Your thesis started in 2009 is a long journey with work on the research project 'Visual-Film-Discourse' took nine years to complete. Could you first introduce us to the main assumptions and focus of this work? And how it evolved?
Florian Wiencek (FW): My thesis started out with looking at the state of the art in digital mediation of art and culture (re-)using digital cultural data with a focus on digital cultural repositories and databases as a tool for mediation. Having a background both in digital media and as a gallery educator as well as working in and with digital archives, I wanted to combine all these areas of work in my thesis. Since the digital world is moving fast the thesis in the end became more of a “media history”.
What was driving my work was always the question of how a specific technology with its characteristics does influence the mediation with this specific medium? I assumed that digital media and therewith also digital archives as mediation media would actually act as a display for art and culture in their own right, providing specific experiences of and about art and culture. And this proved to be true. I even go as far as defining digital technology as an agent in its own right in the process of cultural mediation, structuring and shaping what we can know about and how we experience art in today’s “network-society”. That is why I not only mapped and categorized the transformation of archives through digitization and data-based practices of mediation of art and culture but also looked into the characteristics of digital media, especially web-based formats and online-databases from a Software-Studies perspective. Since according to Lev Manovich “media is software” and software shapes how we produce, perceive and interact with cultural data this paradigm of software as a cultural product is crucial to my work. What role does software and algorithms play not only in the accessibility and findability of data, but ultimately also in what we can know and how we can learn with and perceive art.
© Robotlab, The Big Picture. Image © ZKM | Center for Art and Media, 2015.
I positioned the database as a nexus point in digital mediation processes, on the one hand because they act as a starting point for mediation, being a data provider and therefore a source for multiple stories and perspectives that individual users or software can derive. Thus it offers ways of structuring data and therewith is a mode of “meta-narrative” based on metadata and categorization. It enables contextualization of art and culture through active reuse and engagement with the cultural items made possible in mediated form through interfaces and services. So a central research question is the interplay of technical infrastructure and what forms of storytelling, interaction and mediation of art it enables. In one study I thus looked more closely into the different types of platforms and online repositories for cultural data and the mediation practices that go along with these to then derive four dimensions of meaning-making in databases.
© Hollerith Pantograph Card Punch, ca 1900
Also early on in the process I got fascinated by the multi-faceted nature of the term “mediation”. For me it was initially an attempt to translate the German term “Vermittlung” in “Kunstvermittlung” as in gallery education. But soon I learned that the theoretical underpinning behind the term allowed to widen the understanding not only in the direction of learning, but also by taking mediatization and especially the re-mediation theory by Bolter and Grusin from 1999 into account, the term could broaden the understanding of digital media in the process of cultural learning but also in the documentation and display of art and culture in the digital realm.
You mention transformation processes that have taken place in the digital media ecology, which have resulted in challenges for cultural institutions and museums, both in their role as institutions as well as in their daily meditation work. Could you briefly introduce us to these changes...
FW: One big challenge at the time of writing was still the digitization itself, ranging from the associated costs, manpower and necessary infrastructure and how to secure longterm access to the data. On a more systemic level the fact that museums became part of a larger information economy and suddenly were competing with other information providers from online encyclopedias, streaming providers or the like was challenging the knowledge authority of museums over their own collection and their role as places for learning. And moreover, digital media changed the expectations of (potential) visitors towards the museum experience as well as the way how learning within a museum should work and what institutions should offer also in the digital realm at least for the younger generation. And it affected basically all areas of mediation of art and culture: from displaying art, over discussing and thinking about art to learning from and with art or generating new knowledge with the cultural data using digital methods. So while there was a growing need to adapt to the demand in terms of digital offers there were in the years of writing the thesis multiple factors which hindered the adoption: be it a lack of resources and knowledge inside the museum to do so, underlying fears with regard to digitization – e.g. a still very common misconception that offering digital resources and experiences would result in less physical visitors – to political challenges in terms of funding structures or acknowledgement of digital visits as full museum-visitors when it comes to the subsidies of museums. Also at the time when I started to work on the thesis it was still very common to view the physical museum and the digital or even virtual one as two separated entities. So for me it was important to stress in my work that these might be different modes of experience, but ultimately they can’t be separated anymore but are rather two sides of the same coin – namely the overall museum experience.
