This case study presented for AmbITion Scotland by Hannah Rudman summarises the development of the Edinburgh Summer Festivals’ API, and its impact on app developers, festival audiences and the festivals themselves. A project of Festivals Edinburgh’s Festivalslab, it was one of the first large scale open data initiatives in the arts, cultural, and heritage sectors and heralded a new wave of sector organisations reassessing the more intangible value of their data and opening it up to each other and different sectors, such as digital and interactive, for new uses.

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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Asimetrica organised Spain’s first ever national arts marketing conference in Madrid, and I spoke there on the subject of how digital developments can bring huge opportunities for organisational and business model development; increase reach, scale, impact and legacy for audiences; and create new artistic experiences and product: thanks so much to the organisers, the audience, and the fantastic simultaneous translators who have created my first ever talk (with jokes) in Spanish…

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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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).

Last Thursday I watched an NTLive! almost-live simulcast at my local Cameo Cinema, of Frankenstein, London’s hottest sold out ticket, directed by Danny Boyle (to see it in London, I’d have to queue for a day ticket -from 1am, when the queue starts forming!).

The production was mesmerising, engaging, gripping and yes, it was live theatre on stage, with its sweat, spits, and occasional trips and stammers, recorded for digital distribution. Except, this time, it wasn’t quite live.

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Google’s ultra-high resolution Street View cameras have been sneaking around galleries in nine countries – out of hours – to capture the world’s finest art collections as 360 degree digital tours. The Art Project was launched at Tate Britain yesterday, and includes 385 rooms, and 1061 different pieces.

Each gallery has also chosen one piece to be digitised in ultra-high resolution (7bn pixels), which allows you see a masterpiece in greater detail than the human eye and most microscopes can manage. This encourages people to study art works in depth, for better understanding technique, subject, materials/construction and realisation, and is a move away from the noughties obsession in the visual arts sector as of digitisation as a mechanism for futureproofing archiving.

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With UK Arts Minister Ed Vaizey delivering a speech (no I didn’t write it, although many have asked me if I had!) about how cultural organisations must develop digitally and work more with digital industries in order to be sustainable, its a great indicator that engaging with AmbITion’s opportunities is timely and appropriate organisational development.