Congress on Digital Culture

After four years, our Digital Culture programme will come to an end in 2024. On 10 and 11 October 2023, we are therefore organised the Congress on Digital Culture at PACT Zollverein in Essen. The congress presented the results and experience gained from four years of funding through the Digital Culture programme and explored how these can inform future measures: What current topics, technologies, and aesthetics are relevant for museums, memorial sites, opera houses, theatres, and international production houses? What recommendations do they have for future transformation processes?

We took a look at the experiences of the projects against the backdrop of a radically changing public sphere: digital media and artificial intelligence enable new forms of participation, but also increasingly reveal differences and exclusions. We invited all guests to reflect with us on how cultural institutions can find a new relationship to an increasingly pluralised public. How do they contribute to making social issues and cultural conflicts productive for the public? What new ways of working and digital skills support participation, digital transformation, and social innovation?

At Harvest Houses, panel discussions, and table talks, we discussed these and other questions with the projects, invited artists and experts.

Harvest Houses

At the heart of the Congress on Digital Culture were the Harvest Houses, where the teams of the funded projects presented themselves. Bundled knowledge and work results from the institutions had been presented here, as well as digital applications and artistic works. Centrally located in the foyer of PACT Zollverein, the Harvest Houses with their open architecture invited guests to talk, network, and be inspired.

Conference programme

The conference programme included input talks on additional topics that go beyond the Digital Culture programme in various ways: How can cultural institutions open up and give space to formerly marginalised perspectives? How do artists reflect on social change through the current use of self-learning systems and artificial intelligence applications? And how do artists approach the topic of a new relationship to non-human life forms?

AI performance & Music

The congress was accompanied by a stage programme at Zeche Zollverein. There, the artist collective ArtesMobiles presented the interactive AI experiment SystemFailed – a performance and playful experimental set-up that encouraged the audience to develop new perspectives on the digitalised society.
Jana Kerima Stolzer & Lex Rütten are media and sound artists and DJs. Inspired by the rhythms and sounds of the genre boundaries of electronic music, the duo oscillates between bass music, breakbeat, ambient, and techno. Rather than committing themselves to a particular spectrum of electronic music, they let the atmosphere dictate, so that each mix tells its own story.

The Congress on Digital Culture was an event of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, jointly curated with kultur{}botschaft (external link, opens in a new window) (Karin Bjerregaard Schlüter & Ralf Schlüter) and organised with the support of hahnlive.