Digital meets Culture

online, 2nd October 2020 - during Mannheim 2020 event

Re-Inventing Heritage for Sustainable Urban Regeneration

Project ROCK – Regeneration and Optimization of Cultural heritage in creative and Knowledge cities invites you to join the session ‘Re-Inventing Heritage for Sustainable Urban Regeneration’ taking place on 2 October as part of Mannheim2020.

Mannheim2020, the 9th edition of the European Conference on Sustainable Cities & Towns, is organised as a virtual event from 30 September to 2 October 2020. It will bring together local and regional leaders, European and international institutions and some of the brightest minds working on cutting edge research, businesses and the civil society to forge a more sustainable Europe. Visit the conference website to know more about the event and register.

As part of Mannheim2020, ROCK actions will be presented at the Solution Session ‘Re-Inventing Heritage for Sustainable Urban Regeneration’. The session will take place on 2 October from 9:30 till 11:00 CET.

The session will present first-hand examples of how cultural heritage serves as a driver for the sustainable regeneration of urban areas. The Cities of Hamburg, Rijeka, Sunderland, and Turin will showcase their best practices and reflect on lessons learned focussing on the guiding questions:

How do heritage, culture and creativity contribute to local sustainable development?
What is the role of cultural heritage in promoting social inclusion and cohesion?
What is the link between cultural heritage and resilience – and how can cities benefit from synergies between the two?

The session will explore how cultural heritage has the potential to enable new forms of collaboration and cultural production, to support cities to cope with future challenges, creating the conditions to carry out sustainable adaptive reuse projects. Participants will also discuss how cultural heritage can contribute to strengthening the resilience of communities. The City of Turin, one of ROCK Role Model cities, will present their views on how heritage, culture and creativity are relevant for the sustainable development of the City of Turin, specifically looking at the examples of adaptive heritage reuse initiatives co-developed together with local community groups.

To join ROCK at the session ‘Re-Inventing Heritage for Sustainable Urban Regeneration’ and be part of sustainable local transformation, register for Mannheim2020 here.

The 9th European Conference on Sustainable Cities & Towns is organised by ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability and the City of Mannheim with a much valued support of partners.

online event, 26th October 2020

PAGODE Technical Workshop

Originally planned as a project meeting in Athens focused on dataset enrichment, due to the covid-crisis this event was expanded and transformed in an online gathering, to discuss and share knowledge on metadata curation, vocabularies and thesauri, semantic enrichment, aggregation of data for publication in Europeana portal and the Europeana Publishing Framework, all this with a strong focus on building capacity inside Cultural Heritage Institutions.

Additionally, with the occasion of this event, the PAGODE Annotation Pilot was presented launched, with participants asked to look at images available in Europeana and add more descriptive tags.

The presentations showed during the event will be published soon and made available here

The PAGODE Technical Workshop is organized by the project team at PostScriptum, in collaboration with Photoconsortium and Europeana.

a dense month with 3 engaging screening programs available online

Video art collaborations in October 2020 by Video Art Miden

October 2020 is a month of collaborations for Video Art Miden: 3 online screening programs will be available from 1 to 31 of October on Video Art Miden’s youtube channel, 2 of them curated by invited collaborators, while one more thematic program will be screened in the frame of Balkan Can Kino Film Symposium & Festival, Athens (GR).

More specifically, in October, video art friends around the world will have the opportunity to watch online:

-a selection of video works that approach with sensitivity, in a poetic but also critical way, issues related to the environment and life in a holistic view, through a palimpsest of life forms on our planet (EARTHLINGS: Snapshots from the End), curated by 2 invited collaborators, Evi Stamou and Pietro Radin,

-a program with 9 student works from the Photography & Video Laboratory of the Department of Fine & Applied Arts, School of Fine Arts, Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), curated by professors Georgios Katsagelos and Stelios Dexis,

-a program that investigates the barriers and walls that rise dividing countries and populations in our era and their socio/psychological impact on humans today (Borders), curated by Olga & Gioula Papadopoulou.

