March 2012

All posts tagged arts

Posted:
March 16, 2012
Tags:
Written by
Katy Beale

March 2012

We worked with Fuel Theatre for their Phenomenal People project, as part of the Southbank Centre’s Women of the World Festival. Designed and built by Caper, the Tumblr site shares the incredible stories and achievements from political activists to religious figures, astronauts to opera singers, war reporters to nurses.

The Happenstance residencies have been announced. These are:

James Bridle and Natalia Buckley at Lighthouse
Kevin Walker and Linda Sandvik at Spike Island in Bristol
Leila Johnston and James Jefferies at Site Gallery in Sheffield

Funded by the NESTA, Arts Council England and the AHRC Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture, Happenstance is a pilot programme created by Caper which puts creative technologists in deep immersion residencies in arts organisations. Residents will be onsite in the three organisations from mid-April for two five-week â˜sprintsâ™, experimenting, prototyping and making projects, and each pair will present their work at the end of each period in informal Open House events.

From our friends…

Produced by Sync, Culture Hack Scotland 2012 is on April 27-28th in Glasgow. There’s a few tickets still available for both digital designers / developers and also arts and cultural organisations, plus some travel bursaries (for those within Scotland) are still up for grabs.

The Hack Track is a 24 hour hack event is for developers and designers to come and work with the data to make innovative new culture-related projects. The newly formed Culture Track is for cultural professionals and includes a Learn How To Code workshop, talks and performances.

And finally, here’s a few things that have caught our eye:

With over 46 million Tumblr blogs globally – which one do you choose to follow? Try 10 art Tumblrs to follow, as recommended by Flavorwire.

Watch Melvyn Bragg exploring culture as a social change maker in his short series for the BBC.

Y Combinator opening up their application process to people with ‘no idea’, challenging the need for a start-up to be focused around singular product – more that smart ideas can be generated by groups of clever people who are really good at what they do.

A pocket sized drawing CNC machine called Piccolo (via Prote.in):

 

Posted:
January 16, 2012
Tags:
Written by
Rachel Coldicutt

January 2012

January is Month 8 for Caper.

The period before Christmas was filled with Culture Hack development, including the launch of Culture Hack East, Culture Hack North in Leeds and a Culture Hack taster at the Museum Computer Network conference in Atlanta. We’re now devising the next stage of Culture Hack, which will be back with a new format in 2012.

We’re very pleased to have launched Happenstance, our ACE/NESTA/AHRC funded R&D project, which puts technology at the heart of arts organisations. We’re looking for six bright, creative technologists and producers to fill spaces in three of the UK’s most vibrant arts organisations: Lighthouse, Site Gallery and Spike Island. It’s an amazing opportunity, and we’re thrilled to be working with the Centre for Cultural Policy at the University of Warwick, who will be mapping the impact of the residencies. Applications are open until 30 January, so spread the word.

Katy is developing a digital communications strategy for an inner-London NHS foundation trust, including a key piece of research around reputation management; and managing content distribution of a UK premiere for a major radio broadcaster.

Rachel is acting as an external acting as an external advisor for the BBC/Arts Council England initiative The Space, along with Matt Locke (Storythings), Anthony Lilley (Magic Lantern) and Paul Gerhardt (Archives for Creativity); developing a map-based open-data prototype for Brighton Museum and Art Gallery; and helping our friends at Coney develop a digital strategy.

We have a number of other projects in process:

Forthcoming Women in a Room events, including plotting something that just might change the world of conferences with She Says, Web Heroines and Girls’ Club.

Programming the next round of Makers’ Guild events at the V&A (to be announced soon), with Natasha Carolan and Fiddian Warman.

Developing the next phase of Coding for Kids with Rewired State.

Advising other UK digital programmes, such as Culture Code (delivered by CodeWorks in the North East of England), and developing the international development of our own projects.

We have also, finally, created and launched our website. Finding the time, and the words, to describe what we do has been a challenge, especially as we’ve growing and developing every month since we started Caper at the end of May 2011 – for which thanks to Dean Vipond, who created the Caper logo and brand identity, for design inspiration, and to Rebekah Ford, Emily Webber and Alex Sexton for technical expertise.