My first thought off the top of my head is the irresistible comparison
between the UK and Italian cultural sectors and observing how the UK sector is
15 or 20 years ahead of the Italian one (I am definitely not the first one to
think it). If in Italy we are still struggling on how to bring additional
services such as bookshops or cafè within our museums –although some of our
organisations has been doing well, for instance ‘La Triennale di Milano’, many
are still stuck with the past-, in the UK, cultural organisations hold a
meeting to discuss the use of technology and share ideas all together. Indeed
the UK has been undertaking a structured dialogue on the use of technology
since the 90s, whereby there is now a special £7 fund (The Digital R&D Fund
for the Arts) to support arts project that involve technology.
My second thought and the more developed one, regards my personal
experience of using technology in culture that for a couple of months has been
the object of meetings and skype calls with a group of friends from home.
Everything started one day when all of us were back in our Sardinian home-village
Mogoro for the Christmas break and in front of a pint we were reflecting on the
cultural assets of Mogoro and how it could be good to do something to make the
most of them. The cultural assets in Mogoro are both tangible such as churches
and some relevant archaeological sites (in particular the ‘Nuraghe
Cuccurada’*), the landscape, the traditional crafts and the agricultural
products, among which Mogoro is particularly renowned for the production of
wine; and intangible, such as traditions and the Sardinian language. Moreover,
Mogoro has an incredible number (around 40!) of cultural associations among its
inhabitants (about 5000), that are involved in organising events in the village
but that are not always able to collaborate and often compete between each
other to obtain funding from the local council.
Thus, the idea that came out from our buzzing mind is that of using technology
to create a network among those cultural assets and associations in order to
channel the energy of all the actors together into the regeneration of our
little village. We think that technology can be the right tool to bring the
associations of Mogoro together, to help them collaborate and to make all the
actors aware of the cultural resources of our territory. Our challenge is that
of encouraging the cultural associations to work together within a virtual
sphere in the ideation of events around the cultural assets of Mogoro, with the
aim that the virtual dimension could be then translated into a real dimension.
But, can then technology actually help people doing things more easily than
in a physical sphere? During the conference at the Town Hall, many experiences
were presented and among them one of the thoughts I have found particularly
interesting is the key idea of “making things relevant to people” expressed by
Ben Templeton, creative director of the digital studio based in Bristol
‘Thought Den’. Technology can offer new ways to engage people together and with
culture, but that needs to be carefully and accurately planned. One of the
barriers of using technology can be that people don’t always have the same
level of technology literacy and therefore they can see a digitalisation of
interactions as a distant world and be put off of. It is important to think
about what people need and what is the value that technology can actually add
to the experience of doing things and engaging with culture in ‘the real world’.
I do think that technology can really be an important tool to open new
possibilities of engagement and address social needs offering, as in the case
of our project for Mogoro, new way of organising existing cultural assets and
people’s energies. But I also think that to make our project actually relevant
it will be necessary to create a conversation with the people of Mogoro and build
firstly in ’the real world’ the basis of what technology can then help to work
better.
At the moment, my friends and I are struggling to find funding for our
project and in the meanwhile we are working on our next steps to lay the
ground. Our question is how easy it will be to bring a discourse on technology
and culture in a virgin terrain such as Sardinia and Italy in general. In our country, it looks like that the most relevant support could be received only by private foundations, that in the arts and cultural sector have been the most 'illuminate' actors in the latest politically troubled context. The answer is likely to be: "it won’t be easy at all"! However, we are just at the beginning...
*http://www.comune.mogoro.or.it/paese/territorio/archeologia/cuccurada/