In addition, Video Art Miden collaborates once more with Balkan Can Kino Film Symposium & Festival, which will take place in Athens from 9 to 18 of October 2020, presenting the video art program Past Present Continuous. The selection was curated by Olga & Gioula Papadopoulou especially for this year’s edition of the symposium, which focuses on the Balkan area, under the theme Balkans Today. The present of a wounded landscape.

The programs will remain open on Video Art Miden’s youtube channel from 1 to 31 of October 2020: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8ly7FIRWx2-fXyrAulY-DQ

[Show as slideshow]

More analytically:

EARTHLINGS: Snapshots from the End // Curated by Evi Stamou & Pietro Radin

An elegiac portrait of an ailing planet, a reluctant home for countless hopeful inhabitants (trees and spiders, crows and mollusk, goats and humans).

Kristian Xipolias, Ruina, Italy 2019, 3.13

Dante Albanesi, Sabbia fine estate, Italy 2019, 4.30

Isabelle Nouzha, Dystopian Patterns, Belgium/Lebanon 2019, 6.43

Shelly Silver, Score for Joanna Kotze, Italy/USA 2019, 4.16

Alina Vasilchenko, The Crows (Urban Birds), Russia 2018, 3.25

Gabriele Rossi, Oneira Glyka, France/Greece 2018, 5.27

Maya Connors, Diary of an organism (newly translated), Germany 2019, 11.20

Przemek Węgrzyn, Scarcity, Poland 2019, 14.45

Shelly Silver, This Film, Germany/USA 2018, 6.52

Eleni Magklara, Stelios Papiemidoglou & Efi Roufagala, Imprint, Greece 2019, 3.11

________________

Student works – Photography & Video Laboratory

Department of Fine & Applied Arts, School of Fine Arts, Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki (AUTH)

Curated by Georgios Katsagelos & Stelios Dexis

A group of nine young artists, students of the Photography and Video Laboratory of the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, School of Fine Arts – Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, under the guidance of their two professors Georgios Katsagelos and Stelios Dexis, present their project “Travel”. Through an academic process, an “artistic osmosis” is taking place, almost automatically, when artists and teachers discuss, work and create for a long period together, in a shared space, in the same laboratory. Apart from the obvious differences between the individual works, the search for common places, common reflections and interactions is an interesting challenge.

The selection includes video projects and video installations of various plastic approaches. The works are fruits of the artistic research during an Academic year, while the common presentation of the works serves as a trigger for young artists to coordinate creatively with their teachers. The works deal with the concept of “travel”, sometimes as a sketch diary and sometimes as a unified autonomous project, through contemporary approaches both at the technical level and the forms of narration.

Participant students: Fani Arapi, Vasiliki Lolidou, Orestis Papaconstantinou, Costas Doulmantzis, Alexandros Tsakonas, Thomas Kaliaras, Charalambos Swartz, Fotis Kilelelis, Stefania Patrikiou

________________

Borders // Curated by Olga & Gioula Papadopoulou

Have you ever felt displaced? Videoworks seeking to find a global understanding through topics of war, division, discrimination, immigration, identity, Home.

Cesare Saldicco, Autumn of the Nations, Italy 2019, 3.00

Alex Mendez Giner, Displaced, Venezuela-USA 2019, 13.40

Adriana Lopez Garibay, Soldier’s life, Mexico 2019, 5.07

Felice Hapetzeder, Image of a traitor, Sweden 2017, 8.52

Fran Orallo, Border, UK 2019, 3.47

Lisi Prada, Almost Invisible [Two Poems to Syria], Spain 2018, 10.00

Kim Collmer, Too big to see, Germany/Croatia 2019, 4.04

________________

Lastly, Video Art Miden participates in this year’s edition of Balkan Can Kino Film Symposium & Festival (http://balkan-can-kino.com/), which will take place in Athens from 9 to 18 of October 2020, with a selection curated especially for this year’s thematic of the symposium: Balkans Today. The present of a wounded landscape.

