Art Box digital

The Art Box digital platform seeks to package existing low-cost hardware and proven peer-distribution software into a trusted subscription platform to give curators and directors in cultural institutions, artists, and their audiences, the power to innovate with large digital media, on their own terms. The aim of this project is a model that simplifies technical details into a plug-and-play service - that fills a gap between gallery rich-media, streaming and low-resolution media - with the potential outcome of fostering innovative arts experiences using a traditional art subscription form.

Coaching and training will help to validate and develop a comprehensive business model for a platform for arts institutions, publishers and festivals to distribute data-rich experiences and artworks, using a magazine-style subscription model paired with digital networking. Inspired by multimedia-rich art subscriptions like the 1960s Aspen Magazine and 1990s Words & Pictures art subscription boxes, but for the digital age.

Artworks too big to stream, too complex or costly to sell on dedicated storage, need something in-between: the platform consists of a postal subscription, a device, and digital distribution.

This work develops a model to give more control, over richer media, to significant cultural institutions. While blockchain and other platforms have demonstrated the appetite of arts institutions to experiment with networked distribution, those have an inherently limited file size. Sending out big media is often beholden to streaming costs or constraints of third-party broadcasters.

In-house experimenting is difficult with limited staff and infrastructure, and a complexity barrier for occasional users that prevents smooth arts-focused experiences.

The intent is that by designing a low-cost device paired with a subscription model that distributes updates through the post, a smoother, standardised, trusted and more secure platform for artwork distribution can be offered by arts institutions to audiences. The solution is lowering the barriers to large, rich, media distribution, where the norm has been streaming or low-resolution file hosting. The art subscription model can scale up from one organisation.