- This event has passed.
The Art Museum in the Digital Age – 2022
January 17, 2022 - January 21, 2022
This International Online Conference is organised by the Belvedere Research Center, as part of its conference series on the digital transformation of art museums with its fourth event on the topic. The 2022 event centers on the convergence of analog and digital media. Is the binary rhetoric of analog/digital, conservative/progressive, either/or … still appropriate in the post-digital age, or should we address questions of media specificity, hybridity, and mixed reality?
Media theorists like Peter Weibel were quick to bury the body-based “society of proximity” discursively in the face of the pandemic. In gigantic stadiums, concert halls, and museums, he could only recognize “the pharaonic tombs of the future.” That people would not simply relocate to a purely digital world was already foreshadowed by the first easing of restrictions in the summer of 2020, when an almost excessive return to the analog took place. Original artworks were more in demand than ever, and there was a hunger for encounters with other people and objects in the museum. There are, it seems, anthropological constants, despite the expanded purview of technological possibilities. But what does this mean for the art museum in the digital age and the position of the digital in the cultural sector? What do successful forms of mediation look like in view of the dialectic of virtuality and physical presence? And what new challenges must be overcome in the process?
During five evenings, the online conference will feature a range of interdisciplinary contributions, which above all – but not exclusively – critically reflect on the following topics:
-
The structural transformation of the public sphere in the digital age
-
The logic of selection and interpretation in the modern media ecosystem
-
“Platformization” and the erosion of the traditional rituals for engaging with art
-
Artificial intelligence and new forms of curating
-
Human-computer interaction in the museum
-
Forms of participation in real/ digital spaces
-
The relationship between original-digital-virtual
-
Hybrid publishing and new forms of knowledge representation