Digital Arts and Culture: Transformation or Transgression?

This special issue examines the many dimensions of technological developments and their influence on aesthetic, economic, political, organizational, and scientific practices as well as on discourses in cultural management and cultural policy.

Digitization and digitalization have both had profound effects on our thinking, perception, and actions in the fields of arts and culture. Dealing with artificial intelligence, big data, social media, and other digital phenomena reconfigures social patterns of action, infrastructures, and processes of artistic production, distribution, and reception. Entire industries and sectors are changing rapidly, and with them the conditions of work and consumption in film, music, literature and other creative industries. At the same time, new technologies in the cultural field influence common research methods and might bring about new research designs. These issues are particularly acute during the current COVID 19 pandemic with serious effects on the arts and cultural fields, showing the possibilities, but also the limits, of digitalization/digitization in the cultural sector. What challenges and opportunities does the crisis imply for the cultural sector as a whole?

Contributors are invited to deal with the following topics:

• changing production conditions and artistic practices
• new research designs in cultural policy and cultural management
• new teaching concepts
• new organizational concepts and working models
• the role of social media in marketing