Past present continuous // Curated by Olga & Gioula Papadopoulou

The Balkans. A world that has suffered and endured consecutive wars and crises, a world constantly struggling to express its personality in adversity. How is the current landscape of the Balkans characterized by the specific (economic-social-political) conditions that occurred in the previous years? And how much do memories still influence, mark and even “scar” the way we think about the present?

The selection investigates the connections between the past and the present though works that make references to 7 Balkan countries: Slovenia, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria.

Ana Čigon, Phoney Sights, Slovenia 2019, 21.49

Sophie Atkins, This Is Not Our Horse, North Macedonia 2019, 2.37

Alex Faoro & Helena Deda, Ditët e Luftës (Days of War), USA 2019, 3.18

Alexandra Bouge, The Trial, France 2019, 6.33

Wild Pear Arts, I Have a Song to Sing You (Imam pesmu da vam pevam), Serbia/UK, 2018, 5.40

Melina Peña, Ha Llegao la Hora (The Time has Come), Bosnia & Herzegovina 2018, 7.36

Silvia De Gennaro, Travel Notebooks: Kardzhali Bulgaria, Italy 2016, 2.12

Lea Jazbec, Self – portrait – Behind the reflection 01, Slovenia 2016, 8.13

More info on Video Art Miden’s website: www.festivalmiden.gr

Video Art Miden is an independent organization for the exploration and promotion of video art. Founded by an independent group of Greek artists in 2005, it has been one of the earliest specialized video-art festivals in Greece, setting as basic aims to stimulate the creation of original video art, to help spread it and develop relevant research.

Through collaborations and exchanges with major international festivals and organizations, it has been recognized as one of the most successful and interesting video art platforms internationally and as an important cultural exchange point for Greek and international video art. Miden screening programs have traveled in many cities of Greece and all over the world, and they are hosted by significant festivals, museums and institutions globally.

(*Miden means “zero” in Greek)

Art direction: Gioula Papadopoulou – Margarita Stavraki

Info: www.festivalmiden.gr || www.facebook.com/videoartmiden || https://www.instagram.com/videoart_miden/

The European Conference on Sustainable Cities & Towns - Session ‘Re-Inventing Heritage for Sustainable Urban Regeneration’

What is the link between cultural heritage and resilience?

The 9th edition of the European Conference on Sustainable Cities & Towns will take place from 30th September to 2nd October, to carry on a debate on how to shape a more sustainable Europe.
It is organised by ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability and the City of Mannheim with a much valued support of partners.

The conference will be organised as a virtual event and will bring together local and regional leaders, European and international institutions and some of the brightest minds working on cutting edge research, businesses and the civil society.

As part of Mannheim2020, the Solution Session ‘Re-Inventing Heritage for Sustainable Urban Regeneration’ is co-organised with ARCH Project.
In this session the cities of Hamburg, Rijeka, Sunderland, and Turin will showcase their best practices and reflect on lessons learned.
A key discussion will be how cultural heritage can contribute to strengthening the resilience of communities.
Specifically will be presentend the experience of Hamburg, one of four ARCH pilot cities, focusing on the UNESCO World Heritage sites Speicherstadt and Kontorhausviertel: their views on how heritage, culture and creativity are relevant for the sustainable development of the City and its residents.

Some guiding questions will help to conduct the debate:

How do heritage, culture and creativity contribute to local sustainable development?
What is the role of cultural heritage in promoting social inclusion and cohesion?
What is the link between cultural heritage and resilience – and how can cities benefit from synergies between the two?

The session will take place on 2 October from 9:30 till 11:00 CET.

Visit the conference website to know more about the event and register.

The 2020 European Conference on Sustainable Cities & Towns

Re-Inventing Heritage for Sustainable Urban Regeneration

The 9th edition of the European Conference on Sustainable Cities & Towns, is organised as a virtual event from 30 September to 2 October 2020 by ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability and the City of Mannheim .
Held every three years, the conference is the multi-level interface between the European Union and sustainability action at local level.

