Donna Close is a creative director and cultural strategist with more than 25 years’ experience as a cultural leader working across the private and public sector and developing strategy, training programmes and creative projects all over the world. A festivals specialist, Donna has developed a number of multi-disciplinary arts festivals, provided advice and support for hundreds of festival organisers and developed strategies for governments, local authorities and their partners to help them create the conditions for festivals to thrive. She has a particular interest in supporting a broader range of artists, creatives and producers to make use of emerging technology to develop new types of creative practice and new audience experiences. Donna developed the concept of the 5G Festival for Brighton Dome & Brighton Festival: a £3.4m multiple partner consortium project and one of the UK’s 5G Create projects. The 5G Festival showcase took place in March 2022 and demonstrated the possibilities of 5G enabled remote artistic collaboration and hybrid performances. Donna is also part of the leadership of the national project Digital Democracies for Threshold Studios which supports artists to make use of interactive and immersive technologies in public space. As a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Brighton she developed the projects XR Circus, 5G:XR Brighton Istanbul and Arts DRIVA which all explored artist engagement with tech and data.
This online event has simultaneous translation, LSE interpretation and can be followed in open streaming on the Fundación Telefónica website and on networks with the hashtag #FutureIntelligence22
After the success of its first edition, the Future Intelligence Fest, co-created by Fundación Telefónica, the British Council and the British Embassy in Spain is holding a second episode to investigate the impacts of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality on the arts, media and entertainment. From producing music festivals with artists playing remotely thanks to 5G technology, to creating immersive mega-productions for the Royal Opera House, to encoding albums into 3D printed DNA strands, the Future Intelligence Fest brings together the leading British experts in this sector to raise the creative opportunities but also the social challenges that the use of these tools entails.
This initiative organised by Fundación Telefónica and the British Council began with an initial event that took place on Tuesday, October 5th 2021, with three prestigious representatives in the field of creation and research from the United Kingdom and Spain: the filmmaker and narrator of the future Karen Palmer, the CEO and co-founder of Espadaysantacruz Studio, Miguel Espada, and the researcher and writer, Arthur I. Miller, who were accompanied by Ludovic Assémat, head of Arts of the British Council in Spain.