Art of the future and the digital amnesia syndrome. How technology affects culture

The Global CIO platform hosted an unusual discussion titled “Creativity + technology = art of the future” which tackled the issues of IT in the cultural and social areas. For the first time, we decided to discover how and how much modern technologies are transforming art. Below you can find a video recording of our conversation along with the speakers’ most memorable quotes.

IvanKarpushkin, entrepreneur, culture and technology expert, Stolypin Center director :

"Fewer and fewer artifacts can be associated directly with the modern time. For example, for year 2021, it will be difficult to find just five items relating to various types of human activity. We spend less and less effort to build a cultural layer in the offline, and more and more so to leave a digital footprint.

A digital native perceives the world mainly through their gadget. For them, a digital exhibition is a natural habitat, they take to it like a duck to water. The people of this generation are becoming economically active, and it’s them who make up a significant share of cultural events visitors. We must understand that in a decade these people will become the main cultural content consumers. It’s something we should take as a guideline."

Vladimir Opredelenov, Chief digital transformation officer (CDTO), Pushkin Museum (The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts):

"The key challenge is how to work with one’s memory as it digitalizes. What can someone who mostly lives in the digital world pass on to their descendants? As a result, we’ll end up knowing more about people who lived in the past centuries than about our contemporaries who passed away quite recently.

It's something they call the digital amnesia syndrome at UNESCO. Therefore, museums are faced with the task of creating sustainable digital ecosystems. A digital twin should be as workable as its real counterpart, and ideally even more so, in more detail. However, the technology still isn’t mature enough — for example, VR is not ready for mass use. It’ll take another 5-10 years to fine tune everything. At the same time, I’m sure that anything that has any cultural and historical value should be digitized. We sometimes fail to imagine that in 300 years’ time any everyday object can become extremely important.

Let me highlight that digitization of artifacts is not yet regulated in any way. Moreover, there are issues with digital art copyright, and the legal framework is not ready yet."

Yasha Mokhnacheva-Yavorskaya, creative director, ARTPLAY MEDIA:

"Digitalization doesn’t fully convey the artifact’s image, its three-dimensional nature. But a multimedia exhibition can convey context and a large amount of information within a short time.

Such exhibitions are multi-channel: for instance, they use sound and video. They impact the visitor from multiple angles, which allows condensing information by pushing a large amount of it in a short time frame. Therefore, multimedia has its own advantages compared to the original counterpart — for instance, from a financial point of view. It also has its flaws, like any copy does in relation to the original.

There are different degrees of being immersed in the image (VR, AR). However, the technology in general is still very immature. Nothing will replace attending a traditional exhibition — not in the near future, at least.

I think we’re going to see the rise of digital works of art following the development of NFT (pieces of digital art that you can see through your gadgets and buy for tokens). This new type of creative art has been substantially funded, so we can predict a boom in this area."

Alexey Melnik, creator of the SOL platform for remote sign language interpreting:

"It’s not the technology that’s immature, it’s that the people who create it are culturally immature. It’s important to provide technological entrepreneurs and IT stuff with a solid culture- and value-related groundwork which is being washed out in every possible area.

The gap between culture and technology is there, and it’s huge. Culture makes use of technologies that were not created specifically for it, but for other areas. As a result, when such technologies make it to the artistic field, they are often distorted. Culture becomes an outsider, while other areas are much stronger in terms of technology.

I think, the right thing to do is not to think about how to digitize existing processes, but how to come up with new ones instead. Otherwise, we’ll simply be copy-pasting processes that are already in place. What we need is to create a new digital art concept.

We can’t dismiss the fact that humanity has accumulated a lot of digital garbage. Sometimes nobody can fully understand the purpose of storing it, and there’s a risk that anywhere in the world we’ll eventually run out of the physical capacity to store it. We can’t delegate it to AI because it’s non-existent as a physical subject, it’s just a mechanism. I’m sure AI will never be able to sort out cultural objects and estimate their value. It will only be able to give recommendations and greatly facilitate the process by assisting a human expert."