© Digitization at the British Library of a Dunhuang manuscript for the International Dunhuang Project. De Vere 480 Copy Camera (2006)
By now the situation changed quite a bit over time – on a European as well as on a national level. Thus, digital media became by now more integrated in the overall visitor journey of a museum. And especially through the lockdown of physical museum spaces due to the Corona virus many institutions started to experiment with digital formats of mediation and cultural experiences. The situation led not only to a wider range of digital offers but also to more funding resources for digital mediation – on-site but also outside of the gallery.
You wrote that since the digitization of cultural mediation is not just some short-lived trend, but rather an unstoppable development, the thesis also highlights central directions that museums and cultural institutions might take in reacting to and taking advantage of ongoing digitization. Could you comment more on this?
FW: Focus on the holistic museum experience. One central point is – as outlined – to look at the museum experience from a holistic point of view. This means to not separate the digital experience from the physical but rather regard them as integrated into each other. By now the visitor journey of a museum is likely to start online – looking at recommendation sites like Tripadvisor or the like for recommendations for cultural activities, consulting the website for information how to get to the museum, when the opening times are. Maybe even the ticket to the museum is bought online before the visit. And after as well as during the visit the experience is mirrored back into the online world – be it through social media or ratings. And besides the integrated experience of the analog museum space together with digital touchpoints – that include gallery interactives, media guides and more – there is also the mainly digital museum-experience or cultural experience, that happens offsite. This can come in form of online collections, or mediated cultural experiences that all use digital media as displays in their own right. The technical intermediaries, software and UI design the “in-between” between a cultural object and the user. They enable a cultural experience in its own right. The question is not if an analog or a digital experience is more “real” than the other. If you compare the experiences of a born analog artwork that is displayed in a gallery with a digitally mediated experience the experiences surely differ from each other because the displays and underlying media as well as conventions allow different forms of interaction with and reception of cultural objects and are usually used in different contexts. But especially when taking into account that for many “digital visitors”, who cannot physically come to the museum, the digital experience is their perceived “reality”, both experiences constitute a reality for their visitors. Thus the digital and analog mediation offers should be regarded as unity not as competitors.
Maurizio Bolognini, 'Programmed Machines' (Nice, France, 1992–97). An installation at the intersection of digital art and conceptual art (computers are programmed to generate flows of random images which nobody would see).
A second direction is the change in assessment of museum experience. For museum it is important to keep this fact in mind and to embrace the possibility of reaching out to potentially new groups of visitors that they could not reach with their physical exhibitions. This of course also has political implications. For politics oftentimes only visitors at the physical gallery are counted when it comes to for example museum funding. Here it is important to rethink what constitutes a museum experience with a museum collection and what forms allow a meaningful and qualitative interaction with the cultural objects. Realigning the assessment of the museum experience is an important next step to do. This includes the development of meaningful benchmarks of a museum experience, that goes beyond gallery, page or post impressions but focusing on quality rather than quantity. There are already some interesting initiatives underway. Amongst others Europeana has launched a “Impact Assessment Playbook” helping institutions to get meaningful insights into their digital activities and strategically planning their assessment from setting meaningful and measurable goals to sampling and understanding the right data that allow insights.
Boundary Functions (1998) interactive floor projection by Scott Snibbe at the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo.
Then the issue of harnessing value of the digital cultural objects: or meaningful interactions and experiences instead of digitization for digitization’s sake. A lot of discussions are still going on around the topic of digitization of cultural heritage. And of course, digitization is necessary as basic step to create a basis to work with when it comes to digital mediation of art and culture. But one cannot stop there. The same way an archive can only be the starting point for meaning-making and new insights if it is activated and used by people, the digitization does not have much value if the digital object it is not taken care of longterm and the digital cultural object is eventually forgotten if it is not (re-)used or experienced by anyone. The activation and (re-)use of data in digital mediation is therefore important. Jos de Mul (2009) calls this in his publications “manipulation value” of the digital. Thus value is generated by actively doing something with the data, creating new meaning, new cultural expressions with them. This follows the mediation paradigm of critical mediation by Carmen Moersch (2011), where gallery education is not regarded as simple reproduction of existing knowledge, but as creation of new knowledge together with the visitors, fostering their own interpretation, thoughts and active engagement. In the digital realm that means giving visitors the possibility to actively engage with the digital cultural objects and starting a dialogue about the potential meaning.
© 2018, Palais de Tokyo, Paris · Curated by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel. lgo-r(h)i(y)thms uses technology as an opportunity to extend cognition, to feel the weaving in which all things, humans included, are caught up. Algo-r(h)i(y)thms is an invitation to expand modes of communication and to pay at-tent(s)ion not only to human world algorithms. Which synaesthetic modes of perception do we need to re-sense the world we live with? Algo-r(h)i(y)thms opens up channels of communication and sociality that cross the borders between senses and species. Studio Tomás Saraceno. Photos by Andrea Rossetti.
