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CultureGeek

Come in Geek out We are pleased to welcome an inspiring line up of speakers and delegates from a plethora of cultural organisations to Southbank Centre for our third edition of CultureGeek.

Museums, galleries, festivals, theatres and other organisations across the cultural landscape are adapting their online presence and expanding their digital activity. The conference focuses on how organisations and individuals are adapting and utilising digital developments to connect with their audiences through new channels of communication, generating new revenue streams and developing additional layers of programming and curation.

CultureGeek is a great opportunity to learn about best practice, new ideas, what works (and what doesn’t!) and provides delegates with a collaborative platform to network with like-minded arts professionals.

We hope you enjoy the day and encourage you to share what you hear on Twitter and beyond using #CultureGeek.

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17 June 2015

9.00

Registration, Tea and CoffeeCollect your delegate badge and bag and network with fellow delegates

9.20

WelcomeEmma McLean will welcome delegates to Culture Geek 2015.

Emma is a marketeer with specialist experience of digital advertising and audience development. Her role at AKA sees her strategising and delivering full service marketing campaigns, including the Natural History Museum, Science Museum and Imperial War Museums. She has previously worked for Royal Museums Greenwich & Audiences London.

Emma has spoken about digital marketing and audience engagement at a number of international conferences and has chaired our Culture Geek events since 2012. @emmclean

9.30 How to Speak Art & Tech: Social Media and the Global GuggenheimJiaJia Fei Associate Director, Digital Marketing, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York @VAJIAJIA

Social media is a lot like language. Users communicate with each other while living in a digitaldimension of the world with trends that shift and evolve over time. If you’re not a part of thatworld, it might as well be a foreign language. How can social media be used to speak to aglobal audience—about art—a foreign language in and of itself, and how do you tell storiesfrom within your own institution in a meaningful, accessible, and authentic voice? Conversely,how do you translate digital speak to key stakeholders who aren’t fluent in technology?Using the Guggenheim as a case study, this talk will guide participants on how to speak artand tech—from creating a digital content strategy around visual literacy and best practices forintegration within a digital ecosystem, to leveraging success internally to inspire participationand champion support. The presentation will also include highlights and case studies fromrecent Guggenheim social media initiatives that engage both local and global audiences.

JiaJia Fei is the Associate Director, Digital Marketing at the Solomon R. GuggenheimMuseum in New York, where she has catalyzed the museum’s embrace of digital mediathrough integrated social media, e-mail, web, mobile, and new media marketing initiativessince 2010. JiaJia received her BA in History of Art from Bryn Mawr College, and has lecturedwidely on social media and digital marketing at museum conferences and universitiesworldwide, including Museums & the Web, College Art Association, Sotheby’s Art Institute.

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17 June 2015

10.30 Culture and imagination in a digital age - it’s ours to lose and it’s ours to lead.Sarah Ellis Head of Digital Development, Royal Shakespeare Company

@scarahnellis Creativity has worked hand in hand with technological innovation for centuries. The rituals in culture have been set and then re-defined and re-interpreted. Through that process artists, makers and inventors have used new tools in extraordinary ways.

Ford when he designed his version of the car is alleged to have said “If I asked people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse”. It can be said that culture gets us to think about the things we couldn’t imagine otherwise - an empathetic glance at the other or something deemed impossible in the everyday. Technological innovation moves us forward and paves the way for the future and its solutions. Culture and technology are a neat fit.

As we have over the past few years discussed the merits of digital tools enabling us to reach new audiences. It’s time for us to look at other possibilities. As the YouTube generation has established itself as the purveyor of the internet’s taste. What is liveness? What is connectedness is a connected world? How is culture a diverse and relevant stakeholder in the debate? Sarah Ellis is an award winning producer currently working as Head of Digital Development for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2013 she was listed in the top 100 most influential people working in Gaming and Technology by The Hospital Club.

11.15 Open Everything Rob Gethen Smith Chief Information Officer, Southbank Centre

@robgethers The digital team at Southbank Centre are investigating how to build an ‘Open’ website. The journey started last September with a 10-week stint in a glass box where the team met 100’s of people who visit Southbank Centre. Following this unique experience, the team grew in confidence and decided to open everything up to the public – this included their website vision, processes, thinking, designs, and even the development backlog. They have now created the first version of an open CMS platform that any cultural events organisation could pick up, configure, change and use. In this presentation Rob will explain why the Southbank Centre opened up everything. He will talk about the Glass Box experience and what the team learnt. He will also present the Open Event CMS and how he thinks this approach could fundamentally change how the cultural sector develops future digital platforms.

Rob Gethen Smith is the Chief Information Officer at Southbank Centre where he is responsible for Digital and Technology strategy. He joined Southbank Centre in November 2012. Before this, Rob led business and technology transformation programmes at Tate, Macmillan Cancer Support and WWF-UK.

An aeronautical engineer by background both in the British Army and also the Private sector, Rob takes a keen interest in how technology can enable organisations with a strong social purpose improve how they work and extend their reach, often when resources are limited.

An MBA from London Business School underpins his technical approach with sound understanding of business strategy and commerce.

