New media ‘the future’ at the National Arts Centre

There are many in the new media community who would likely give anything to be in Maurizio Ortolani’s situation. As producer, new media at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre (NAC), he has access to one of the fastest networks in the world, produces podcasts and other digital media with some of the biggest names in the arts, and – perhaps best of all – works in a corporate culture where new media is a must-have."The National Arts Centre is a locally situated national organization," Ortolani says, explaining the latter point. " allows us to fulfill our national mandate, especially in education in audience outreach where it wouldn’t otherwise be possible with...traditional media."The dichotomy of being a national arts entity with a single location is apparent when looking at the NAC’s two biggest online properties, its corporate site and its ArtsAlive portal devoted to music education. The corporate site gets about 5,000 unique visitors each day, mostly from potential patrons in the Ottawa area. ArtsAlive, meanwhile, can receive as many as 6,500 visits from individual unique IP addresses during the average 8-to-4 school day.And, says Ortolani, that latter number might understate the case considerably, perhaps by as much as a factor of 30. "If you think a classroom’s using it, it could be 30 times that number, because they’re all coming in on one IP address," he says.In 2001, the NAC, sensitive to criticism that it was ignoring its national mandate and operating in an insular fashion for the benefit of the Ottawa elite, laid out a four-element strategic plan. The elements included: artistic expansion and innovation; heightened emphasis on the centre’s national mandate; a renewed commitment to youth and education, and; a "dramatic" increase in earned revenues.However, says Ortolani, the last of those four priorities is perhaps the least worrisome. Every department at the NAC treats new media as a necessary expense when putting together a budget. For instance, whenever the NAC Orchestra goes on tour, it earmarks $25,000 for a dedicated tour website with podcasts recorded on the road. The only exception is the budget for the centre’s corporate website, which is allocated directly to Ortolani’s group." is part of touring culture, it’s part of the education program for English theatre, French theatre, dance…they all are literate in new media now and are very active in new media, so it’s great for us that way," he says.The NAC’s various sites host approximately 140 hours of audio and video, much of that in the form of podcasts hosted by personalities such as NAC Orchestra principal bassoon Christopher Millard and Peter Hinton, artistic director for English theatre. The hours of audio and video accessed through the NAC’s servers in 2005 clocked in at 3,700; in 2006, that number burgeoned to 5,200. The ArtsAlive portal accounts for most of that traffic. Not surprisingly, storing all that media is becoming an issue, says Ortolani: "We have an archive going back now seven years: tours, master classes, telementoring sessions, conferences, symposiums…it’s a lot of stuff."But while the centre’s podcast series has garnered attention from the American Symphony Orchestra League – an organization Ortolani describes as a kind of "National Hockey League" for orchestras – other cutting-edge initiatives melding ultra-high-speed networks with distance education are quietly making waves as well.In 2001, the NAC received funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage to lay fibre throughout the public areas of the centre. Today, that means that audio-visual equipment can be connected in any of the performance or rehearsal salons and a signal broadcast over Gigabit Ethernet. "We’re about five hops on a good day from the Internet2 hub in Chicago," says Ortolani. "We connect from here to the Federal GigaPoP at the National Research Council , so we sit directly on CA*Net4."That combination of in-house bandwidth and proximity to a blazing fast academic research network has led the NAC to launch Hexagon, a broadband distance learning project. Using highly customized videoconferencing equipment from Pleasanton CA-based Polycom Inc., the NAC has connected music students in Ottawa with jazz educators at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, and vice versa. These "broadband master classes" offer connections of up to 35 megabits per second and uncompressed DV quality. "In our tests we sent a DVD stream to Columbia University or Northwestern University, and it looks like you’re looking at that video locally on the machine – there’s no compression," Ortolani says.And, the material generated by those limited-access master classes can be repurposed for broader educational use, further leveraging the investment. "If we do a Pinchas master class over broadband, that’s great for the participants and anybody who can tune into that multicast at US and Canadian universities, but it doesn’t have a life beyond that," Ortolani says. "So, we take that and distill it down to Web video and post it on ArtsAlive.""The bottom line is that this is a national organization that has really found its legs and found a way to reach its national constituents using new media," Ortolani concludes. "This will be a big part of the future of the National Arts Centre."

New media ‘the future’ at the National Arts Centre

News | 02/21/2007 5:00 am EST

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