11 December 2020
An online symposium examining how museums and galleries adapted during 2020, featuring discussion on what comes next.
Museums and galleries faced extraordinary challenges in 2020. Short term fixes to keep in touch with audiences, make collections accessible, and re-open exhibitions required adaptations and innovations that will shape the long-term future of public heritage in the UK. A shift to digital ways of working was accelerated, for better and for worse.
In this online symposium we will take stock of how museums and galleries adapted during 2020 and where we go from here. How will the pandemic and its aftermath affect how we create new digital content for museums and galleries? How will it re-shape the relationship that museums and galleries have with their audiences? On the one hand, there are exciting opportunities to create digital experiences, within and outside museum walls, that allow different museum communities to emerge. On the other, digital technology creates new barriers to participation, potentially deepening existing inequality of access to museums and their collections.
The Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies brings you insights from two AHRC-funded University of Nottingham museum projects that had to significantly adapt the way they worked in 2020. Speakers from these projects will be joined by a museum experts to discuss how museums created new digital cultures during the pandemic, what the future now holds for digital culture in museums, and how museums and universities can work together to overcome the challenges we face.
Speakers include:
- Andrea Hadley-Johnson (Artistic Programme Manager, National Justice Museum): ‘Letters of Constraint’
- Brendan Cormier (Lead Curator, Shekou Design Museum Project, V&A), ‘Pandemic Objects’
- James Mansell (Associate Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham), Annie Jamieson (Curator of Sound Technologies, National Science and Media Museum) and Alex De Little (Research Fellow, University of Nottingham), 'Sonic Futures: Collecting, Curating and Engaging with Sound at the National Science and Media Museum'
- Louise Stafford (Director of Learning, National Holocaust Centre and Museum) and Paul Tennent (Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Nottingham), ‘The Eye as Witness: Recording the Holocaust’
- Gillian Greaves (Relationship Manager, Museums, Arts Council)
To watch this talk, please follow this link.
14 April
Symposium ont he innovcations and adaptations that are shaping the new landscape in film production, with experts from academia and industry.
Film production has been challenged, fractured and irrevocably changed over the course of the global pandemic, with practices rapidly evolving in response to new health and safety requirements and production protocols. Now, as we slowly emerge from lockdown, we explore the innovations and adaptations that are shaping the new landscape and identify the opportunities and challenges that remain for the sector. In this seminar we identify and explore three urgent trajectories – the advances in technology and virtual production that have occurred during the pandemic; the emergence of initiatives to stimulate the ‘greening’ of film production; and the significant triumphs and reversals for the sector priority of engaging and representing a broader range of talent both in front of and behind the camera. The event will also launch the Future of Film 2021 report.
The Event is a collaboration between Professor Helen Kennedy, Institute for Screen Industry Research, University of Nottingham, Professor Sarah Atkinson, Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London and Alex Stolz, Founder and Director of Future of Film.
Speakers:
- Mariana Acuna Acosta, CPO & Co-founder of Glassbox Technologies, an organisation that is pioneering the use of gaming technology in Virtual Production, utilizing Virtual and Augmented Reality by creating a framework for visualizing performances, environments, virtual collaboration, virtual location scouting, and much more for real-time production based in Los Angeles, California.
- Sarah Atkinson, Professor of Screen Media from King’s College London, who has published extensively on the impact of digital technologies on film production and cinema spectatorship.
- Zena Harris, President and Founder, Green Spark Group, a sustainability consulting firm that serves the motion picture industry in the United States and Canada and Creative Director, Sustainable Production Forum.
- Pietari Kääpä, Associate Professor in Media Communications at University of Warwick. He is a specialist in environmental screen media, focusing especially on environmental media production, policies, practices and content (especially film and television) and PI (with Hunter Vaughan) of the AHRC Network on Global Green Media Production.
- Clive Nwonka, an LSE Fellow in Film Studies within the Department of Sociology with research expertise in black British film, international cinemas and American Independent film.
- Alex Stolz, the producer of Film Disruptors, the podcast on the future of film. He serves as a consultant and strategist to organisations and filmmakers as well as Head of Film at the film ticketing and analytics platform Usheru.
To watch this talk, please follow this link.