creative

The digital issue we don’t discuss and its implications for the creative economy Computers’ ability to effectively simulate a huge variety of functions has allowed them to replace hi-fis, cameras, maps, DVD players, calculators, typewriters, cash registers, musical instruments, watches, TVs, newspapers, books, shopfronts, money and more. Although the changes caused by the general-purpose power of computation are widely observed, it is arguably less discussed than the role of data and/or the costless copying of information....

JW Turner’s ‘The Lake of Zug, 1843. In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Zug area of Switzerland is known for its concentration of blockchain activity. What is blockchain? In digital money there is a fundamental problem, how do you know that someone has the right to spend the money they are offering as payment, particularly if (as often happens in financial transactions) you don’t know them. One way to solve this is what happens in the banking system - you have a centralised authority that tracks transactions and verifies a person has the money that they claim, before allowing payment....

Streets surround us, but, at first glance, there is no systematic data on what they look like. There are records of property transactions, land use and buildings protected due to architectural or historic significance (listed buildings and conservation areas), although none of these directly capture areas’ appearance. Buildings appearance is though part of planning decisions about the built environment. There is also greater recognition of the importance of areas having a sense of place, but it is not always clear what this means and how to measure it....

An algorithmic Deep Dream at the school of Athens, John Davies From algorithmic creations to transforming galleries Art is free. It doesn’t need to represent anything. It doesn’t need to be beautiful. It doesn’t need to be an object. It doesn’t need to be new. Despite these liberations, it is notable how comparatively little artists' tools have changed. Particularly when compared to the digital revolution’s effect on many other creative domains, with entire supply chains collapsing to a laptop, some servers and an internet connection....

The Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House, the London Garden Bridge. The recent demise of the proposed Garden Bridge across the Thames raises the question of when public support for radical buildings should occur. Unique buildings, by their nature, are hard to evaluate based on experience and their construction can turn out to be unexpectedly expensive. However, they have also resulted in some of the world’s most popular and distinctive buildings – central to many cities’ identity and tourism....

People who have contributed (red circles) to the Processing graphics software (the central circle) on GitHub, and the other software repositories (dark blue circles Why are we seeing more digital social networks in creative domains? The rise of specialised social networks Social network sites get more attractive to join as more people use them, resulting in a tendency for single platforms to grow to monopolise specific areas. This makes it harder for new-entrants to compete directly with incumbents, encouraging the development of social networks in other areas....

Styles, trends and brands Fashion has tensions. It’s about standing out. It’s about being noticed. It’s also about belonging and clothes as a signal of status, desirability and taste. There are many ways to stand out - not all of them are good. Although there are objective measures of quality, such as the technical skill and materials garments are constructed with, styles have a degree of subjectivity. At any one time specific looks may be in, and the reasons for this are not particularly clear....

Neo - Starcadia by Gil Sherman and Lenka Della-Porta. Photograph John Davies. The UK is widely believed to have a business department, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). However, something which has gone largely unnoticed is that slowly, but steadily, a new business department is emerging and one with a remit that threatens to overshadow the current incumbent. Once mocked as the Ministry of Fun, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has been acquiring portfolio after portfolio....

Street Art in Shoreditch, photograph John Davies It begins: an area near the city centre is less developed, artists and independent businesses move in, culture and creativity thrive increasing the area’s visibility and desirability. At which point a less fashionable (but richer) crowd arrives, rents and prices rise and the artists/independents, and original inhabitants, get forced out. Many of us intuitively feel there’s something troubling about this, and it has been a focus of much debate in London in particular, but our reasons for caring about it are often not entirely clear - which isn’t to say we shouldn’t care....

Art is, of course, about emotions, society, things it’s impolite to talk to strangers about (sex, politics and religion), etc. Ostensible meanings aside, very sophisticated interpretations are possible and there is the massive literature of criticism devoted to this. Art’s shapeshifting, eternally changing, nature (installation art, post-modernism, post-internet, who knows what next) is a challenging moving target - even for humans. Nevertheless, there are reasons to think that computers will be increasingly influential in assessing it....