Greetings from our culture team! We are Verónica Toro, Edda Vivana Forero, Nicolás Barahona, and Juan Pablo Marín.

Offering you this content excites us. Its creation is a construction in which we never stop surprising ourselves. We did data surfing and came up with projects that propose integral ways to understand the culture. It has printed the daily life of Bogota and the novelty of Artificial Intelligence as a creative tool.

You will find mighty and straightforward things, such as new artistic expressions based on data or humility, as a basis for solving social problems. Our goal is to open a path of innovation and inspiration. We hope you will walk it with us, question it, find things we didn’t see and, above all, enjoy it.

If you know someone who might be interested in the content, please share it. You can read our previous newsletters and subscribe at Data Culture.

#ARTICLES

From "I kissed a girl" to "Call me by your name".

This article from The Pudding visualizes homosexuality in American culture from songs highlighted by Billboard magazine. It collects the lyrics of the year-end Hot 100 songs between 2008 and 2020 and investigates each artist’s sexual orientation and gender identity. It does so with a programmatic and manual approach that examines Wikipedia pages, news articles, and artists' social media profiles.

Alien Dreams: an emerging art scene

OpenAI launched a few months ago a program called CLIP. A neural network learns visual concepts from natural language monitoring. In this article, Charlie Snell tells us how artists, hackers, and researchers have discovered how to use CLIP creatively to generate algorithmic art by entering text, poems, or lyrics.

CLIP and other similar programs generate a new art form, a visual production medium beyond algorithms. The article calls it “Alien Dreams” and points out that it has enormously developed in the last few months.

The generated images are almost reaching a commercial production level. The future of this art is the combination of more machines and artificial intelligence, pushing creativity and technology. Thinking about the new mechanisms of generating value to virtual objects, such as NFTs (digital certificates of authenticity of a work), we still cannot imagine where this new artistic movement will end.

Source:@ak92501

#TOOLS

Creative tools to generate art with AI

In this post, you will find 41 AI machines of various media to explore and produce your creations. From image and voice generators to computers that will play piano with you. It is an opportunity to explore new experiences and aesthetic concepts, enjoy them! https://aiartists.org/ai-generated-art-tools

#CALL FOR PROPOSALS

DeFi 4 Green Recovery

ACDI Argentina, IOVLabs, and Socialab have just announced the DeFi 4 Green Recovery innovation call. Its objective is to promote open and decentralized finance solutions, known as DeFi. They will support ideas, projects, or people focused on building a sustainable, low-carbon, and resilient economy to the effects of climate change. Also, that encourages large-scale reforestation, helps transition to regenerative agriculture, promotes credit and liquidity to companies and cooperatives with sustainable production, promotes a more efficient carbon market, and promotes a fair economy.

Remember that blockchain, crypto-economics, and decentralized finance tools can be an excellent opportunity to transform the world, as we explain in this blog post and our talk with Chuy Cepeda.

Learn the details and apply for investment from 5,000 USD to 20,000 USD to boost your solution at https://cl.socialab.com/challenges/defi4greenrecovery. You have until November 20th, 2021, to do so.

#LEARNING-TRAINING

Data Science vs. Data Analytics

This webinar is organized by Thinkful, a virtual education company located in New York, USA, will discuss the details of these two professions that are becoming the most sought after in recent years. In addition, the audience will learn how to obtain the skills to succeed and discuss the fields of action to apply. It will be virtually on Thursday, August 26th, 2021, between 9:00 and 10:30 am (Eastern time). More details can be found at this link.

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence Course

In this IBM course, you will learn the basics of using Watson, an Artificial Intelligence software. It will show you how it works, how to create applications, apply this type of technology, and what has happened to its clients. It lasts eight weeks and is taught free of charge in English.

All the details are in this link.

#PODCAST

Humbling Technologies

How do science and technology affect rights, equity, and justice? In this episode of the Justice Matters podcast, host Sushma Raman and Sheila Jasanoff, a pioneering social science professor, explore the role of science and technology in law, politics, and modern democracy.

Technologies of Humility is an invitation to identify how we can build more participatory methods for public policy problem-solving in the face of the new global context. You can listen to it on Spotify or any podcast channel.