12.00

Lunch A light buffet lunch will be provided for delegates

1.00

Me and My InstagramAlice Rawsthorn Design Critic and Author of “Hello World: Where Design Meets Life”

@alicerawsthorn When Alice Rawsthorn started to post on Instagram on 1 January 2015, she decided to treat it as a project by choosing a weekly theme on a different aspect of design, and posting once a day about a relevant project. The objective of her posts is the same as for all of her writing, whether in a column for the New York Times, or a book like “Hello World: Where Design Meets Life”, to defuse the misconception of design as a superficial styling device by demonstrating its power to make an increasingly dynamic and eclectic contribution to our lives.

A recent week of posts on Design and Disaster included a humanitarian design coup in R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and a flop in the ill-judged PlayPumps irrigation program, the world’s first smart phone made from conflict-free minerals and a wind-powered landmine detonator. While a celebratory St. Andrew’s Day week on Scottish design ranged from the Dundee illustrators who drew Dennis the Menace and Gnasher, to the design patronage of the choreographer Michael Clark, William Playfair’s pioneering 19th century information graphics and the world’s most advanced prosthetic hand.

Alice will discuss the impact of her Instagram feed at the CultureGeek conference, and her plans for its future.

Alice Rawsthorn writes about design in the International New York Times, which syndicates her columns worldwide. She is also a columnist for Frieze magazine, and the author of the critically acclaimed book “Hello World: Where Design Meets Life”, which explores design’s influence on our lives: past, present and future.

Alice is a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery and the contemporary dance group Michael Clark Company, as well as chair of trustees at the Chisenhale Gallery in London. She was awarded an OBE in 2014 for services to design and the arts.

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17 June 2015

1.45

Digital Revolution – Exploring Digital CreativityConrad Bodman Head of International Relationships, British Film Institute

@conradbodman Conrad Bodman has been a curator for most of his career, his gallery exhibitions exploring film, television and digital culture. He has had a lifelong interest in videogames and curated Game On at the Barbican in 2002, the first exhibition of its kind in a cultural venue and most recently Game Masters at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne which has just completed a successful run at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

In 2014 he developed ‘Digital Revolution’ at the Barbican Centre which was the first exhibition to highlight the growth of digital arts practice since the 1950s. The exhibition included a range of large-scale digital installations including Chris Milk’s iconic ‘Treachery of Sanctuary’ and a series of innovative digital art commissions.

Now working at the British Film Institute Conrad has developed a cultural strand which explores creativity in the areas of videogames, VFX and digital animation. Recent events have included explorations of VR and Mocap technologies. Conrad will also discuss BFI Player the BFI’s VOD player and how it is being used to showcase both contemporary film and archive film from the BFI’s collections.

2.30

Tea and Coffee Break

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3.00

The British Library Ventures Off the MapStella Wisdom Digital Curator, The British Library @miss_wisdom

The Off The Map competition is a collaboration between the British Library and GameCity, a videogame cultural hub and festival run in partnership with Nottingham Trent University. It challenges higher education students based in the UK to create videogames inspired by the British Library’s collections. The 2014 Off The Map competition accompanied the British Library’s exhibition “Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination”. Curators selected maps, sounds, text and illustrations to provide three Gothic themes for entrants to base their videogames on. These were author William Beckford’s home Fonthill Abbey, Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death and the seaside town of Whitby, which features in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The 2014 winning entry Nix, created by three students from the University of South Wales, invites gamers to reconstruct Fonthill Abbey via a series of puzzles in a spooky underwater world. It uses Oculus Rift, a revolutionary virtual reality headset for 3D gaming, to enable the user to virtually explore the Abbey. You can see a flythrough of their game at http://youtu.be/8ESieZO4VHw. For 2015, students are currently working on their entries for “Alice’s Adventures Off the Map”, as the competition accompanies the Library’s forthcoming exhibition, opening in November, which celebrates Alice in Wonderland’s 150th birthday.

Stella Wisdom is a Digital Curator at the British Library, where her role explores and promotes new methods of research using both born digital content and digitised collections. In 2013 Stella co-founded with GameCity a competition for Higher Education videogame design students called Off the Map, where students are challenged to create videogames inspired by British Library collections. Stella has worked for the British Library for nine years and prior to working in Digital Research, she managed Collection Storage at the British Library’s site at Boston Spa in Yorkshire. Stella has also previously worked at the Library and Information Statistics Unit based at Loughborough University, the Warburg Institute Library and the National Library of Scotland.

17 June 2015

17 June 2015

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3.45

Universal: Digital Transformation at The British MuseumChris Michaels Head of Digital and Publishing The British Museum

@chr1sm1chaels Chris Michaels is Head of Digital and Publishing at the British Museum. His mission is to help the world’s first museum achieve its founding goal of being the Museum of and for the world, by fully embracing the potential of mobile, the cloud and big data to transform our visitors’ experiences of our programmes and collection.

Chris was previously CEO at children’s education mobile startup Mindshapes. Backed by Index Ventures and some of the world’s greatest gaming entrepreneurs, Mindshapes released over 40 apps with partners including the BBC and the Jim Henson Company, winning multiple awards and delighting children and families around the world.

Chris has previously been an SVP at international media company Chorion; Digital Publisher at HarperCollins; and started professional life in advertising. He has a PhD in American Literature from the University of Bristol.

4.30

Conference Closes

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