Promoter - Information technology, research and innovation

Promoter @ Digital Echoes 2015, Coventry 13 February 2015

Theme of the Digital Echoes Symposium 2015 is Intangible and Performance-based Cultural Heritage.

Antonella Fresa will attend the Symposium in Coventry presenting "Citizen science in the research on cultural heritage and humanities" during the afternoon panel. She will talk about the experience of the Civic Epistemologies project.

Digital Echoes 2015 will bring together artists, researchers and practitioners interested in exploring how digital environments intervene in the creation, documentation, circulation and reception of culture. The focus of this year’s event is on the potential and limits of digital technology for affording new ways to engage with traditional forms of cultural heritage as audience, user, artist, author, researcher and co-creator.

As museums, archives and other memory institutions open and digitise their collections, there is now a growing corpus of cultural content freely available on the web. For dance and performance-based cultural heritage, unique and rare audiovisual content, scores and documentation are now becoming available. The availability of this content has the potential to inspire contemporary art practice and drive new modes of user and audience engagement with cultural productions. User engagement is facilitated by a variety of access modes, many of which encourage active interaction with content for in-depth exploration, contributing metadata, tagging, interpreting, creating customised access paths and personal collections. Contemporary artists, authors and practitioners can draw inspiration, engage in asynchronous creative dialogues, reuse and propose extant content in novel creative interpretations. Yet this array of opportunities comes with its own set of open questions and challenges – technical, intellectual, social and political. In particular, reuse and creative interpretation of cultural content needs to abide by legal regulations that are often vague, or insufficiently disseminated and understood by artists and practitioners. Moreover, co-creation practices and increased use of crowdsourcing by artists and cultural institutions compel us to question the nature of cultural heritage, established notions of ‘author’ and ‘creator’, and who is entitled to claim ownership and act as steward and guardian for cultural productions. Digital Echoes 2015 will offer a space for exploring and discussing best practice and innovation in digital heritage productions and uses, and for engaging critically and reflexively with the underlying open questions and challenges.

This year’s theme is inspired by current research carried out at C-DaRE for the EC funded projects Europeana Space  and RICHES. Europeana Space aims to increase and enhance the creative industries’ use of digital cultural content by delivering a range of resources to support new forms of engagement, interaction and reuse. RICHES (Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society) researches the context of change for European cultural heritage with particular attention to the impacts of digital technology, and maps its social, economic and legal implications. This on-going research at C-DaRE opens up questions about change, innovation and reinvention of cultural heritage through digital media.