The feeling of frustration, the uncertainty of the future, the restriction on individual freedom: when all this seemed to be behind us, everything comes back and we feel like March 2020. Conceived in an out-of-balance world in a period of extreme introspection and dissolution of time, at Artsformation we are exploring from an academic point of view, the intersection between arts, society and technology.

A few months after the general lockdown in Europe, and in the middle of the return of restrictive measures in different European countries, today we are publishing 3 reports with conclusions on the potential role of the arts to face digital challenges.

The signal we want to give with this project is clear: there is a new tendency in our society, that is moving more and more to the online dimension. With Artsformation we want to stress the centrality of the arts in a context of strong social crisis like the one we are experiencing.

We have been working to develop these academic reports related to the experience of artistic creations in the digital dimension, its potential and its challenges. If the first wave saw the world of culture moving to the online dimension, it is now necessary to conceive and create artistic proposals that live directly in that digital space that increasingly represents an element of learning and leisure – from school to culture.

These reports are part of a series of works that reviews the scholarly and practical state of the arts and establishes the beginning of the project’s research work laying the foundations for the upcoming activities of Artsformation.

The first report called The Role of the Arts in the Digital Transformation co-authored by researchers from BI’s NCIS and Copenhagen Business School focuses on the transformative and pharmacological potential of the arts to face the digital transformation challenges. The second report of the Artsformation Report Series titled The Role of Art in Enterprise is a joint work from researchers of the Trinity College Dublin, the Copenhagen Business School and BI’s NCIS. This report explores how enterprises and artists have engaged with each other providing historical and contemporary examples setting a base to further research on the potential of the artist industry in engaging with the digital transformation.  The last report of the series named The Social and Civic Impact of the Arts is a joint product of researchers from the Copenhagen Business School, BI’s NCIS, Trinity College Dublin and LATRA. This report is interested in the “social turn of the arts” and focuses on the so-called socially engaged arts and their potential to empower people who are not benefiting from the digital transformation. Likewise, this report presents some of the methods employed by socially engaged artists to bring about social change by giving voice to communities or acting as social entrepreneurs.

If you are interested in knowing more about our conclusions, get in touch with our team members and authors of the report.

https://artsformation.eu/team/