Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts (DRHA) conference 2022. Digital Sustainability: from Resilience to Transformation

DRHA 2022 brought together artists, scholars, educators, curators, digital researchers, and entrepreneurs interested in the ways digital technology intersects with the arts and humanities. The theme for the 2022 edition of the conference was ‘Digital Sustainability’ in light of the immediate challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the longer-term shadow of climate catastrophe.

Since its outbreak in early 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic became a crisis that permeated all types of human activity. It could be conceived as a distinct hyper-phenomenon – perhaps, the first of its kind in recent history. The creative and cultural industries represented one of the sectors hardest hit by this global health crisis. Venue-based creative practices around the world (museums, galleries, theatres, performing arts, live music, festivals, cinemas, etc.) were severely affected by closures and social distancing measures. The abrupt drop in revenue put their sustainability at risk; UNESCO estimated that 10 million creative jobs were lost in 2020, wiping $750 billion off the value of the global cultural and creative industries (2020). The effects of the pandemic on the creative industries were still felt at the time of the conference in 2022. Research suggested that the creative sector had not been sufficiently resilient in the face of the pandemic (Khlystova, Kalyuzhnova, and Belitski 2022), which might partly be attributed to the large proportion of SMEs and free-lancers who have higher ‘mortality’ rates and were hit harder by the pandemic (Mizen 2020; OECD 2020).

Despite the challenges posed by COVID-19 on the creative industries, the DRHA ‘22 conference and this affiliated issue illustrate how many artists were able to transform these challenges into opportunities for innovation and experimentation, re-examining their own practice and developing new approaches to their work: ‘Krajac “examines the choreographic sphere through the perspectives of cine-digitalities, archival memories, and camera mediations” to argue that “our pandemic and post-pandemic Zoomscapes introduced a new cine-material plane that reorganized the choreographic process, as well as its presence and remoteness.”’ Webb and Layton examine three cases of innovation that emerged in performance practice as a direct result of COVID-19 restrictions to argue that, though ‘digital skills and competences are very important for performance makers (…) making successful digital performance is not necessarily dependent on the mastery of specific technical skills but rather a creative use of digital technologies’. Their article aims to inform discussions about skills and the training needs of future performers and performance-makers.

Guljajeva, Sola and Kuzmin present the interactive performance NeuroKnitting Beethoven, which was conceived as ‘a live work combining music, neurofeedback and algorithmic knitting to commemorate Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th anniversary and to provide an alternative experience of the classical music canon’. The performance had to be reconceived as a telematic project due to travel restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic; an opportunity the artists used to examine the capabilities of biometric data. Guljajeva et al. argue that ‘sensification of brain data could be a means for creating an alternative space of remote intimacy’ between participants who find themselves physically isolated from each other due to the pandemic or for other reasons.

Mastrominico found herself ‘grounded’ at home with her creative and life partner and family. In her contribution, she discusses ‘home as a stage, and its intersection with new technologies through an autoethnographic recollection and analysis of practice research project Flanker Origami: a live online performance on Zoom devised by Organic Theatre’. The piece explores the deep nexus between home, identity and gender and their impact in reconfiguring ‘notions of self and authenticity in performance processes driven by the pandemic’.

Greuter, Mulvaney and Myers present Deakin Motion Lab’s approach to archiving the immersive performance Because the Night by Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre using 360-degree filming technologies. The performance was disrupted by the pandemic and eventually curtailed prematurely due to lockdown restrictions. The researchers aimed to simulate the audience’s embodied and emergent experience of the performance as this was essential to the work’s dramatic form.

Lee, de Weck, Yang and Coughlin examine the organisational transformation of digital design platforms (DDPs) to present considerations around their value propositions, services, and business models in the context of large, complex and systemic transformational challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Their study identifies key takeaways for the transformation of DDPs during that time, around the need to craft new partnerships, identify criteria for transformation, extend participants’ engagement levels, and leverage collective resources.

These contributions illustrate the resilience and innovative capabilities of artists and creatives, who turned obstacles and setbacks into opportunities for the development of new methodological approaches to the creation, organisation and archiving of creative practice, leading to questions about the technological skills and technical competencies needed by future creatives, performers and makers.

The outbreak of the pandemic coincided with the increasingly present effects of climate catastrophe: 2020 was being pronounced, jointly with 2016, the warmest year on record by NASA (2021) and Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) (Hausfather 2020). Climate catastrophe has widespread effects on the environment through accelerated sea level rise, longer and more intense periods of heatwaves, and more extreme weather phenomena causing severe droughts, rainfalls and wildfires across the world. The effects of climate catastrophe are bound to have severe impacts for life on earth, as the global average temperatures are expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees C within the next few decades (NASA n/d; World Meteorological Organization 2023). Though the creative industries, like every other activity, have a carbon footprint, creatives have been at the forefront of environmental campaigns, advocating for action and lifestyle change for the sector and more widely (Julie’s Bicycle and BOP Consulting 2022, 4).

