The New Normal: Digital Placeshaping
“Entering this week when cultural institutions (from fine art to popular entertainment) are shut and empty of people and where we cannot rely upon shared creative expression to join us together and close our physical and social, we must address the notion of Digital PlaceShaping.
For 13 years, Futurecity has helped partners raise the ambition of how to design and enliven public spaces. While we have been embracing the role of digital as a key principle or as a collaborator of cities or as innovative forms of wayfinding, it is time to focus upon our digital commons and delve into cultural engagement crafted solely for the digital platform. During this opportunity of great disruption, we will share our thinking, the research and experiments of our international associates, and highlight efforts of strategic and artist-led initiatives cropping up.
The past days, many people have scrambled to move or be moved into a digital place. We find it is not a copy. Or replacement. It is a new world – one where we can choose our POV for video conference. We choose to curate our environments or blur them. Our domestic lives collide with work or social ‘outings’ across our kitchens, alternate spaces or bedrooms. The experience of presenting on a digital platform reinvents how we socially engage and how we share intimacy publicly. We explore new non-verbal signals, read the digital ‘room,’ and focus in complex screen and home environments. Like a pre-Raphaelite painting or 4K film, our depth perception is intensely flattened and pressed forward.
Institutions and commercial galleries are putting forth their works so that you retain your memory of place by visiting virtually. Using the digital channels as a presenting venue or distribution platform. BBC’s virtual arts festival, Culture in Quarantine, is being coordinated in close consultation and collaboration with the Arts Council England and many others. People can curate their own exhibition through digital access to 216,000 works of British Art; browse through the world-class museum and galleries collections via Google Arts & Culture; walk through Art Basel Hong Kong’s virtual viewing rooms.
The first efforts put forward either existing digital content to be made available to the general public for free. The second effort was to curate existing content. Many may not know that there are collections that have been digitised or that one can experience the livestream of major companies, such as National Theatre and Royal Opera House, without the cinema charge.
Creatives jumped to the fore, immediately producing and sharing content on any presenting venue on a digital commons. Global stars like Chris Martin, John Legend, Oprah Winfrey immediately took to Instagram and other platforms. Homemade music videos at celebrities’ homes began happening, with no obvious interference from ‘the industry.’ Rebecca Solnit is doing nightly readings of a new work on Facebook. Billy Bragg produced a song for Mother’s Day and shared it early on Sunday morning for others to send to their mothers. By using a smartphone, one can augment their ‘working from home’ reality with artwork by contemporary artist KAWS via Acute Art app.
The Social Distancing Festival is developed by artists in North America but designed for global participation and time zones. While it began to populate a viewing programme, on Saturday the Festival announced a featured call to give attention to works that have been postponed or cancelled, thus finding the new ‘venue.’
These are instant known channels to connect. And they have become places where we have gathered previously, yet perhaps not to the reach or with such immediacy and earnestness as now. These forms reference the digital translation for the live experience with the work. The variation in scale and clarity of the experience requires we suspend our normal detailed critique and accept the altered experience as a substitute. Ultimately it still leaves us wanting the original experience.
Perhaps what is most interesting are those creatives who think about overcoming geographical obstacles and invent a new digital space. Artists have been investigating the web as a platform but the audience has remained specialised. One small and delightful discovery is Tete A Tete opera’s ‘Corona Chorus’, developed in the UK. An art form often dismissed as elitist, is creating some of the most experimental and contemporary approaches of reinvention.
Now is a good reckoning and experimental time. We can widely distribute our exhibition and archival; we can try new models of presenting, and we can assess how to progressively enter our digital places and shape them for the future. While we will enter an obligatory hiatus of the expected sense of place, we have the opportunity to put aside the past assumptions and set forward a new normal.”
– Sherry Dobbin, Partner (Managing & Cultural Director)
Read our Futurecity Top Picks for digital art presentation here.