On Wednesday, the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab announced that I’m their inaugural Geek in Residence:
This is an exciting and experimental new role in which Ben will work with and across the festival set to spot and develop project opportunities and bring his expertise and experience to explore what it is to be a festival in the 21st century.
The Edinburgh Festivals include some of the world’s largest arts festivals – twelve in all – and I’m hugely excited to be part of the mix. Long-term readers will know that it’s not technology as such that excites me, but the human impact of technology – and what could be more human than a set of international arts events that spans the breadth of what global culture has to offer?
The Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab is a new experiment and resource for the twelve Edinburgh festivals to explore how they can use digital technology to create new value for audiences, artists, the city and the festivals themselves.
Over the next two years, the twelve festivals will work together and with a wide range of partners to identify, develop and prototype high potential projects which use digital technology to improve the festival experience, for audiences, for artists, for the festivals themselves and for everyone.
We recorded a short interview on Wednesday that serves as an introduction to me and my background, but also why I’m so excited about working with the arts in this way.
Photo: Edinburgh Festival by Bex Ross, shared under a Creative Commons license.
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