Some of the contributions to DRHA ‘22 directly engaged with the challenge of climate catastrophe, exploring the possible uses of digital technologies to facilitate positive action and allowing themselves to imagine innovative interventions that might aid survival. In her Document ‘The “Bichi” Project’, for example, Badani ‘discusses how digital media and the use of food serve to design speculative new edibles in times when the future of food is jeopardized by the anthropogenically induced change in climate that causes biodiversity loss and food chain disruptions’. Badani’s DIY ‘kitchen science’ leads to ‘the design of evocative “animal-human-vegetal-polygender” 3D simulations positioned between the organic and the computational’, which underscore the need to channel efforts towards the adaptation and co-existence of food chains.

The combination of the ‘pandemic effect’ on creative industries and the context of climate catastrophe brought increased focus on the dual questions of sustainability and resilience. During COVID-19 lockdowns around the globe, digital technology applications captured our imagination through their potential to support people in enduring isolation and countering the effects of closures and restrictions through creativity and innovation. Emerging technologies, such as distributed immersive environments and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and established technologies, such as live streaming, social media, and online social platforms, provided the means of connecting people, distributing content, moving social and cultural experiences online and disrupting the future of creative industries. The COVID-19 crisis reminded us, UNESCO argued, that ‘we should nurture the socially beneficial aspects of digital technologies and focus on improving access and uses in parts of the world where it is lacking’ (2021).

A case in point is the work of Garcia-Lara and Bugueño-Cordova, melding tradition and innovation in the context of indigenous knowledge and know-how in a research project that spans both archives and generative artistic practice with careful attention to indigenous culture and knowledge, illustrating how technological innovation does not have to be viewed in opposition to tradition. The authors consider methods of protecting the cultural rights of indigenous people of Chile, suggesting that the combination of AI models with generative and parametric algorithms offers ‘a panorama of infinite interactions, possibilities, and results’ for the configuration of a ‘transcultural language’.

The work of Strange, Gooch and Collinson on sustainable models for digital collections is also pertinent here. Strange et al. ‘offer(s) a practical insight to the methods being employed at the University of Oxford to support digital humanities scholars (and others) safeguard their digital legacy for future generations’, examining how institutions can support the medium and long-term hosting and open access of semi-active data collections once the project for which they were developed comes to an end.

Zhou’s article ‘The Closest and the Farthest Away’ focuses on notions of space within the context of intermediality, to address spatialised politics that intervene in the agency of spectatorship. Building on the work of Michel de Certeau and Sarah Bay-Cheng, Zhou ‘explores the re-configuration of theatre space in the intermedial spatial practice of National Theatre Live’.

Sant and Tabone explore data visualisation as artistic practice. The piece presented at the DRHA ‘22 conference exhibition at Kingston University’s Stanley Picker Gallery, called Naked Data, employed ‘a data set depicting prehistoric female figurines held by Heritage Malta’. The research aims to develop a model for processing information about art collections, museum policies, and ‘ways to engage with cultural heritage through data’, offering a method of opening up knowledge about heritage collections and enabling audiences to look for things hidden in collections that are not chosen for display in cultural institutions.

Whatley et al.’s work engages with a different type of accessibility facilitated by technological innovation. The study has ‘emerged from an interdisciplinary collaboration between prosthesis-using disabled dance artists, computer scientists, dance researchers and engineers to explore the transformative potential of digital technologies to co-create aesthetically personalised prosthetics from dance movements’. The article shares dancers’ reflections on ‘questions around agency, appropriation, ownership and the political implications of disability as a site of resistance’, airing broader questions around the meaning of terms such as ‘connection’ and ‘access’ in the context of digital innovation.

Lurking in the background are significant developments in AI, or more precisely Machine Learning (ML), technology. The achievements of ML systems are sometimes over-hyped; nevertheless, it is hard to deny the impact that ML methods are having on research in many fields and their potential applications in the making and studying of creative practices that fall within the scope of this journal. Scholars and artists versed in digital technology have an opportunity to contribute to these developments, applying their interdisciplinary understandings, knowledge and expertise in working in the intersections between art, creativity and digital innovation. For example, claims for the authenticity of unfinished work completed using AI need to be scrutinised and evaluated. At the same time, artists’ creative explorations of new technology often serve to expose both its creative potential and its limitations. AI, and particularly large ML models with their billions of parameters and opaque training procedures, are ripe for a robust artistic shake-down to explore the gaps in their ‘learning’ and the limitations of their ‘intelligence’.

Anticipating these developments, Hadzi puts forward an open justice approach to cyber-crimes, to include AI and XR crimes, in the context of the rise of the metaverse. He compares the legal systems in the EU and USA and concludes by ‘reviewing possible international open justice scenarios for XR criminals’. His contribution highlights urgent questions around ethical approaches to technological innovation and presents the value of engaging artists, creatives and makers in these debates. Questions around ethics of care, sustainability, equality and inclusion, accessibility and connectivity, were addressed by DRHA ‘22 and continue to be both pertinent and urgent. Artists and creatives, particularly those who have worked at the intersections of digital creativity and technological innovation, bring invaluable understanding and insights, which can contribute to the grand challenges of our times; and their ability to think ‘outside the box’ can turn challenges into opportunities for innovation and positive change.

The DRHA 2022 conference was chaired by Professor Maria Chatzichristodoulou and co-chaired by Dr Bill Balaskas, Dr Oded Ben Tal and Dr Sylvia Tzvetanova Yung.