DIGITAL IST KULTUR CULTURE IS DIGITAL – DIGITAL IS CULTURE

PREFACE
DIGITALISATION REPRESENTS A CULTURAL CHALLENGE FOR US AS A SOCIETY –
AND AT THE SAME TIME, IT IS A CHALLENGE FOR CULTURE
PROF DIETER GORNY
(Managing Director, european
centre for creative economy)
P
ublic cultural institutions must be makers – and not
hostages – of digitalisation. This requires resources
– museums, theatres or libraries need to be able to actively
invest in digital transformation – especially in times
of dwindling public funding. At the same time, the Cultural
and Creative Industries are experiencing an ongoing boom
of investments in digital infrastructures including platforms
and streaming services, which are attracting a dynamically
growing demand. But high usage alone does not generate
an income for artists and creative professionals in the digital
age – on the contrary, often, such a change in distribution
channels initially leads to declining sales. Innovations
in the creative economy are triggered – or even forced – by
digitalisation. But how can the Cultural and Creative Industries
be drivers for digitalisation? Or are they drivers
precisely because of the permanent urge for innovation?
Which creative ideas trigger new digital worlds or values?
And how can artists and creative professionals make a better
living from their work?
Under the motto “Culture is Digital – Digital is Culture”,
the Forum d’Avignon Ruhr 2015 gave room to discuss different
issues related to culture and its digitalisation that affect
the everyday life of almost all cultural creatives and institutions
in Europe and often even threaten their existence.
It is not surprising that more than half of the participants
attended the conference for the first time. This year’s edition
of the Forum d’Avignon Ruhr once again hit the nerve of the
cultural scene – which is not to be understood as a sceptical
stocktaking, but a political task.
The speakers and experts of the Forum all agreed that
today nobody is left unaffected by digital transformation, so
it is high time that the cultural and creative scenes – including
artists and individual entrepreneurs, but also public
institutions and global players of the creative economy –
must shape the politics of digitalisation much more actively
than before. The debates of the Forum showed that it is
not enough to just take a stance once – permanent technological
progress requires constant learning and a recurring
creation of new realities as a result of digitalisation as well
as a regular political involvement and development of legal
framework conditions.
6
More than ever before, digitalisation urges us to shape cultural
politics more actively and steadily – and economic
politics in particular. How will we achieve that? Where do