The aim of the conference is to bring together local and regional leaders, European and international institutions the brightest minds working on cutting edge research, businesses and the civil society to forge a more sustainable Europe.

The conference will offer the opportunity for participants to gain concrete tools to help face sustainability challenges in their cities throught “Solution and Toolbox Sessions”.

Among the eight Sessions, led by research teams, on October 2nd the EU project ARCH will lead the Session ‘Re-Inventing Heritage for Sustainable Urban Regeneration’ .
The session will explore how cultural heritage has the potential to enable new forms of collaboration and cultural production, to support cities to cope with future challenges, creating the conditions to carry out sustainable adaptive reuse projects.

It will also present examples of how heritage, culture and creativity are relevant for the sustainable development of the City and its residents and how cultural heritage can contribute to strengthening the resilience of communities.
The ARCH Cities of Hamburg, Rijeka, Sunderland, and Turin will showcase their best practices and reflect on lessons; specifically, the experience of Hamburg will be presentend focusing on the UNESCO World Heritage sites Speicherstadt and Kontorhausviertel.

Further information are available on the Conference website.

Promoting the Practice of Digital Curation

The 2020 Annual Global Art Access Corporation Curatorial Competition

The Global Art Access Corporation is a nonprofit focused on arts, culture and humanities. It was founded in 2019 with the aim of promoting access and engagement with art and history to a wider audience, through the creation of analog and digital educational programs, the foundation of partnerships with stewards of material culture and educational or communications platforms and the development and application of new and existing technology.

The main sectors of activity are:
Digitizing Private Collections. Global Art Access Corporation offers support to digitize the publicly inaccessible art in high resolution or gather already digitized artwork in order to help the stewards of privately held or difficult to access material culture to reach a wider audience with their collections and archives.

Quarantine Museum Education. This education initiative aims at bring together schools and museums, forced to close due to the COVID19: trought technology a virtual community is created where students can learn from museum education professionals.

Digital Accessibility and Inclusion. Global Art Access Corporation helps institutions to understand how improve accessibility measures to don’t exclude website visitors with disabilities, the websites must become inclusive and include programming for visitors with learning differences.

The Corporation has launched its first Annual Curatorial Competition focus on the value of open access images.

The museums around the world have worked hard, particularly in the recent months, to digitize their collections and to facilitate open access images of public domain works of art.

The 2020 Annual Global Art Access Corporation Curatorial Competition is dedicated to promote this effort, stressing the value of open access images and valorising digital exhibitions.

All exhibitions must be submitted by the 1st October and the finalists’ exhibitions will be published on Global Art Access Corporation’s Website.

A commission of professionals will consider each submission and three finalists will be selected by October 15th.

The 1st November a Grand-Prize winner will be announced.

Further information here.

Paris (France), 18th September - 4th October 2020

S+T+ARTS exhibition VISIBLE SENSIBLE

The new S+T+ARTS exhibition VISIBLE SENSIBLE is opening at Fondation Fiminco, in Romainville (Grand Paris), from September 18th through October 4th, organized by two partners, French Tech Grande Provence and Fondation Fiminco.

Today, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to rise to almost 70% by 2050. Over the past century, our cities have been built primarily on an efficiency and productivity approach. However, the technological advances that have benefited our societies have shown their limitations, those of the depletion of natural resources and the destruction of natural ecosystems. Against the background of climate change and environmental emergency, the concept of smart city, the ultra-technological and connected smart city, has given way to the concept of a resilient and sustainable city. Undoubtedly, this urban ideal implies changing the rules of the game, reinventing our living spaces, private or public, questioning our way of thinking and living in the city.

What place should be given to technology in this transition process? How can they be seized upon to create new imaginations, collective and participatory systems, spaces for reflection and criticism?

