Page 48 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014society in the wake of big data”, MIT professor Alex Pentland poses the question, “For whom is this new data‐ruled world and what will it be like? [...] it is true that this new world might make George Orwell seem like a third‐rate player with little imagination and that we need to think about serious issues such as privacy and the property of data”. Cultural institutions and companies are the repositories of a large amount of data of enormous value from the point of view of heritage and of business and they must investigate how the new technologies can help them with their task while not ignoring the problems their use poses for society.IoT and Big Data technologies may help towards better conservation of works of art and enable better use to be made of exhibition spaces, and may also contribute to achieving better exploitation and marketing of cultural products (books, photographs, music, etc.) based on the analysis of the new, valuable data available about the public’s preferences and behaviour. The new wearable devices and augmented reality may help generate experiences that imply greater involvement of the senses—touch, sight and hearing—with the art object. Equally motivating, the possibility of communicating remotely with different art objects thanks to IoT technologies could catapult artistic production into places we have yet to imagine, so that cultural spaces are transcended and become new, entirely digital spaces, where the artist can generate new artistic experiences beyond a specific physical space or object.Something like this must have passed through the mind of André Malraux when, at the height of the Second World War he described his imaginary museum as a place without bounds nor special restrictions nor temporal limits, made to measure for each person, where what one has seen there and elsewhere, what one is and what others are, are all mixed and are transformed into a world where, as he says at the beginning of the work, “a Romanesque crucifix was not originally a sculpture, the Madonna by Cimabue was not a painting, neither was Palas Atenea by Fidias a statue”. Do not be led astray: no matter that a work of art is digitalised and completely at our disposition through the Net, Malraux’s dream has still not been fulfilled.On the otherhand, althoughthe benefits ofinvestment intechnology inthe culturalindustry areclear, theremust also beawareness that investment in technology does not have an immediate impact on development until management processes are adapted to the new changes. In the study Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity, by the McKinsey Global Institute, the consultancy clearly relates investment in technology with economic development through the various stages of the technological revolution, but warns that “there is a delay between investment in technology and the management innovation needed to accelerate productive growth”.Investment in technology in the cultural industries also entails the adaptation of management processes in order to generate profitsWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 4: CULTURE IN THE CLOUDAC/E CURRENT PAGE...48