Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Art - Computer Art / Graphics / Art in Media, grade: 8, Maastricht University, language: English, abstract: The new opportunities humanity gets while society develops and technology grows are seemingly non-terminating. Obviously, many people like to benefit from the arising advantages and the positive side-effects. The World Wide Web is one of these technologies, that on the one hand remarkably facilitate our life and on the other hand lead to a more complex and intertwined system and to changes that can not be reversed. In times of rapid growing technological progress civilization struggles with the issue of striking new paths to the future while at the same time fostering the own cultural heritage. For some people arts and culture are necessary, because they belong to their roots and are signs of their history, but opinions and notions about that theme vary widely. Still there are hotly debated problems relating to cultural policy – Heilbrun & Gray (2011) argue that arts and culture are caught in a materialistic world (p. 3) which is the reason why they always have to deal with a mighty term called ‘money’. But when thinking about culture and heritage, it is not just about keeping the past in mind and preserving ancient monuments. It is also about actively promoting the arts and culture, that currently come into existence. Technologies arise and so do arts. How to cope now with balancing between past and future, heritage and progress, art and high-tech? Bringing something forward means spending time on it, participating in it and therefore reinforcing it. A modern world needs people who get involved and that is why participation may be one of the pivotal things needed for generating a successful future. By taking a look at the current situation, I want to examine the special relationship between the use of the internet and participation in arts and culture. What do we understand by thinking of the term ‘cultural participation’ and for which reasons is it so important to participate? Which tool does the internet provide to influence and increase cultural participation and which examples can be made for that? After a general overview, the demand position will be adapted on the concrete example of the Netherlands. The results may create the basis for developing future scenarios and investigating questions like whether the web's popularity is able to create more popularity for cultural participation or if just the internet's degree of esteem will grow further without any impacts on culture.

This book examines cultural participation from three different, but interrelated perspectives: participatory art and aesthetics; participatory digital media, and participatory cultural policies and institutions. Focusing on how ideals and practices relating to cultural participation express and (re)produce different "cultures of participation", an interdisciplinary team of authors demonstrate how the areas of arts, digital media, and cultural policy and institutions are shaped by different but interrelated contextual backgrounds. Chapters offer a variety of perspectives and strategies for empirically identifying "cultures of participation" and their current transformations and tensions in various regional and national settings. This book will be of interest to academics and cultural leaders in the areas of museum studies, media and communications, arts, arts education, cultural studies, curatorial studies and digital studies. It will also be relevant for cultural workers, artists and policy makers interested in the participatory agenda in art, digital media and cultural institutions.

Media Studies.

The Web has been with us now for almost 25 years. An integral part of our social, cultural and political lives, ‘new media’ is simply not that new anymore. Despite the rapidly expanding archives of information at our disposal, and the recent growth of interest in web history as a field of research, the information available to us still far outstrips our understanding of how to interpret it. The SAGE Handbook of Web History marks the first comprehensive review of this subject to date. Its editors emphasise two main different forms of study: the use of the web as an historical resource, and the web as an object of study in its own right. Bringing together all the existing knowledge of the field, with an interdisciplinary focus and an international scope, this is an incomparable resource for researchers and students alike. Part One: The Web and Historiography Part Two: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections Part Three: Technical and Structural Dimensions of Web History Part Four: Platforms on the Web Part Five: Web History and Users, some Case Studies Part Six: The Roads Ahead

This book explores how digital culture is transforming museums in the 21st century. Offering a corpus of new evidence for readers to explore, the authors trace the digital evolution of the museum and that of their audiences, now fully immersed in digital life, from the Internet to home and work. In a world where life in code and digits has redefined human information behavior and dominates daily activity and communication, ubiquitous use of digital tools and technology is radically changing the social contexts and purposes of museum exhibitions and collections, the work of museum professionals and the expectations of visitors, real and virtual. Moving beyond their walls, with local and global communities, museums are evolving into highly dynamic, socially aware and relevant institutions as their connections to the global digital ecosystem are strengthened. As they adopt a visitor-centered model and design visitor experiences, their priorities shift to engage audiences, convey digital collections, and tell stories through exhibitions. This is all part of crafting a dynamic and innovative museum identity of the future, made whole by seamless integration with digital culture, digital thinking, aesthetics, seeing and hearing, where visitors are welcomed participants. The international and interdisciplinary chapter contributors include digital artists, academics, and museum professionals. In themed parts the chapters present varied evidence-based research and case studies on museum theory, philosophy, collections, exhibitions, libraries, digital art and digital future, to bring new insights and perspectives, designed to inspire readers. Enjoy the journey!

Contemporary Art and Digital Culture analyses the impact of the internet and digital technologies upon contemporary art in last fifteen years. Art production from the mid-2000s to the present has been, and continues to be, deeply inflected by social media and the rise of the internet as a mass medium, as well as by economic and political factors such as the financial crisis of 2008 and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. This book is the first to provide a thorough historicisation of the current interest in networks and digitality, and takes stock both of canonical twentieth-century art history and technological predecessors such as cybernetics and net.art. It shows how art addresses identity, circulation, privacy, and globalization newly in the digital age, and how feminism and gender binaries have been shifted by new conceptions of identity. It also looks at the art market and art scholarship to show how the internet's promises of democratization have been absorbed by the art world infrastructure. This book will be of interest to students, undergraduate and postgraduate, in contemporary art, especially those studying history of art and art practice and theory. It will also be of interest to students of film and media as well those working in curation or art education.

How the creative abundance of today's media culture was made possible by the decline of elitism in the arts and the rise of digital media. Media culture today encompasses a universe of forms—websites, video games, blogs, books, films, television and radio programs, magazines, and more—and a multitude of practices that include making, remixing, sharing, and critiquing. This multiplicity is so vast that it cannot be comprehended as a whole. In this book, Jay David Bolter traces the roots of our media multiverse to two developments in the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of elite art and the rise of digital media. Bolter explains that we no longer have a collective belief in “Culture with a capital C.” The hierarchies that ranked, for example, classical music as more important than pop, literary novels as more worthy than comic books, and television and movies as unserious have broken down. The art formerly known as high takes its place in the media plenitude. The elite culture of the twentieth century has left its mark on our current media landscape in the form of what Bolter calls “popular modernism.” Meanwhile, new forms of digital media have emerged and magnified these changes, offering new platforms for communication and expression. Bolter outlines a series of dichotomies that characterize our current media culture: catharsis and flow, the continuous rhythm of digital experience; remix (fueled by the internet's vast resources for sampling and mixing) and originality; history (not replayable) and simulation (endlessly replayable); and social media and coherent politics.