Monetising Content was the theme of Scotland’s national conference for the digital and interactive industries, Digital 2012. Organised by Interactive Scotland and AmbITion Scotland, Hannah Rudman gives an overview of why the conference is addressing the theme, and introduces the main subject and discussion areas of collaboration, convergence, content experience, and collection of data.
(A collection of content from Digital 2012 of interest to the arts, cultural, creative, and heritage industries is available on AmbITion’s new website).

Two of Rudman Consulting’s AmbITion Scotland programme organisations launch ambITious digital experiments this month – Stellar Quines and Woodend Barn.

Can 3D film offer an artistic and commercially viable alternative to the live theatre experience?
This is the question Stellar Quines has been grappling with in conjunction with the Federation of Scottish Theatre‘s (FST) Action Research Group, facilitated by Rudman Consulting, set up to experiment with the digitization of live theatrical content. Stellar Quines’ contribution to the FST project has been to create a 3D recording of a live theatre performance – a first for Scottish theatre and film!

To achieve this Stellar Quines commissioned Freakworks to film a live performance of ANA in 3D at the Traverse Theatre. We are now hosting a presentation and initial screening of the recorded show and would like to invite you to come along, see what we’ve done and give us your feedback.

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Artistic content and practice is going online en masse in May.

The Space has announced the 53 digital commissions that will go online between May and October this year. #thespacearts is a pop up platform that will provide interactive, engaging arts content online, on connected TV and on tablets and mobile to coincide with the Olympics and Cultural Olympiad. The Space is a £3.5m joint project between Arts Council England and BBC, and you can find out a little about all the commissions, which I’ll be really excited to see!

Its interesting that the competition, like NESTA’s £0.5m Digital R&D fund competition in England, was massively oversubscribed. 750 Expressions of Interest were submitted to ACE (490+ were submitted to NESTA), and in total, 61 ACE and NESTA projects in England have been given a chance to develop with £4m shared between them – 1179 have not.
So this is digital content by the chosen few, creating a fabulous showcase for England that will be available globally. But its not content by anyone/any cultural organisation in England for everyone. The sheer numbers of ideas presented to both these competitions proves to me that there is great hunger for digital development opportunities across the broad cultural sector, and that the cultural sector understands the opportunities for increasing reach, scale, impact and legacy that digitising content encourages. 

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Hannah Rudman will be launching Scotland’s national conference for the creative and digital industries, Digital 2012, at a networking party on 29th March and running workshops at the conference on 30th March 2012, all at SECC venue. Follow@digiconx #digi2012 for more information.

Rudman Consulting client and AmbITion Scotland participant Stellar Quines theatre company is venturing into the world of live streaming. They are live streaming on Thursday 26 January from the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. The List by Jennifer Tremblay will be rehearsed during the day by directors Muriel Romanes and Emma Faulkner and actress Maureen Beattie, then given a rehearsed reading in the evening followed by a discussion in Traverse Two. Stellar Quines continue to uphold their aspirations of making the most of digital opportunities for increasing the reach and scale of their work – watch this case study of their experiments so far.

The sections being live streamed are two hours of the rehearsal in the afternoon, 2pm – 4pm, and the evening performance and discussion which will start at 7.30pm and end by 9pm. There will be an attached moderated chat room, linked twitter etc., and you can view it all through the website for Stellar Quines’ next show ANA. Do join them online or in person!

HiBROW.tv has launched, with over 9 hours of High Definition (HD) arts content, filmed by documentary and film maker Don Boyd, curated by culture sector professionals. The website aims to become a social network (using the power of ning) for people who love a quality, high-brow cultural experience – for a certain clientele, the “high art” demographic, a brilliant website that aims to programme 7 hours of fresh content per month from all over the world.

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Here’s my annual roundup of the most impactful digital developments we’ve seen in the arts over 2011. Its been a fascinating year: some of these digital developments increase reach, scale, impact, and access to work creating massive opportunity; some create new economic models for better sustainability; some challenge our traditional notions of participation with an artistic experience or piece of work. Conventions and practices which are socially embedded rituals are being impacted, our perceptions of proximity and intimacy are being altered, and our organisations are in need of capacity, capability, and confidence in order to be able to reflect, respond and create.

