ELECTRONIC MEDIA & VISUAL ARTS

Credibility and uniqueness are the currency of cultural heritage. The
narrative of the objects and the aura of their material presence constitute
the spaces of experience in which collective memory gain substance
and intensity. Museums, libraries, archives and concert halls
unfold the impact of culture primarily through the real and material
presence of things and the authority of physical sensory perception.
They are the «teddy bears» of postfactual modernism, who seem to
compensate for the loss of trust in the fragmented and increasingly
immaterial world.
The ever accelerating convergence of virtual and material spheres
brings movement to this paradigm. More and more functions and
contexts of the art, the museums and their collections are being shifted
to digital instances. Virtual replicas represent the original work in
cyberspace, and generate new contexts, narratives, perspectives and
options for interrelations.
It is generally expected to regard digital replicas with the same confidence
and trustworthiness as we do with the material objects in our
museums and archives. In digital media, however, credibility is a fragile
construct. The costs of reliable validation interfere with the interpretability
of digital replicas or, even worse, lead to fakes and history factions.
“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” is the popular
paraphrase of this dilemma.
Against this background, the claim «Based on Trust», which we put
before the upcoming EVA conference, refers to all areas of the «virtualization
of the museum», to innovative reproduction and visualization
techniques in 2D, 3D, sound and video formats as well as to einstallations,
explorative VR applications and the semantic storytelling
of an associative AI. Authenticity and credibility do not arise by themselves,
but result from elaborate attribution processes and data curatorial
expertise. New credibility technologies and certification procedures
offer the opportunity to ensure the integrity of data, transparently and
permanently. For the public, for education, science, research and the
creative industries, the full dividend of the digital transformation of
cultural heritage can be seen when the identity-creating ‘originality’
and ‘uniqueness’ of the museum is also transferred to its digital formatting:
«If it is not accurate, it might as well not exist!»
The 26th Berlin EVA Conference invites you to present current positions
and practical applications on these topics. We expect innovative contributions
for the conference and for application-oriented workshops.
Processes, projects and products can be exhibited at the same time or
presented in the poster session.
As part of the international EVA conference network, the Berlin event is
a platform for transnational exchange and European co-operation.