FutureEverything is investigating the potential of something we are calling the Digital Public Space, with our partners, BBC, Creative Exchange and Lancaster University.
The Digital Public Space (DPS) will enable digital content to be made as freely available as possible for anyone from anywhere, doing for the whole range of digitised cultural content what the Open Data campaign is doing for publicly-funded datasets. Within the Digital Public Space every digital asset that can be shared will be shared, and as we digitise more of the analogue past this will stretch to encompass the whole of recorded culture.
The Digital Public Space has emerged as a framework for thinking about the ways in which the arts and culture will reshape themselves in the screen-based, online world that FutureEverything has foretold and shaped for many years.
The digital media we produce is ‘out there’ waiting to be accessed and assembled in new ways. It creates threads connecting us through time. Our audience, or our collaborators, may be people looking back at us and our creations in twenty years time.
The Digital Public Space will make new forms of collaborative work possible in ways that are not even imagined as yet. It offers not just new means of making the things we already make, but of developing new forms of culture, based around shared catalogues/metadata and simple licensing of material.
The Digital Public Space makes possible new paradigms for cultural engagement for creators, audiences and institutions built around shared data models, open interfaces and standards for authentication, rights management and identity.
The festival programme at FutureEverything 2013 will make the Digital Public Space theme come alive. We will be inviting artists and innovators to come forward with artworks, prototypes and experiences that provoke and inspire. The goal is to push at the possible, to chip away at the barriers, to show that it can, and must, be done.
The Digital Public Space will build on existing web technologies to provide a mechanism through which publicly-held cultural media and related materials will be managed, accessed, augmented and shared by institutions, organisations and the public. There have been several pilot projects, most notably The Space, the Arts Council England/BBC experimental service to deliver digital art to multiple devices during summer 2012.
The FutureEverything 2013 festival and conference theme is Digital Public Space. FutureEverything 2013 will look at the Digital Public Space from all angles, to challenge and refine the core ideas, explore the current and future technologies that could sustain it, and ask about its real value to artists, institutions and the public whom it is supposed to serve. We will consider whether it can release public value or simply offers another way for larger institutions and corporations that hold rights to assert their hegemony, and lock the public out, and explore the technological barriers that stand in the way of delivering a genuinely public online service.
One goal of the organisations actively working to create the Digital Public Space is to bring together the activity around a major cultural programme in 2014 which will connect exhibitions and collections across the whole of the UK, and FutureEverything 2013 will look at plans for 2014 and ask if it is possible for connected archives and contemporary reflection to be brought together in a meaningful way.