Opening Up the Museum is another topic. In order to be able capitalize on the manipulation value it is necessary to “open up the museums”. This also requires a change of mindset going away from regarding a museum merely as a place that safeguards the collection from damage, misinterpretation or abuse and strictly keeping the authority for interpretation within a circle of experts – resulting in very hierarchical institutions. The institution needs to embrace a culture of cooperation and participation, allowing and embracing a multiplicity of voices as well as active engagement with works by the users in form of cultural expressions, re-use or sharing. Then the museum can truly be a place in the society where meaningful discussion can take place and where cultural objects act as starting points for conversations, as information hubs that not only further own interpretation and discussions but also lead to actions e.g. inside a society, as Nina Simon argues in her book “The Participatory Museum”. Everyone is an expert of their own lives and brings his or her own point of view to the table. The museum therefore needs to embrace this complexity and different points of view that might differ from their “grand narrative” and seek a dialogue with the community.
Pawel Althamer, installation view of ‘Draftsmen’s Progress’ at the New Museum, March 2014. Polish artist opens up his exhibition to contributions from the public by providing paint, paper and smocks to the many, many visitors who want to leave their mark.
Finally restructuring the museum effective work in the digital realm. Working with digital media also has implications on the structures and ways of work inside a museum. What digital knowledge does a museum need inhouse, what can be outsourced? How do I set up my digital team and working stuctures inside the museum to create digital innovations? How can this work be funded? Kati Price from the Victoria and Albert Museum and Dafydd James from the National Museum Wales did valuable research on this topic. For further insights I can highly recommend their paper “Structuring for Digital Success”.
You refer to the concept of 'Convergence Culture' by Henry Jenkins which assumes the interplay between three main concepts: media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence. Media convergence describes the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted. The participatory culture opens up a contrasting image to what previously was described as ãmedia spectatorship. Last but not least collective intelligence refers to the concept of Pierre Lévy (1997) and refers for Jenkins to the added incentive of communication about consumed media, about the available abundance of information, and therewith accumulate the individual knowledge, resources and skills.
FW: If you reduce convergence culture to its core elements, it is about the relationship of media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence. Media convergence means that stories are told across multiple media platforms to serve the desires of audiences to “have the media they want where they want it, when they want it and in the format they want” (Jenkins 2006). Moreover the audience goes from assumingly passive media spectatorship towards being a prosumer – a mix of consuming and producing media. These two parts were traditionally separated but in participatory culture are converging as well. Audiences are according to Jenkins “encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” (Jenkins 2006). They want to feel involved, have the possibility to enter into a dialogue, participate in meaning-making. In 2009 Jenkins describes participatory Culture as follows: “A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another” (Jenkins et al 2009). Participatory culture is therefore a culture of openness, of sharing, of collaboration that opens up the process of social negotiation of meaning, where the audience can be a part of. And this does not mean that everyone actually becomes a creator. There are a number of other roles and forms of participation: from critic who mainly comments and discusses, over the collector, who compiles information e.g. in their social media timelines, to name just two. And also the topic of personalization of content and an experience to the need of individual users plays an important role. Users take their experience into their own hands.
Andy Warhol drawing Debbie Harry on an Amiga computer. © Photo by Allan Tannenbaum.
Following Meret Sanderhoff besides having tools that support collaborative or co-creative knowledge generation, this kind of digital mediation practice depends on users ability to access and retrieve cultural data anywhere and at any time and on their ability to freely manipulate, reuse and share cultural data in places like social media platforms, peer-to-peer networks, websites or online-repositories. How this cultural challenge relate to copyright issues in your perspective? As there's so much debate about it, let's think about photography and "social media sharing"... Would this paradigm lead to a new concept of art itself rather less confined into a digital product-like dimension?
FW: Copyright-law is surely an issue for OpenGLAM, and a field where many organizations do a great job in pushing for change. Examples are irights.info or the conference series “Zugang gestalten” (“designing access”, transl. FW) that is organized by German lawyer Paul Klimpel. With licensing models such as Creative Commons sharing and reuse of data has become easier. But one goal here is also to make it easier to provide digital access to collection data where the copyright has already expired and where rights-holders are not known – so called grey-area works. In Germany for example it is still difficult to share these works in an online collection without proving that a certain amount of hours per work has gone into trying to find rights holders, which for many institutions is simply not feasible when it comes to workload. Where copyright and distribution rights are absolutely crucial for living artists and also composers to make a living with their art – and nobody should take that away – the right situation for cultural heritage with expired copyright or unclear copyright situation, especially of artworks collected by public institutions and therewith already paid for by tax money, still needs to adapt further to lower the barriers to reuse it in digital mediation – and therewith making the works experienceable in digital media and use them for learning from and about art.
