Culture, dance, tourism and technology: exploring the CultureMoves project

The tools

CultureMoves is a Europeana Generic Services project, with a team consisting of IN2 Digital Innovation, Fondazione Sistema Toscana, Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Coventry University. It supports the development of new forms of tourist engagement, educational resources and dance research by leveraging and promoting content from Europeana.

The project’s tools include MovesCollect, a Chrome browser extension which allows you to create bookmarks and save your favourite items while browsing Europeana Collections. Additionally, the MovesScrapbook tool allows you to organise this saved content and mix it with your own, creating scrapbooks that can be used for storytelling, inspiration and much more. 

Paying attention to the leading role video is playing in the content revolution, CultureMoves has also produced MotionNotes, a web-based video annotator designed for dancers and choreographers. All tools are accessible on our dedicated portal and tutorials are posted on our Youtube channel. 

Promoting destinations with generative art

CultureMoves works to push the boundaries of creative content reuse. Our Dance (Algo)rhythms video installation is an example of one of the innovative ways we promote destinations through generative art. Generative art uses programmed algorithms and artificial intelligence to handle cultural heritage content and create artworks, which we then use as the interactive set of dance performances. We presented Dance (Algo)rhythms during Internet Festival 2019, one of the main events in Italy dedicated to the Internet and digital technologies. You can read about other examples of employing dance for touristic promotion in our report. 

LabDays and events

In 2019 we also organised our ‘Moving Culture’ Conference in Pisa on the topic of new forms of creative engagement and art. The conference included reputed speakers from around Europe, including Pep Gatell of La Fura dels Baus / Epica Foundation, an organisation which has experimented with the integration between arts and digital technologies since 1980. Videos of the presentations from this conference are available on our YouTube playlist. 

In the research and educational context, we have also organised several LabDays, which are interdisciplinary workshops bringing together students from various disciplines (such as architecture), artists, researchers, dance educators and technologists. The LabDays tackled topics including the relationships between dance, public spaces and tourism. Due to the positive feedback and exciting outcomes we encourage others to take up this approach and have published a ‘LabDay toolkit’ in our White Paper. 

MOOCs

CultureMoves has built a strong network of supporters and collaborators. With the team of the project 50s in Europe Kaleidoscope, we have developed the MOOC ‘Creating a digital cultural heritage community’. Four modules will address the intersections between culture, dance, tourism and digital technologies, with a particular focus on dance in unconventional spaces and in relation to touristic landmarks. You can register for the MOOC later in January, when it will be launched on the EdX platform.