Remix: Fuel The Fire

Culture, technology and entrepreneurship fused together in two intense days of debates, inspirational talks and lively panel discussions from technologist, leading cultural institutions and exciting entrepreneurs. Themes varied from: the importance of storytelling; emerging social enterprise models; culture and the digital economy; creative communities; and how to make memorable experiences (to name only a few!)

One of the hot topics that emerged was the ever-growing importance of audience participation if organisations (both public, private and cultural) wish to stay relevant to their modern users. From MTV to museums the importance of including your audience in the creative process was shown to provide higher numbers of public engagement, investment and audience loyalty. From creative professionals, technologists to entrepreneurs everyone was stressing the importance of letting audiences steer the experiences that they want to have.

Now more than ever audiences want personalized experiences, they want to be at the centre and collaborate in the act of creating, they want new ways of storytelling that embrace emerging innovation, they want immediacy, dialogue and seek platforms that connect them with peers that share the same interests.

The importance and impact of immersive and exciting experiences were again at the forefront with speakers from The Serpentine Galleries, MTV, Melbourne Festival and The Space all reiterating the importance of putting the audience at the centre of the experience instead of as a traditional, passive voyeur.

We at Blippar were excited to be the physical representation of this ideology with our Fuel The Fire augmented reality installation. Our colorful camp-in-the-forest installation remained static until you interacted with the scenery through our app.

Once blipped the still backdrop transformed into a magical, live woodland complete with roaming wild animals, flowers and a raging fire that changed color in accordance to the way you interacted with it. If that wasn’t enough you could continue the conversation and debates from the talks and see what other members of the conference had posted.

Remix highlighted the importance and relevance that AR can play in democratizing space, creating conversations and making a participatory platform. From art galleries, installations or museum exhibitions AR can create that extra digital space for audiences to learn in a way that is personal and relatable to them. User generated AR content can be an effective way to steer immersive audience experiences that are curated by the audience themselves and in doing include the modern audiences into the dialogue and pedagogy of cultural institutions (if you’re interested in becoming a non-profit cultural partner email education@blippar.com).

The boundary between physical and digital is forever blurring; audiences are demanding physically relevant digital immersion that goes beyond the desktop. Cultural spaces can no longer afford to miss out if they wish to engage with modern audiences then they must embrace innovative ways to create sensory spaces while equally supporting platforms for audience dialogue. Remix has taught that if cultural organisations wish to stay intergenerationally relevant then they must treat space not just as a container but instead as a tool for audiences to create memorable experiences with.