The exhibition “VISIBLE SENSIBLE“ invites us to observe, question, imagine, build our future living spaces, intimate or shared, real and virtual. In this exhibition, connected objects, virtual reality and AI, are all technologies made visible and therefore more transparent, through sensitive artistic experiences. Around interactive installations resulting from collaborations between artists and researchers, the public is invited to become an actor of a creative, poetic and sustainable innovation.

Website: https://www.starts.eu/agenda/regional-starts-center-exhibition-visible-sensible/detail/

This interactive exhibition includes the artwork of Yann Deval & Marie-Ghislaine Losseau, So Kanno’s installation, and the collaborative game of the SONY Computer Sciences Laboratory – Paris.

online event, 11-13 November 2020

Europeana 2020: Crisis, Change and Culture

2020 is not the year we thought it was going to be. A global pandemic has changed our day-to-day lives. The Covid crisis has brought home how connected our lives are across the globe, while the injustices and societal inequalities that exist between them have been thrown into sharp relief. This demands a response from us. Above all, this year has shown us that we need to build more coherent, coordinated and effective approaches to dealing with the challenges facing society, whether it is a short-lived natural disaster, a pandemic, or the ongoing battle to combat climate change.

This is as true for the cultural heritage sector as it is for our wider society.

In recent months, culture has shown to be a compelling force: people turned to digital technology and communication to share culture and come together as families, in friendship groups and as communities. As we move through and on from these crises, how can digital culture create meaningful and positive change in our society?

Now is the time to look critically at the role of cultural heritage, and reimagine it.

Europeana 2020 builds on that momentum to explore how – together – we can develop an open, knowledgeable and creative society.

Website and registration: https://pro.europeana.eu/page/conference#

Call for proposals is open until 30/9.

The experience of atomic bombing through stories collected in a digital archive

Hiroshima, 6th August 1945: the “Bomb Experience”

text by Caterina Sbrana.

“It was a hot, clear morning. I was getting ready to leave for the Tax Office, near Hatchobori, where I worked as a Mobilization Workforce Student. There was a bright flash and an extremely loud noise and then the house crumbled. For a few minutes I was in darkness. I lay on the floor, covering my ears and eyes, unable to move.

I waited for some light to shine through the rubble and dug myself out. I went and stood in the yard and looked around. All of the houses in the area had collapsed and the roofs were sprawled on the ground. By the time I got to the streetcar tracks, I was completely surrounded by fire. So I took the only way out, which led me in the direction of Yoshijima. There were many people around me escaping the fire, but no one spoke. We all walked with a horrified look across our faces. Many people were swaying as they walked. They were naked apart from rags hanging from their outstretched arms. I was not thinking very clearly and my mind could not comprehend why they would all be naked. I mostly remember the destroyed houses and water squirting out of the broken pipes” […].

This is the beginning of Teru Feruta’s (maiden name, Kawaguchi) tale “My A-Bomb Experience”.

A month has passed since August 6th. A date on which each Japanese, in their own way, remembers the terrible epilogue of the Second World War. As usual, every year, the press dedicates articles or broadcasts to commemorate this terrible page of human history and proposes us testimonies of survivors who, year after year, are always in fewer numbers. The words, written or spoken, remind us that at 8:45 am “Little Boy”, so called the enriched uranium nuclear bomb, was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima bringing with it death and destruction. Three days later it was Nagasaki’s turn. 100 to 200 thousand civilians died. 75 years divide us from that August 6th, 1945, but memory can approach that event and not let it fall into oblivion, browsing the specifically created website.

The home page is gradually enriched with pictures or photographs of places; by clicking on a portrait we receive some informations: Kiyoko Takenaga: tells what happened to his family on that dramatic day. Image from: http://hiroshima.archiving.jp/index_en.html

To deepen our knowledge I suggest to visit the Hiroshima Archive website, as through the stories of survivors we can consolidate our idea of the repudiation of war no ifs, ands, or buts.

Hiroshima Archive is “a pluralistic digital archive using the digital earth to display on it in a multilayered way all the materials gained from such sources as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the Hiroshima Jogakuin Gaines Association, and the Hachioji Hibakusha (A-bomb Survivors) Association.