Andy Warhol, Andy2, 1985. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.
With regard to the second part of your question: I don’t necessarily think that art or its role in a society change conceptually. Digital accessibility and discourse might even strengthen the potential of an artwork comment or influence the society and be a startingpoint for discussions. Accessibility strengthens the cultural capital of a work. What changes in my point of view is rather the art market or art distribution when it comes to digitization. Where in the classical art market one pays for owning an artwork – whatever the tangible part is, especially when it comes to a conceptual artwork, a digital artwork or an installation – in digital distribution systems similar to streaming platforms for film or music one pays for access to an artwork. And with Digital Rights Management systems as well as new licensing models such as creative commons artists or galleries might gain more control over who is able to access, view or show a work and how it can be re-used.
© Stefanos Tsivopoulos, 'The Precarious Archive' at the exhibition 'Joint Memory: Photographic Fragments' at FOTODOK, curated by Daria Tuminas, 14.11.19-23.02.20. Installation views (c) Studio Hans Wilschut.
© Stefanos Tsivopoulos, 'The Precarious Archive' at the exhibition 'Joint Memory: Photographic Fragments' at FOTODOK, curated by Daria Tuminas, 14.11.19-23.02.20. Installation views (c) Studio Hans Wilschut.
© FOTODOK 'The Precarious Archive' at the exhibition 'Joint Memory: Photographic Fragments' at FOTODOK, curated by Daria Tuminas, 14.11.19-23.02.20.
© FOTODOK 'The Precarious Archive' at the exhibition 'Joint Memory: Photographic Fragments' at FOTODOK, curated by Daria Tuminas, 14.11.19-23.02.20.
© FOTODOK 'The Precarious Archive' at the exhibition 'Joint Memory: Photographic Fragments' at FOTODOK, curated by Daria Tuminas, 14.11.19-23.02.20.
This change in the media ecology also defines the expectations of the audience towards the museums, who traditionally acted more as broadcasters of information. It demands a change of mindset towards more openness and collaboration – taking the visitors seriously. Especially younger museum audiences increasingly demand to not only be presented with cultural objects and readymade information, but also to interact with the items, and be able to manipulate and reuse data about the objects and therewith be able to participate in the meaning making process. Moreover, the public want to have a choice in “what, when, where, and how” to learn, communicate, and access information. And for informal learning that meant the rise of learning outside the classroom with devices connected to the Web at all times - having all information at your fingertips. Where this means that museums have to adapt their mediation approach it also offers the chance to actually harness the individual knowledge of the visitors through collaborative and crowdsourcing processes, and that beyond the physical reach of the museum, as people who never met before physically could collaborate online. But it needs the trust of the museum into their visitors and taking them and their knowledge seriously. The people and community are central in this media culture.
This also lead me to think about the book 'Software Takes Command' by Lev Manovich which defines numerical code the new universal intermediary. You also argue on how the digital encoding of data has a big advantage: even though not directly accessible anymore to our senses the same data can be formatted for our perception in various different ways, without affecting the actual data, for example by displaying visual data in different views in an image editing program. How all of this will impact on the way art will be conceived and maybe be produced?
FW: Yes, the key is that software interfaces determine how we can interact with media and therewith also our perception. But it also implies a necessary translation process for example of physical artworks into digital data or information, that then becomes machine-readable but it also enables to bring together born physical with born digital artworks on the same platform or medium. As it is common with any translation there is always information that cannot be 1:1 translated into another medium and therefore needs to be documented or substituted in a different form. This is true for example for materiality in a painting or sculpture, the haptic of material or spatial information of an installation. So a documentation of an artwork or a translation of an artwork into a digital experience will never be a mere mimick of a physical experience or a replacement, but rather an experience in its own right, that comes closer to what I call a meta-experience – an experience that gives the users an understanding of possible experiences within an artwork. The results of such a translation process are creative products in their own right that are then suited to be experienced on the web or a mobile device also outside of the gallery. Thus also the reception-context of an artwork changes.
