Page 104 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014announced on Facebook and Twitter and they obtained free passes for the fair.Non‐profit organisations such as the Wikimedia Foundation, operator of Wikipedia, also ran world‐wide competitions, such as Wiki Loves Monuments, with a cultural aim: to document the world’s monuments in photos. The result was a collection of 360,000 photographs, sorted geographically, which were uploaded under a free licence to Wikimedia Commons.THE SOCIAL NETWORKS AS NEW SPACESFOR CREATIVITYExperimentation has also reached social networks and culture. The social networks themselves can be a new space for creation, as we shall see with several examples.In Mexico an initiative took place to encourage reading through Twitter with the slogan “If your reading limit is 140 characters we are going to make you read”. Gandhi books implemented an interactive strategy which won them, in just three weeks, over 10,500 followers and 4,000 visits to the Website just on the day of the launch. The first book to be adapted to this medium (a Tweetbook) was The Little Prince. Twitter accounts and avatars were created for the thirteen characters in the book and the whole book was formed by the dialogue between them within the setting of the social network.Another example of social networks as a new scenographic space can be seen in the Gorki Theater in Berlin, which produced the first theatrical work created and premiered directly in Facebook. The characters interacted with phrases, replies and comments and the audience entered the performance at the moment in which they were following the Facebook page where it was taking place. The development of the work (Effi Briest 2.0) can be followed on YouTube, where this experiment is now documented.AC/EThe Tate Modern usually stages premieres for the entire world by means of YouTube streaming, as part of its “BMW Tate Live”, where it has premiered dance performances such as Shirtology. The aim, according to the organisers, is to “capture a volatile audience and face up to the most powerful medium of our time”.The social networks have the potential for being a new space for collective creation where followers are invited to produce a new workAnother way ofusing socialnetworks is co‐creation,invitingfollowers totake up thechallenge tocollectively create a new work. Thus, the Sundance independent film festival created the film Hollywood & Vines, the first to be created by collective collaboration (crowdsourcing) using Vine, the Twitter video app that lets users record and share up to six seconds of movie. The producer created a script, shared it through Twitter with Vine users throughout the world and received more than 750 contributions. Once they had been selected and edited he formed a composite video made up of the contributions of creators from nine different countries and fourteen states of the USA.Under this heading we should also mention examples such as the Barcelona Contemporary Culture Centre (CCCB) with its initiative “Pantalla Global”, in which followers sent videos less than two minutes long that formed part of a large collective work that was then shown around the world.In the Guggenheim in Bilbao, in 2012, there was also a trial of this sort of collective work, creating, with photos sent through social network, a great collage under the direction of artists at the museum, after the manner of David Hockney.Another striking example is how it was possible to collectively create a festival out of nothing on the basis of YouTube and dissemination through the social networks: the Festival of False Trailers.WHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 8: ARE THE SOCIAL NETWORKS ANY USE TO THE CULTURE INDUSTRY? CURRENT PAGE...104