WittenLab. Zukunftslabor Studium fundamentale

Chair of Digital Arts and Cultural Mediation

The chair is primarily dedicated to the interactions of materiality, immateriality and variability in the digital arts. This is achieved through three focal points, which are explored in scientific and artistic collaboration:

I. Digitality as drive and challenge: media upheavals and technological innovations as catalysts for artistic practice

II. cultural mediation: changes in the distribution, presentation and accessibility of the arts through digitality

III. conditions of digital art and cultural production: production, archiving, preservation and resource requirements of digital arts

The chair researches digitisation processes in the arts: in cultural terms, digitality has increasingly shifted from the paradigm of reproduction to that of production. It therefore examines how artists react to this in terms of motifs, material, but also structurally in their work: Algorithms, codes, data and generative practices are now part of artistic work.

Artworks are shaped by new instruments such as so-called 'artificial intelligence'; the arts are also changing through virtuality and immersive concepts, through the use of computers or robotics. The question is how media are currently being digitally transformed and placed in new sensory and spatial contexts.

It also examines how institutional practice is being expanded by smart extended reality devices. All of this is not only changing art itself, but also its perception and thus access to it: digital socio-cultural and culturally (re)producing networks are increasingly forming the technological interfaces that influence people's physical and environmental experiences of the arts.