After the Tech4Culture, 16th March 2017 at Zorlu PSM // Reviewed by Dr. Gökçe Dervişoğlu Okandan

After the Tech4Culture, 16th March 2017 at Zorlu PSM

Tech4Culture Conference has been held at the Zorlu Performing Arts Center on the 16th of March 2017 and marked the end of the global hack program Tech4Culture organised by British Council between December 2016 and February 2017 in collaboration with Technology Development Foundation, The Audience Agency and Outlandish that curated a series of events to invite culture and technology communities to play and create prototypes.

Presented by Simon Cronshow, co-founder of Remix Summits, Tech4Culture Conference brought together art, culture and technology professionals, coders, developers, data scientist and designers. Barriers and solutions for digital collaborations were discussed through examples from Turkey and the United Kingdom.

“New Playgrounds: An Introduction to Hacks in the Arts” booklet has been presented and published online in both English and Turkish.

Commentary by Gökçe Dervişoğlu Okandan

(Assist. Prof. Istanbul Bilgi University Arts and Cultural Management Faculty Member, Cultural Management Master's Program Coordinator)

British Council İstanbul Office is one of the most effective institutions that bring the “Creative Industries” discussion, which has been on the United Kingdom’s agenda since 1998, into the context of Turkey. Due to the know-how and vision of its own team, the institution provided among the works in the art field, both an opportunity to examine thoroughly the reasons for tendencies of digitalization in culture and also an opportunity to share its practices in the UK with the events they organised in the field of the use of technology in “creative entrepreneurship”, “creative hubs” and finally “hack culture” and “audience development” in the recent years. The other supporters of the program that questioned the start-up culture and audience development efforts at the businesses within the framework of the digital “hack” concept were The Audience Agency and Outlandish in the UK and TTGV (Technology Development Foundation of Turkey). After the Hackathon, the event continued with a conference where examples of digital media reflections of the cultural institutions from cultural heritage field to historical film implementations in Turkey and in the UK have been displayed. This year in the conference, also attended by younger institutions such as ArtBizTech and Timelooper beside the implementations by institutionalized organizations such as Istanbul Modern and IKSV (Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts), DECOL which will participate to the REMIXX Festival as the winner of the Hackathon, attracted good attention with the VR application it has developed in the Hackathon.

Besides the effect of bringing together the technology-driven cultural institutions, this serial event provided opportunities for TTGV, as a supporting structure of the technology focused entrepreneurship, to meet the examples of creative entrepreneurship, the triggering of the learning process resulting from the presentation of the examples from Turkey and the UK together and the presentation of “New Playgrounds: An Introduction to Hacks in the Arts” booklet with the Turkish translation for the institutions interested in this topic. More information is available on Tech4Culture website.

(KPY, 2017)