Arts, Digitalisation, and Other Stories…

Anders Rykkja is a Lecturer in Arts and Cultural Industries Management at Queen’s University Belfast

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Festival of Social Science has chosen ‘Our Digital Lives’ as the topic of the 2024 edition. On the main festival website , the theme is loosely described as ‘an exploration of the relationship between humans and digital technology, from threats and opportunities facing us today to what life might look like in future.’

This blog’s aim is to explain how Queen’s University Belfast’s MA in arts management has developed its program for this year’s event, which will take place on November 6th during the festival.

While the description of the topic stresses the future perspective, our point of departure is a reflection on what past advances in digitalisation has brought the arts.

In the arts, digitalisation is a mixed bag. The digitisation of artforms and the digitalisation of the way arts and culture can be distributed, accessed, experienced, and consumed encompass a miscellany of the good, not-so-good, and negative. In other words, digitalisation is as much a boon as a disadvantage.

The not-so-good reflects Alvin Toffler’s proposal that our digital lives are in a state of ‘future shock’. Future shock here means a sensory overload caused by technology providing us access to too much information. E.M.Forster foresaw the effects this could have on us when he in a novella published over hundred years ago (1909, The Machine Stops) described a future in which we live in isolated cells, never seeing one another, and communicating only via audiovisual devices. After COVID, I guess we all understand what that kind of life may look like. This negative version of ‘future’ could be like the one envisioned by Father John Misty in Total Entertainment Forever, in that our digital lives has become a reality lived through a VR-headset by someone somewhere else.

There is also evidence supporting a case that digitalisation has brought the arts and culture some good. The cultural economist Joel Waldfogel suggests we live in a time of digital renaissance, with an abundance of available works, a substantial increase in the number produced, and their level of quality and appreciation on the rise compared with a predigital era. My own research into the use of digital fundraising (crowdfunding) in the arts found that digital platforms had helped fund over 7,500 projects that otherwise may not have been produced in the Nordic countries and Spain.

The foregoing discussion, however, indicate mere lines in the sand and position-taking. To truly appreciate and understand how digitalisation is affecting the production and consumption of arts and culture in a present-future perspective, we should reflect on the past, or the question of how we got to where we are today.

I would like to take you back 21 years to make a case that our current discussion of ‘digitalisation’ is indirectly informed by three instances of ‘technological progress’ taking place in 20003. First, 2003 was the year Apple launched the iTunes Store. I-tunes paved the way for distribution of arts and culture as a digital commodity. This forever changed the way we engage with and experience arts. A lot of our consumption shifted from a model premised on ownership of artifacts to one premised on access to content. Second, we witnessed how digitalisation facilitated the emergence of new careers and forms of intermediation. This shift was propelled by Google’s (now Alphabet) acquisition of a start-up called Applied Semantics. Applied Semantics had developed a piece of software named AdSense, which could semantically interpret written online content and offer contextually targeted advertising to collaborating webpages. AdSense helped create the conditions for new careers such as blogging, with WordPress also launching in 2003. It also enabled recording artists and performing musicians to establish a digital presence through another platform fuelled by AdSense launched the same year: MySpace. Finally, digitalisation facilitated new forms of commons-based cultural production and funding for artists and creators. The first commercial crowdfunding platform, ArtistShare, began its operations in 2003. Since then, it has helped fund numerous album recording projects, 15 of which have gone on to win Grammy Awards.

However, as Peter Tschmuck, in an article on the topic of creativity and digitalisation also published in 2003 reminds us: we also need to focus on ‘culture’ within an industry; access to technology is just a condition that determines the dominant mode of production and consumption in a given moment. Digitalisation may change how art and culture is produced or distributed, but that does not necessarily alter the way in which we experience the aesthetic or symbolic value of artistic works and expressions. As Tschmuck suggests, any discussion of digitalisation needs to interrogate what is culture within an industry. Therefore, our event will have a dual focus. Part of it will examine examples of how and in what way technological changes have affected us as artists, industry professionals, academics, audiences, and patrons of arts and culture. Another will probe and questions the issue of how culture evolves alongside digitalisation through shifts and changes that bear no relation with digitalisation as a process. It is these concerns that underpin the title of our event during the ESRC Festival of Social Science: Arts, Digitalisation, and Other Stories.

The event will also feature presentations of the research of some of our MA students who only tangentially engage with digitalisation. Kasey Manche may in her presentation of research into ethical leadership and decision-making remind us that a lot of exploration still needs to be done to understand and explain how arts organisations can implement digital strategies that are both financially viable and ethically responsible, ultimately serving previously marginalised communities. Aoife Osborne’s concern is to determine the factors influencing decisions relating to performance space for immersive theatre, and the processes involved in making these decisions.

One of my key takeaways from Aoife Osborne’s dissertation is her understanding of space as a descriptor for the place in which a performance or production happens. My interpretation is that space could be anyplace or anywhere if it can be related to the acts of creating producing, presenting or consuming works. Situating space as a place contingent on these activities aligns with a recently published article by our keynote speaker, Dr Carolina Dalla Chiesa from Erasmus University of Rotterdam. One of the article’s claims is a call to detach the notion of place from space and embrace the idea that digital and offline space is complementary, not oppositional. Sometimes we connect with others through digital tools and virtual networks. Other times we disconnect from our devices and gather in place-based spaces to engage face-to-face. Neither option should be conceived as inherently better than the other. Digital and non-digital spaces are co-constitutive, mutually supporting and reinforcing one another, just like when we think of every other hybridization in the arts and culture (public and private funding sources, omnivorousness in arts consumption, superstars and long-tail niche producers). The premise being that when we look into what consumers do and how cultural participation unfolds, the world looks much more like a continuum, rather than binary. As the article suggests, this perspective aligns with a growing understanding of the flow of creativity, crowdsourcing, artistic work, and cultural production in cities and regions through a “glocal” lens: we are anchored locally yet have global opportunities to connect through digitalisation. This is another story about how our digital lives as academics, artists, audiences, and cultural producers may look in the future.

I would like to conclude with a proposition from Professor Rotem Shneor who argues that we need to embrace digitalisation and platforms for the utilitarian tools that they are. The point he makes is that digital platforms are becoming ‘one-stop’ shops for arts and cultural production. Hybrid platform service models, combining crowdfunding technology alongside editorial services, publishing, production support, access to distribution and valuation are emerging. Platforms like Substack enable writers of fiction and non-fiction to monetise their work in serialised form. Unbound combines a publishing house with a crowdfunding platform. Bandcamp helps musicians fund vinyl editions of their records, offering pressing and distribution services once they achieve a certain number of pre-orders. Shopify and Etsy allow visual artists to set up stores to sell their artworks directly to consumers, while Seed&Spark provides film producers with both crowdfunding and distribution services. However, without a community of followers—whether offline or online, in a city or in a rural location—none of this would be possible. Digitalisation is simply an enabling tool that helps us tell the stories of arts, culture, and life where we live. Regardless of technological advances, we need to remember that technology without culture is an empty hollow. Therefore, may the arts and culture being produced and the stories we tell continue to flourish as we move forward.

Get your free tickets to be a part of the event, which will be arranged in the Brian Friel Theatre, University Square 20, at 4pm on the 6^th of November.

QPol is the ‘front door’ for public policy engagement at Queen’s University Belfast, supporting academics and policymakers in sharing evidence-based research and ideas on the major social, cultural and economic challenges facing society regionally, nationally and beyond. Website: qpol.qub.ac.uk  Email:  [email protected]