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.
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Case Study in Innovation: Edinburgh International Book Festival
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Roadshow South: Faith Liddell & Martin Reynolds, Festivals Edinburgh, 10th June 2010
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UK arts organisations launch iPhone apps
The Brooklyn Museum did it (see my earlier blog), and now London Philharmonic Orchestra has launched an iPhone app. With over 1.5bn downloads of applications from Apple iTunes store, and the smart mobile fast becoming the ubiquitous device, launching an iPhone is a great strategy, particularly if you can work out what a premium pricing model might be (see my earlier blog on freemium here). The app is currently free, and facilitates the purchase of tickets, shares news and events and music releases, and lets users listen to music. It’s quick to download this application from the itunes app store directly to your device. From your iPhone or iPod touch, visit the App store and search for ‘London Philharmonic’.
Similarly, Edinburgh Festivals have released “Edinburgh Festivals Guide” – the only official iPhone application for the largest arts event in the world. The Guide comes complete with full listings for all 7 August festivals, and uses GPS to locate the nearest shows and venues, showing results on a map with simple directions straight to the venue door from exactly where you are. It sort results by location, start time or popularity rating. Additionally, users can read reviews of shows and write their own; call box office direct from the listings to book tickets; view photos of events and venues (and upload their own in the next version); and find out which tickets are on sale at The Fringe Half Price Hut. The iPhone app costs £1.79 – more than the 7 festivals’ free brochures, but less weighty and impactful on the environment. The iPhone app development is a successful innovation initiated by Festivals Edinburgh and the Fringe, delivered in partnership with HedOut. The risk and the reward have been shared by the partnership.
iFringe Free is the final iPhone app launched: this app presents the reviews of fringe shows from “independent critics” – not the people on the street nor the official reviews from the Scotsman or Guardian, but from the reviewers of the independent magazines and websites of the Fringe. The titling and the page for the app suggests a “full” version around the corner: expect further functionality and expect to pay for iFringeFull!Leave a Reply
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Convergence and participation: dead big collaboration opportunities
Can I get raspberry sauce with that?
Big collaborations are the new art world blockbuster pattern talked about by the Guardian yesterday: egos coming together to offer audiences star vehicles that cross art form boundaries. Collaboration is a key 21st century skill, as the article proves.
But for me, the subtext of the article was more interesting: the convergence of art forms, and the impact that technologies have had on this. Concluding that the use of digital video, screens, music in many performances across many art forms has created a kind of cross-over or fusion, Guardian journalist Laura Barnett reports:
But the distinctions between genres have never felt quite so blurred as they do now. In theatre director Katie Mitchell’s words, the world is no longer “neat and organised and tidy”; it is fractured, multicultural, multimedia – and artists want to capture this. They know their audiences move easily between “high” and “low” culture, and that their attention shifts with the click of a mouse.
This is a great challenge to arts organisations still stuck within a strict genre definition, and still trying to define and communicate with their audience as “theatre lovers”, or “opera lovers”. As Mitchell suggests, audiences online will be eclectic, be used to choice, and know what they like, however its defined. They will not be particularly bothered about whether their culture is high or low, or even if it is defined as “theatre” or “opera”. This confirms my anxiety that those projects set-up to filter cultural event listings, and that do so by trying to digitally organise event listings by genre, may not be going down the right path.
It also confirms that the web presence (its smashed up content – the content that is everywhere else on the web but the official website) for an organisation is far more important than a destination website: audiences are just as likely to find out about a cultural event online via another interest they have – so its important that they can see the cultural event in that sphere of their interest.
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