As part of the IBBT-SMIT Lecture Series, on Wednesday 29 February 2012 in Brussels, research group Digital Arts and Cultures organises In Transition? The role of the curator and the arts in a digital culture. Invited speakers Beryl Graham, Frank Maet and Michelle Kasprzak situate, consider and debate this topic from an academic, philosophical and curatorial perspective. Continue reading
With the Youth ‘n Classic competition, KlaraFestival and SonicAngel want to stimulate talented musicians between 16 and 26 years old inspired by classical music in their development and offer them a steppingstone to a successful career. The musicians could register in three categories: interpretation of existing work, own compositions and cross-genre works or classical-music inspired compositions. Now, the new talents themselves can promote themselves on the competition page http://klarafestival.sonicangel.com: starting with creating their online profile, uploading videos and audio fragments. Here, they can create a social buzz so that their fans can vote for them on Facebook, Twitter, by e-mail etc. Continue reading
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What a blog can do for a theatre festival and what it cannot do: four years of Theatertreffen-Blog (applications now open, see below)
Do you know these children’s books where you match different heads of animals to different bodies and feet of animals? Thus, you create pelican-cat-cows or dog-zebra-seagulls. For me, this is what blogs can do for you also. Ideally, they put thoughts, people, medias together and create something distinct – a distinct voice, a distinct place for information, entertainment and networking amongst the other pelican-cat-cows that have some interest in your event. When someone, be it an individual or an institution, starts blogging, they need to find out about this idiosyncrasy: What makes my event special and who is part of it? If this does not become clear, their blog will not be read or noticed. Be aware, death in the internet comes along quickly. The German weekly Die Zeit once collected dead web pages in a digital cemetery on their website, and even this cemetery is dead now…
Social Media Bandwagon
When cultural institutions started to make their way in this ‘viral’ world two or three years ago, there still weren’t any proper names. We fell upon the so-called web 2.0 and despised traditional websites as web 1.0 while web 3.0 appeared on the horizon (where it has evidently since disappeared). We ran to lectures and looked at examples of best practice – and the speakers were always just half a step ahead of the participants. Everyone began “with something somehow” and in retrospect this way of working turned out to be exactly right.
EFA, the festival network
In 2011, the European Festivals Association (EFA) set up the Working Group “Communicating Festivals – Communicating Europe”. The participants are communication, marketing, PR and new media experts working for or with some of the most renowned festivals from all over Europe. Together with EFA, participants quickly agreed on the first focus topic: the use and application of digital and social media in festivals. The interest in a dynamic and continuous exchange also in the virtual world resulted in the launch of a dedicated blog “Festival Bytes”.
