There is insufficient access to funding, and a lack of continuity and structural recognition within cultural funding bodies and the structural funding by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (BIS). Many makers and festivals depend on project grants. This means that after each project they have to start again with a clean slate and an empty wallet. Overheads are often not covered. This makes research, development and long-term planning difficult. Producers need time and space to establish the multi-year and international partnerships that are crucial for the Dutch market and international distribution. The sector’s profile benefits from having trend-setting examples and visible successes to reach a large audience. The capacity of mid-career artists and small companies to develop is permanently under pressure because they lack money and opportunities for further training, updating skills or deepening existing knowledge. Makers are economising on training, and there is a risk that development will stagnate.

Another important issue is the inadequate infrastructure for distribution and presentation, which is a precondition for a workable revenue model for the digital culture sector. Distribution is still in its infancy, and presentation is so laborious and expensive (particularly because of the expense of equipment and travel) that the income rarely covers the cost. Producers working on distribution often do so in-kind. In addition, the division of roles between makers and producers in this sector is not the same as in film, gaming or theatre.

Responsibility for distribution often lies with the makers and artists themselves, which creates an additional workload. Moreover, little guidance in marketing, communications and business management is available for the makers of this type of work LIMA - which specialises in conservation and distribution - and SEE NL- which focuses more on international film distribution but can sometimes support VR, both have insufficient scope to offer assistance.

As yet, there is no separate business model for the presentation and distribution of digital culture, yet it is important as a means to introduce work to the public, as a client, as a place to experiment, as a source of knowledge and inspiration and as a place where national and international makers can meet. The film festivals that play an important role in this distribution and are specifically oriented towards digital culture are short, and venues such as MU Hybrid Art House, NXT Museum, and Tetem tend to attract a specialist audience, although interest is increasing among a wider and especially young audience.

The presentation of digital culture is expensive. The costs of technology and staff come in addition to the regular budget for exhibitions or screenings. Moreover, extra time and attention is needed for marketing. One initiative to conduct further research on this is by the company Cassette Stories, which has started a VR distribution pilot called Nu:Reality. in collaboration with the French event agency Diversion Cinema. With this platform for artistically high-quality VR experiences, they aim to integrate VR into the everyday programming and experience of cinemas.

Another shortcoming is that there are not enough online presentation platforms for games and VR with a cultural identity that is able to reach a large audience. For cultural VR, interactive web docs and gaming, it would be beneficial to have a digital version of the film platform Mubi, for example.

The challenges in presenting digital culture contribute to a lack of visibility for the entire sector. Moreover, little is written about digital culture from an artistic and cultural point of view, and there is no specific platform for such writing. The sector needs to be monitored; it is important to analyse the growth and development taking place in the sector, and what is lacking. Knowledge of the sector is currently fragmented and lacks funding, which means that developments are not systematically monitored over a longer period.

Digital culture also suffers from monopolism in the commercial sector and the dominance of companies such as Meta (and formerly Oculus), Steam and Bytedance. While digital culture has more value than the purely economic, the lobbying regarding the sector regularly plays off culture off against economics, return on investments and scaling. Research in the sector relating to the technology’s impact on society, the technology itself, and the role of art as a cultural expression and identity is regularly dismissed as haphazard experimentation.

The current lack of visibility across the board also makes it hard for courses to attract enough new students, and there is a permanent shortage of makers, designers and developers to work on larger titles on commission. If the sector has an independent profile with its own financial structure and clear platforms for presentation and discourse, the increased awareness of digital culture will attract more people to the sector from the start of the chain as students.

The diversity of the work, its frequently interactive nature and the rapid development of the technologies employed means that archiving has to be custom-made, and a lot of research is still needed. Small and independent parties in particular lack the money, time and space to deal with this complex subject.

Some specialist organisations are engaged in archiving. They include as Sound and Vision, which deals with archiving games; Network Archives for Design and Digital Culture (NADD) which works on an accessible memory for design and digital culture; and LIMA which manages a large number of digital collections and media artworks created over the past 50 years.

The creative digital sector has only been included in the National Digital Heritage Strategy since the 2021-2024 version. As yet, however, today’s independent makers are often left to their own devices in dealing with the problem of protecting their work against changing formats and technologies, bit rot and other forms of decay. There is a good chance that a lot of digital work will disappear into the black hole of history, only to be found in writing or on video.

Digital culture is ephemeral due to its dependence on advancing technology. Considerable joint efforts are needed to ensure at least a part of this heritage is conserved.

Now that our sector has for some time grown beyond its adolescence, we want to tackle a number of issues that are important both nationally and internationally. There is still a lot to be gained in the sector in terms of cultural diversity, both on the part of the makers and their subjects and on the part of the audience. This applies not only to professional practice, but also to vocational training. Moreover, diversity among audiences and reviewers should also be considered in terms of age, education and background. Inclusion is also not sufficiently taken into consideration either within the practice of makers or in the context of presentation and audience. At individual project level, specific attention is occasionally paid to these topics, such as the British VR project Notes on Blindness.

Sustainability is also an important issue for makers, producers and festivals, and it regularly features as a subject in their stories and works. The platform for internet culture The Hmm, for example, does so with its focus on a lighter internet.

Sustainability is also increasingly playing a role in production methods and programme organisation: European guests are encouraged to travel by train, guests from other parts of the world more often participate via video calls, and the ecological impact of NFTs is the subject of critical discussion and a reason for research into more sustainable solutions in the sector.

Within the subject of sustainability, there is also another issue at play: the sustainability of knowledge in the sector. As a sector, how can we share knowledge more effectively and more structurally?

The issue of fair practice has received a lot of attention in recent years, with efforts to improve working conditions in the cultural and creative sector in a broad sense, including fair pay for workers and contractors and an increase in fees paid to artists. Working conditions and workload throughout the sector are also a recognised problem. Organisations involved include Kunstenaarshonoraria, a website providing guidelines for artists’ fees; Kunstenbond, a union for the cultural and creative sector; Platform Beeldende Kunst, a professional association of visual artists BBK (Beroepsvereniging van Beeldende Kunstenaars) and De Zaak Nu – an organisation for contemporary art institutions, which unites with other organisations in the sector in BKNL, an informal platform for consultation. This guideline is a joint initiative of the visual arts sector to achieve fair practice in professional contracts between institutions and artists.

Platform ACCT (Arbeidsmarkt Culturele en Creatieve Toekomst) also hosts a large number of programmes that contribute to improving the labour market in the cultural and creative sector. The organisation was founded with the support of Kunstenbond (a cultural and creative sector trade union) and Federatie Cultuur (a federation of employers’ associations in the sector) and is financed by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and supported by the major cultural organisations in the Netherlands.