The New Social
Hybrid Strategies for Cultural Spaces (Innovation Labs)
What is the future of the digital space for artists and cultural programming? Since the first lockdown, cultural institutions have been at the forefront of innovative experiments to respond to urgent social questions and logistical challenges. In this context, organisations like IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture], Framer Framed and Hackers & Designers have distinguished themselves, creating online exhibitions, live online events and other cultural programs. Together we have been selected for the Innovation Labs Programme to further develop a set of hybrid events. The focus lies on participative livecasts, publishing and archiving.
Innovation Labs is a project initiated by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the Creative Industries Fund NL and invited makers and institutions to develop usable knowledge and working methods to increase the flexibility and resilience of the cultural and creative sector. With The New Social: Hybrid Strategies for Cultural Spaces, we want to conduct a series of experiments to better capture all the innovative strategies that were created during the Covid period, and further develop them. We give special attention to the elimination of new differences and separations (beyond national borders): between the online and onsite audiences, between digital natives and not-tech-savvy participants, people with and without a good internet connection or digital equipment.
More concretely, between January 2022 and March 2023, IMPAKT, Framer Framed and Hackers & Designers will collaborate on a series of design sprints and experiments with hybrid events, hybrid publications and the development of suitable platforms to enable these. The results (prototypes, code and workflows, as well as critical reflections on societal and artistic implications) will be collected in a hybrid toolkit that will be made available to the entire cultural field.