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Innovation funding needs to meet the specific needs of cultural organisations and that isn’t always about creating something radical and new. This article for Arts Professional stems from my thinking over the summer, crystallised here and in a talk I presented at Creative Entreprenuership, a European conference on the future of the Creative Industries held in Tallinn, October 2011.

In a country with a deficit as bad as it was in 1945 after Britain had endured six years of world war, it is not surprising that innovation is seen as an essential component of helping Britain regain economic stability and achieve growth. Government and its arms-length agencies are investing heavily in innovation, hoping to unleash radical, transformatory creations. The nation’s universities are incentivised to innovate jointly with private and publicly funded businesses. NESTA’s research and development programmes further catalyse the notion of knowledge exchange for innovation. Innovation Lab and Culture Hack activities are increasing, opening up possibilities and encouraging cross-sector collaboration. Discovering the new, radical and transformatory is the focus of funding which is underwriting the risk of the research and development. Developing collaborative relationships that enable nascent products to become economically viable is another purpose of current innovation investment. The innovation-specific investments available for the creative and cultural sector are explicitly for stimulating radical innovations (defined as bleeding-edge nascent products and processes that the world needs – or does not know it yet needs).

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Rudman Consulting is delighted to announce that that Creative Scotland has launched its Cultural Economy Programme. This funding area includes investment in digital development for the cultural sector over the period 2012-2014 to be delivered by AmbITion Scotland, designed and delivered by Rudman Consulting, together with Culture Sparks. These resources will sustain delivery for another comprehensive series of events sharing digital skills, knowledge and resources throughout the sector. The AmbITion Scotland team will be working directly with new partners, NESTA and Culture Hack Scotland building on our considerable experience from the last two years. The Creative Scotland guidelines for the Digital Development strand state:

“We have developed partnerships with NESTA, and Culture Hack Scotland, and will launch an integrated, comprehensive programme of support for digital development early in 2012. This will address the spectrum of needs of organisations at varying stages of development in terms of digital capacity, knowledge, and skills. The programme will:

· Support capacity building around skills, infrastructure, and knowledge in adopting digital technologies

· Address and reflect the further digital technology development needs of organisations with the capacity and interest to innovate and significantly enhance organisational sustainability through further integration of sophisticated digital technology

· Support the further organisational sustainability of those exploring progressive business models, or at a more advanced stage of developing creative content*

*note: support for the development of creative content is available through other Creative Scotland Investment Programmes including the Innovation Fund which will open again in April 2012 (this also sits within the Cultural Economy Programme and aims to ‘invest in distinctive and engaging digital interactive media content’).
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Watch out for more news in the new year!

Following its initiation at Culture Hack Scotland, this case study video maps the development of a hack into a fully operational mobile site launched by Edinburgh International Book Festival this summer.

“Five Minute Theatre in an Hour!”, is an AmbITion Scotland webinar, that explored the digitisation of live theatre content. Five Minute Theatre was an extraordinary piece of virtual and live theatre – work that my other company Envirodigital created working as producers together with National Theatre Scotland. Watch the case study as told by project creator Marianne Maxwell, National Theatre Scotland; media partner Robert Dawson Scott, STV and The Times theatre critic; and technical consultant/producer Hannah Rudman, Envirodigital, to find more out about this extraordinary virtual and live production.

In total during Five Minute Theatre, a twitter trend was created (#fiveminutetheatre was the top trend in Glasgow on the day) and there were over 6000 hours of theatre viewed online. To put that into context: NTS’s July touring production, Knives in Hens is 1.5 hour viewer hours. 6000 viewer hours online is therefore equivalent to 4000 people watching  a one and a half hr production (that’s equivalent to  around a sold-out 2 1/2 week run at a venue like The Traverse – a midscale scale venue).