marketing to connected television to games to enterprise problems. You name it and I'll help to fix it.
I think stories are very, very important and I'm a huge fan of narrative driven design. I especially like narrative driven two screen experiences for television and narrative driven games that do something different or tackle complicated
and difficult subjects.
In the past I've developed big, complicated games and small, snappy games and intricate applications and simple applications and 24 hour applications and now I'm doing all of those things whilst also trying to reinvent the way narrative is delivered for television with Channel 4.
Appendix 3. Sync & Creative Scotland Cultural Economy Overview
Sync
Sync is a new two-year programme for the cultural sector in Scotland – all about prototyping and innovation in the space where culture, technology and design meet. It is part of the Creative Scotland's Cultural Economy programme.
Between now and the end of 2013, Sync will implement three main strands of activity:
Culture Hack Scotland - an incredibly playful yet productive experiment to see what happens what developers and designers and cultural professionals can make together in just 24 hours. Full details: http://www.welcometosync.com/hack
Geeks-in-Residence - a programme that pairs up creative technologists with forward-looking organisations to make new, valuable and stretching projects.
Now open to applicants! See website for information pack and application. Key dates: Close May 8th; Shortlist by May 11th; Interview and assess by May 31; Final choices by June 7th/15th.
Bi-monthly online magazine called SYNC Tank – a showcase of the freshest thinking around how digital is enabling, inspiring and changing our cultural practice and experiences. It’s important to practice what you preach: so Sync itself is constantly prototyping and learning from what works and what doesn’t.
You can find out more by heading over to www.welcometosync.com and by following @syncHQ on Twitter.
Creative Scotland - Cultural Economy Programme
A new programme to support digital development of Scotland’s cultural sector was unveiled at the Digital 2012 conference in Glasgow on Friday 30 March.
Developed in partnership with NESTA, AmbITion Scotland and Sync, this integrated programme will support digital experimentation and new business models, as well as raising the threshold of knowledge and skills within creative organisations to harness the opportunities offered by rapid advances in technology.
The programme will:
• Support capacity building around skills, infrastructure, and knowledge in adopting digital technologies in cultural and creative businesses
• Respond to digital technology development needs of organisations that are already ‘digital natives’
• Significantly enhance organisational sustainability through further integration of sophisticated digital technology
• Invest in organisations that are exploring progressive business models, or at a more advanced stage of developing creative content to enhance their sustainability
Backed with an overall investment of £1.5m from Creative Scotland, the programme has already attracted additional investment from partners.
NESTA and the Arts and Humanities Research Council will contribute £285,000 and £150,000 respectively for a programme that will support prototype ideas, test markets or learn from others.
In addition, Culture Sparks will manage programmes delivered by AmbITion Scotland and SYNC that will support creative companies to:
• Develop their in-house expertise to exploit a digital landscape.
• Experiment with their digital developments.
Iain Munro, Director of Creative Development at Creative Scotland said: “Many creative organisations across Scotland already work successfully across digital platforms but, as the pace of technology accelerates, our cultural sector needs to source new opportunities to increase their audiences and improve their revenues. This new strategy – a major commitment from our Cultural Economy programme – is a dynamic new route to boosting Scotland’s digital presence and we welcome the co-investment from our other partners.”
More information on the programme is available here: creativescotland.com/investment-programmes/cultural-economy/digital-developments.