All users can get a panoramic view over Hiroshima to browse survivors’ accounts, photos, maps, and other materials as of 1945, together with aerial photos, 3D topographical data, and building models as of 2010. The archive aims to promote multifaceted and comprehensive understanding of the reality of atomic bombing”.

By clicking on Viewing with Digital Earth a series of images appear and each photograph can be enlarged and tells the epilogue and the consequences of the release of atomic bombs. Image from: http://hiroshima.archiving.jp/index_en.html

The “Hiroshima Archive” has been produced in 2011 by melding a large amount of materials accumulated over 66 years with the latest Internet technologies, with a view to passing on the experiences and messages of A-bomb survivors to future generations.

The interactive map on the home page is gradually enriched with pictures or photographs of places. Clicking on the photos of people appears the name of who tells and a description.

Another example of the destruction of bombs is witnessed by this photograph. Image from: http://hiroshima.archiving.jp/index_en.html

If we click on the photos of the environments we can get an idea of the level of destruction of the bomb.

A 5-minute video with captions in Japanese and English takes us to Japan. A circular tale that begins with the image of a watch dial that marks 8:45 and ends with the same dial that continues to mark the same time. As if time had stopped. In between, starting from the Peace Memorial, the narration tells, through a series of photographs, the life of Hiroshima before the nuclear attack.

We share the goal of the creators of the archive “to make the archive a platform to gather the threads of stories for the future by sharing the past memories and the present messages in both real and web spaces” and “to collect from all over the world messages of hope for peace and nuclear abolition and incorporate them into the digital archive”.

http://hiroshima.archiving.jp/index_en.html

http://hiroshima.mapping.jp/news_en.html

http://hiroshima.mapping.jp/index_en.html

Share your knowledge on digitized archives!

23-24 November 2020: “Collect & Connect International conference”

The conference aims to promote exchange and discussion between researchers and heritage professionals in the field of digital natural and cultural heritage.

It officially concludes the NWO/Brill Creative Industries Project Making Sense of Illustrated Handwritten Archives and it will present the results of finished and original research in the field of digitized archives and natural and cultural heritage collections.

Experts in the field of:

Digital Humanities
Digital, Cultural and Natural Heritage
Digital Collection and Archives Curation
Semantic Data Integration

Are invited to submit their contributions which present, discuss, and reflect upon the technical, social, and institutional challenges digital heritage professionals and researchers encounter when enriching heterogeneous digitized collections with context.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

- Semantic web approaches to interlinking digitized historical archives and collections
- Text and image interpretation in digital collections
- Multimodal collection interpretation and access
- Handwriting recognition and heterogeneous digital collections
- Machine learning and digital collections
- Bias and digital heritage
- Computer vision and digital collections
- Digital collections’ access and inclusivity
- Sharing and visualisation of heterogeneous historical archives and collections
- Citizen science (including crowdsourcing) and digital archives and collections
- Challenges of enriching digitized handwritten archive material
- Digital capture and annotation of heterogeneous collections and artefacts
- Dealing with uncertainty, quality issues, data bias and collection gaps
- Geographical and spatial enrichment of collections
- Application of common vocabularies and data reconciliation

Next to specialized paper presentations, the conference will also entail a variety of interactive formats (e.g., round tables or demos). Six to eight papers presented at the conference are expected to be selected for publication in the ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH). All positively reviewed papers shall be submitted as proceedings volume to CEUR-WS.org for online publication.

Submission deadline postponed to 18 September 2020.

The conference will be held at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, from 23-24 November 2020 and will be fully online. Registration will open later this month.

Contact person: Maarten Heerlien, E-mail: m.heerlien@rijksmuseum.nl

For more details see:

Full call for papers
Website international conference Collect & Connect: Archives and Collections in a Digital Age.
Project Making Sense of Illustrated Handwritten Archives

Follow Naturalis Biodiversity Center on Twitter for updates on the conference.

#shareyourknowlegde #collectandconnect