#VIDEOGAMES

Before Your Eyes

It is an adventure game developed by GoodbyeWorld Games and published by Skybound Games for PC in 2021. It catches our attention for its use of eye-tracking technology in its storytelling. It tells a moving story told in the first person, in which you choose and alter the course of events through your blinks. In addition, it allows you to immerse yourself in a world full of fond memories while watching the main character’s life pass in front of you. Here are the links to watch the gameplay and download the game.

#DATASKETCH

We have created a physical and virtual conversation space to invite people from the data ecosystem to talk about their work and research: the Datasketch House. We invite you to relive all our talks on our Youtube channel, and we present a summary of our last face-to-face meeting.

MAPS Workshop

Within the framework of the MAPAS project of the Line of Sustainability of the Artistic Ecosystem of IDARTES (Instituto Distrital de las Artes), we seek to visualize the strategies of sustainability, innovation, and collaborative networks in the artistic ecosystem of Bogota in times of pandemic. Last Wednesday, August 5th, we were at Casa Datasketch with different creative collectives: Los Rulos Vinyl Club, Atendido por sus Propietarios (APP), El Deambulante, Fiesta de las Aves, Pigmento, Maki Arte, Biblioteca Comunitaria Santa Rosa, and Escuela Liber- Arte CB, to rescue and think about which practices and activities have been vital for the (re)construction of cultural, collaborative and knowledge networks during the art consumption crisis.

Together we want to promote the social impact of culture, find new ways to strengthen the sustainability of the art sector, and use information as a pillar of entrepreneurship. This project is possible thanks to CK WEB, IDARTES, and Casa Datasketch.

We invite you to watch the meeting on our Youtube channel.

Taste and memory

Don’t know what to cook this second half of the month? Don’t worry. We remember one of our most creative and diverse projects in this installment: food, data, and visualization in one place. In Cocina Colombiana, we explored 700 native recipes of the country.

The preparation went like this: we took the PDF of the Great Book of Colombian Cuisine from the Ministry of Culture. We immersed it in the pdf tool as a big block of text. Then, we spread the text across the RAM to identify grains of similar text. The grains attended to a pattern separated by each recipe’s ingredients, difficulty, and cooking time. Each group of grains was reduced to a CSV file with the columns separated by variable. This data was then carefully analyzed and cleaned, and thus we were given a special dish of our brand.

Learn more at the link: Colombian cooking recipes, ingredients, and data.

#PRODUCT

Puzzles of Bogotá

Jafet Garnica is an architect who graduated from the Universidad Nacional. In the form of a puzzle, his work represents his love for Bogotá, the city where he grew up.

The deep green represents the hills, the savannah, and the wetlands on which this enormous city sits. Terracotta means brick, one of the most commonly used building materials in Colombia’s 482-year-old capital. The grayish-blue represents the abundant rains and waters that have always flowed through the territories now occupied by Bogota. You can learn more about this proposal and purchase the puzzle in our store.

#UPCOMING - OPENING

Atendido por sus propietarios

Atendido por sus propietarios (APP), a collective that seeks cooperation between independent artists in Bogota, has become a foundation. At Datasketch, we support their work and share their vision of creating cooperative ties in culture from the beginning.

Data science has been one of the bases for APP’s artistic creation, as in the case of “[-4 … 24.8]^14.9”, a visualization of the city’s temperature made by Gabriel Zea, which we talked about in our previous newsletter. The work can be wearable as a garment and interacts with one of the elements that inspired its creation: the cold of the Colombian capital. You can learn more about the piece by visiting our store’s website.

APP’s new office and showroom launch will be on August 20th, at its headquarters in Bogota, located at Calle 59 #3A - 51, Taller 102.

For more information and to register, access this link.

That 's all for now!

It has been a pleasure to share so many initiatives and content. We invite you to stay tuned. Together we strengthen the data culture! If someone sent you this email and you want to keep updated with the best data culture, subscribe!

Remember that in Datasketch, we have other newsletters, with which you will also learn about:

• Data Journalism
• Open Government
• Data entrepreneurship

See you next time!