Can festivals adapt to digital space? How do you curate an online festival? How do you engage the audience? Can you make a digital festival financially sustainable? This discussion looked at what happens to festivals and the arts when we could no longer gather as people. Sharing examples of digital art and online festivals, the participants explored the pros and cons of digitizing a festival and offer advice on the practicalities of moving performance online.

Speakers: Kate Craddock (GIFT - Gateshead International Festival of Theatre - United Kingdom), Sepehr Sharifzadeh (NH Theatre Agency - Iran); Nima Dehghani (Transdisciplinary Artist - United States/Iran), Asif Majid (Scholar, Artist and Educator - United Kingdom)

Moderators: Angele Galea (Artistic Director - Science in the City, Malta); Nada Shemais (Cairotronica).

After just a few weeks of confinement, we were already forming new habits: hosting birthday parties online, going online to watch performances, crossing the street to keep our physical distance... How would we come out of this? What steps could we take to rebuild trust and invite people from different households to share an experience together?

Speakers: Fergus Linehan (Director and Chief Executive Edinburgh International Festival - United Kingdom); Rucera Seethal (Artistic Director of National Arts Festival Grahamstown - South Africa).

Moderators: Erica McCalman (Art Oracle - Australia); Fanny Martin (Art of Festivals - Canada). 

Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) is a public institution that fosters and promotes culture through a wide-ranging programme of activities and initiatives designed to encourage the mobility of professionals and creators. We bring this same spirit to the AC/E digital culture annual report, a publication that sets out to promote digital internet culture. Our aim is for it to help sector professionals and creators understand how to incorporate digital technologies into their work. If the culture sector gains the skills and capabilities to work actively on the internet and furnish it with cultural content, between all of us we will succeed in giving culture a prominent presence in this great virtual public space.

The AC/E Annual Report is an annual document of reference that analyses the development of digital trends in the world of culture and focuses on a specific sector or discipline each year.

The annual report is structured into two main parts. In the first professionals and specialists from the digital sector carry out a cross-cutting analysis of digital trends in the world of culture, addressing all the cultural disciplines. The second part identifies and defines cases of good practice in the use of digital technology, both national and international, in a specific cultural sector—the performing   arts in   2014, museums in   2015, cultural   festivals   and   professional meetings in 2016, cultural heritage in 2017, readers and books in 2018, and creators and authorship in the digital age in 2019.

To access the reports: https://www.accioncultural.es/en/ace-digital-culture-annual-report

Founded in 2017 by a team of engineers and culture professionals, Ohme is an organisation developing new practices of scientific mediation, interdisciplinary artistic creation and innovation, through collaborative practices.

Ohme investigates the boundaries between artistic and scientific disciplines, re-designing practices and contributing to the development of new understandings of interdisciplinarity, with a keen interest in education, co-creation and sharing of knowledge.

By bringing together established and emerging artists, scientists, researchers and students, Ohme develops performances, installations, multidisciplinary events and academic programs on a variety of subjects, spanning from physics to music, from neurosciences to digital arts, from design to social sciences.

The activities of Ohme are divided between a production company, curating and producing performances, installations and events (Ohme Studio) and an educational and research institute developing academic programs and igniting transdisciplinary research (Ohme Academia). We also propose a series of tailored-made activities and services to artists, scientists, schools and companies (Ohme Services).