Emma Free, Digital Learning Assistant, talks about the Digital Utopias conference which took place at the Hull Truck Theatre recently.

With an early start and a chance to wake up on the train, I arrived at Hull with Graham Thorne, YMT’s Digital Creator; we quickly met up with Digital Team Leader, Martin Fell and made our way to the Hull Truck theatre where the Digital Utopias conference was being held.

Once there we had just enough time to grab a coffee and have a quick chat before we were herded into the main theatre hall to hear the opening key notes, where the hosts explained what they were hoping to achieve with the conference and told everyone how recently Hull had been awarded the City of Culture award for 2017 and what they were hoping to do with that.

The first session I went to was the ‘Google Culture Institute’, in which the head of the Art Project, James Davis, stepped forward to speak about what the project entailed.

The session was broken down into three sections as to better explain just what the Google Cultural Institute is about; these three sections being: The Art Project, Historic Moments and World Wonders.

James Davis went onto say that in the art project alone Google had 450 partners in the Art Project, combined with the other two projects Google has 600 partners overall in 70 different countries. However, they want to expand this project to parts of Africa, the Middle East and South America.

The second session I attended was about writing and how authors, publishers and also the future of publishing with the digital age now in full swing.

This session was called Copy and Paste. Part of the talk was about how to try and make online communities for writers, giving them a voice in the future of publishing, but also an outlet, a chance for writers to analyse and share their experiences.

They provided some sites to look at:

www.thewritingplatform.com 
www.invisibleislands.com
www.fablermove.com

An app for android and IOS was also mentioned, the app was called MacGuffin and is designed to host user generated content, made up of stories, short novels or one shots and poems.

I did attend another session along with Graham called ‘Activating the Public Space’, which was about using digital technology to change the way people perceive the space around them.

Molmol Kuo was the first speaker and she was a technologist and media artist from a group called Yes, Yes, No.

She discussed the interactive projects her group had worked on, one example she gave was a water fountain which spoke to people when they took a drink from it. The aim of her team was to try and bring people together using different forms of technology.

The second speaker worked with creating gaming festivals in Nottingham. He spoke about how he had done various projects, one included two giant screen set in a square, each opposite ends of each other. They were set up to play video games and still interact with one another
The final speaker was working on a clean air project in New York and London, and using digital devices to spread the word about what was happening.

All these linked together since they were about getting the public involved with technology out in the open space, either through exploring new areas, interacting with one another or even learning new information that is available to them. Showing also that there can be positive and negative results to just what you make available to the public.

Other sessions that Graham attended were ‘After the Future’, ‘Disruptive Innovation’ and ‘Crafting Code’.

Sessions that Martin attended were ‘What to do with your data?’ and ‘Archiving and Preserving’.

The conference ended in a spectacular dance and light show called Marshmallow lasers which was made by Memo Akten, who had been a speaker in one of the sessions.

It was amazing, with the dancer and the light bending and moving together until the light took over and the dancer slipped off the stage to allow the audience to focus purely on the light display.

It was a very impressive ending to a rather long day. But it was very entertaining with lots of useful information about what options are open in part to organisations looking to expand their digital content.