Selfiecity. Investigating the style of self-portraits (selfies) in five cities across the world. Posegrid Sao Paulo 2014 © Lev Manovich together with Dominikus Baur, Jay Chow, Daniel Goddemeyer, Nadav Hochman, Moritz Stefaner, Alise Tifentale, and Mehrdad Yazdani
In these grids, we have arranged the photos horizontally by head tilt; the vertical axis shows you if people look up or down.
In addition, we can crop and rotate the photos to center on the faces. Posegrid Sao Paulo, cropped and rotated.
Your thesis makes a contribution to the field of visual studies by conducting an analysis of the specific reception context of online repositories and online collections as well as data-based approaches to cultural learning on the Web. Could you develop your main contribution with this regard?
FW: The main contribution is not so much singularly to one field, but rather bridging the disciplinary and discursive boundaries of Media Theory, Mediation of Art and Culture, Museum Studies, Digital Humanities and the practical fields of Museum Technology as well Digital Pedagogy. To understand the production and reception contexts one needs first and foremost to understand how digital media, the media ecology and the underlying infrastructure works. The thesis bridges this understanding from Media Theory and the Software Studies paradigm of Lev Manovich together with an understanding of what an archive and its role within the society and for knowledge production actually is, as well as discourses around different approaches of cultural learning, approaches, possibilities and challenges of digital pedagogy, the current and future use of technologies within a museum for learning and display, as well as knowledge creation methodologies and research practices of Digital Humanities. All this creates a backdrop to understand practices and infrastructures of digital mediation more deeply than just one discipline could. This also revealed parallel discourses within several disciplines.
© Choreography/Direction: Pontus Lidberg; Artificial Intelligence Installation: Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm; Audio and Visual Design: Ryoji Ikeda; Original Music: Ryoji Ikeda; pphoto: Morten Abrahamsen/courtesy of Oriente Occidente Dance Festival
The infrastructures were collected and categorized in the thesis through a classification of online repositories, describing different types of platforms and sites that provide cultural data in specific contexts. Within these infrastructures and mediation or learning practices going along with them I identified four dimensions of meaning making: a) categorization of the material and information architecture; b) contextualization through retrieval; c) modes of presentation, contextualization, and interaction with cultural data; and d) participation and collaborative meaning-making.
Finally, in your personal opinion, are the possible challenges and achievements to expect when it comes to the digital mediation of art and culture.
Through the current situation with the pandemic digital mediation surely got a boost in importance. Museums are experimenting with new formats, especially for off-site experiences that are possible at home. Where previously a lot of effort was made to create experiences that go along with or expand or complement a physical museum visit, now the new focus is clearly how to bring the collections into the homes of the people. Besides financing these efforts big challenges ahead are surely how to make museums “fit for digital” – e.g. through the increase of digital literacy and mastery within museum staff or introduction of digital workflows and the adaption of team structures within the museum.
But also the topic of accessibility of digital offers will gain importance. Where digital has the chance of cater to individual special needs for example for blind, hearing-impaired or cognitive impaired visitors by tailoring the experience to them and providing perceivable and understandable art-experiences, there is still a huge room for improvement. The topic of creative translations and documentation of artworks, as well as providing tools for knowledge generation and storytelling – in short meaning-making – for a rising amount of cultural data are also topics, which will be important for the years to come.
Another important topic is the integration of physical and digital experience with cultural objects. The medium of Augmented Reality has a lot to offer conceptually (see also the project HoloMuse - and the prediction is that with the rise of glasswear in the consumer market it will increasingly find its way into mediation experiences.
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Literature references
de Mul, J. (2009). The work of art in the age of digital recombination. In M. van den Boomen, S. Lammes, A.-S. Lehmann, J. Raessens, & M. T. Schäfer (Eds.), Digital Material. Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology (pp. 95–106). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Welcome to Convergence Culture. Retrieved October 14,
Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. J., & Weigel, M. (2009). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21 st Century. Retrieved January 24, 2012
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Dr. Florian Wiencek is an expert on the interface of Digital Media and Cultural Learning. He earned his B.Sc. in Digital Media and M.A. in Art and Cultural Mediation from University of Bremen and his PhD in Visual Studies at Jacobs University Bremen. He currently works at Fluxguide in the areas of digital concepts, project management and R&D and participated amongst others as researcher in the innovation project HoloMuse.
He published his PhD at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany on the topic of “Digital Mediation of Art and Culture”, analyzing how digital media and digital data with their characteristics and affordances are currently employed in practices of mediation of art and culture and for cultural learning. Moreover he is interested in the creative (re-)use of digital heritage data for co-creative knowledge generation about and with art and culture together with the audience inside and outside of an exhibition or institution.
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