The Digital Future for Museums

This one-day Symposium explored themes of personhood, modernity and digital art, bringing together speakers from a range of disciplines to consider technology, artistic practice and society. It seeks a renewed consideration of the role of art in illuminating human identity in a positive relation with technology, and its transformative effects upon space and time. The concerns for the role of art amidst the forces of a post-modern world are influenced by important legacies of the past, by which ideas about human identity and difference have been made meaningful in the relation of history and technology. In the frequently transient and conflicting forces of humanness and forces of modernity, the digital world of the arts emerges as a means by which new ideas of space and time can be considered, with new perspectives of human identity seen as states of being, towards the possibilities of experience, technology, individuality and society.

Claude Shannon (1916–2001) is regarded as the father of information theory. Alan Turing (1912–1954) is known as the father of computer science. In the year 1943, Shannon and Turing were both at Bell Labs in New York City, although working on different projects. They had discussions together, including about Turing’s “Universal Machine,” a type of computational brain. Turing seems quite surprised that in a sea of code and computers, Shannon envisioned the arts and culture as an integral part of the digital revolution – a digital DNA of sorts. What was dreamlike in 1943, is today a reality, as digital representation of all media, accounts for millions of “cultural things” and massive music collections. The early connections that Shannon made between the arts, information, and computing, intuit the future that we are experiencing today. This paper considers foundational aspects of the digital revolution, the current state, and the possible future. It examines how digital life is increasingly becoming part of real life for more and more people around the world, especially with respect to the arts, culture, and heritage.