Introducting Moonshot
We see that the potential of Dutch digital culture is not being used to the full. This Moonshot explores the opportunities and bottlenecks in the sector. The input is drawn from expert sessions held at Cinekid, NFF, IDFA and Nieuwe Instituut.
The Moonshot aims to provide a detailed picture of digital culture, the players, the value of the field, the bottlenecks and possible solutions.
Image generated by the text-to-image application Stable Diffusion, with the promts: ‘realistic dancing astronaut with a VR-headset with the moon reflected in it’.
Digitisation versus digital culture
The digital culture sector comprises a wide variety of makers, training courses, research institutes, game companies, producers, festivals, organisations, museums, galleries, development institutions and funding bodies. Activities in this world take place between two extremes. On the one hand there are born-digital projects, which are digital through and through. They often focus on technology and its impact as their subject matter, and they use software and code as tools. They can take different forms, from purely online or digital, to installations and performances, to alternative interfaces. At the other end of the spectrum, we see digitisation: the process by which analogue information is converted into digital resources; this is often used to reach a larger audience or to archive analogue forms.
The report Digitisation as an Opportunity (Digitalisering als kans, 2022) by the Council for Culture principally focuses on the digitisation of culture. The Council notes that the Dutch cultural sector responded to the difficult years of the Covid-19 pandemic with considerable innovation: ‘Digital culture proved to be a valuable addition to existing cultural and creative practice,’ the report says. Based on this idea, the report recommends that the cultural sector should continue the digital transformation and ‘embrace the positive possibilities of digitalisation’ with the main goal of increasing public reach and deepening the visitor experience. The importance of digitisation for the cultural sector is crystal clear. This has led to developments such as Cultuurloket DigitALL, a public-private partnership which provides resources for cultural organisations wishing to widen their audiences using digital technology.*
*A consortium of funding bodies, both private (including Het Cultuurfonds, Fonds 21 and VSB Fonds) and public (Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, City of Amsterdam).
Horizon Forbidden West, Guerrilla
The Moonshot focuses on digital culture as an independent medium and sector. As such, it deserves recognition: it offers contemporary forms of expression and encourages critical thinking about the impact of digital technologies.
Digital culture has a wider scope than the ‘classic’ disciplines in the cultural and creative sector. Its inherently interdisciplinary nature is both its strength and its Achilles heel.
Within the chain of education, research, development, production, distribution, collection, use and archiving/conservation of digital works, major progress has been made in the Netherlands since the 1960s. Both young talent and experienced makers produce innovative, cutting-edge projects, and the sector receives well-deserved international recognition.
Nevertheless, funding this entire chain is a constant challenge for the sector. The development organisations responsible for experimentation, development and knowledge sharing within their own field are crucial to the sector’s vibrance and diversity. Presentation venues and post-academic training institutions, both large and small, new and existing, jointly fulfil a crucial role in this ecosystem with regard to talent development, experimentation, network building, the production of new work, and the establishment of digital culture within their own areas of work.
Examples of these platforms include V2_, STRP, IMPAKT, Submarine, Montevideo/NIMk/LIMA, TodaysArt, The Grey Space in the Middle, Mu Hybrid Art House, and Tetem.
These organisations function as the R&D of the digital culture sector. Through their activities, they explore topical issues arising in a local, national and international context. They play an important role (and in some cases have done for decades) as clients, platforms for new talent and mid-career makers, and meeting places for professionals and interested audiences.
Symbiosis by Polymorf & Studio Biarritz
R&D
R&D for digital projects takes a lot of time: a project entails not only creating the content, but also researching the possibilities, limitations and implications of the required technology. In terms of funding, however, the importance of this development phase and the budgets it requires are structurally underestimated.
The Dutch film festivals play an important role as venues for first public screenings. Cinekid, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and Netherlands Film Festival (NFF) receive structural funding from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science as ‘basic cultural infrastructure’ (culturele basisinfrastructuur, BIS). The festivals have been working on digital culture programmes for years and have undergone major developments. The Digital Culture programme at Cinekid dates back to 1998, when it was launched in the form of the Kids & Bits programme at De Balie; IDFA Doclab has been running since 2007; and NFF’s Storyspace programme started in 2016. However, due to their BIS funding status, these festivals are not eligible for additional support from the Creative Industries Fund and their digital culture programmes are dependent on smaller, short-term project subsidies from private funds.
This form of fundraising is time-consuming and makes it hard to develop a long-term strategy.