Apple Tablet
With the new year coming along I can only see one thing that is going to change everything. That’s the Apple Slate. Suddenly you can sit on your sofa, floating around the web watching video reading text in ways which feel less like sitting at a computer and more like reading a magazine. Done right the technology has the ability to enable creativity to become even more accessible. Better keep an eye on this thing.
Came across this article by Michael Arrington. He’s painting a picture of an ever more complicated world of digital media built on tons and tons of crap. The challenge is to find visibility through that morass. Talent will always out but we really need new tools to sift out the dumbification of media. This thing ain’t getting any easier.
Artists and arts organisations need to be rethinking their plans for their business if they have a significant reliance on public sector funding. Individuals in particular need to be concerned as I have heard a stat that public sector funding for artists will decline by 44% in 2010/11. Arts Quarter are carrying a survey on this here which should keep you posted. ACE is under huge pressure with the third year of their settlement not finalised, all local authorities are facing massive budgetary problems and trusts and charities are being hit by low interest rates. There’s not a lot of good news and the recession will impact later as public budgets are set. That is why ACE has set up Sustain, but this is of use only to organisations. Now more than ever artists need to be innovative, commercial and take a portmanteau approach to building their careers and businesses.
Keith Jeffrey
Director, QUAD
Very interesting article here at TechCrunch showing that there are ways for old media to change. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/30/what-if-the-new-new-york-times/
Keith Jeffrey
Part of our job at QUAD is to bring the best of world cinema to Derby. Normally audiences are smaller than for mainstream blockbusters for obvious reasons. But mainstream audiences are missing a trick. If seat of the pants, visceral thrills are what cinema audiences want then they are there in world cinema. Take my two favourite films of the year and “The Good the Bad & the Weird” and “Flame & Citron” one a Korean western, the other a WWII movie of spies and hitmen and betrayal. Each had more tension excitement than probably the best block buster of the year Star Trek. So who’s missing out? Is reading sub titles that much of a deterrent to watching great films?
Keith Jeffrey
CIN Keith Jeffrey_QUAD Simon Foote Architects Martin Hyde_Design & I Dawn Foote_Katapult Murray Carmichael-Smith_BCS