Welcome to zkm_digital!
Have you ever wondered how we want to shape our lives under the conditions of digitization?
As a center for art and media we accompany the development towards digital culture and give you as a visitor impulses, but also the space to ponder over this question and to discuss it.
Find out more about digital culture and our digital strategy, discover our digital artistic productions, our program on digital topics, our digital mediation or our approaches and practices for preserving digital cultural heritage.
Digital artistic production
Since 1989, artists from all over the world have been coming to the ZKM to conceive and produce works of the visual and performative arts using digital means.
Digital Displays – Development and Testing
Digitization has changed our habits of perception and knowledge acquisition. Since its foundation in 1989, the ZKM has been continuously testing experimental formats for the digital mediation of art that focus on active visitors and viewers – in exhibitions, in public spaces, and online. Augmented reality applications, apps, touch- and motion-sensitive interfaces, 360° projections, techniques for localizing the individual visitor open up new interactive approaches to works of art and documents, sound and video archives, and knowledge about society. New trends are subjected to closer scrutiny and critically questioned.
The collection and preservation of digital cultural heritage
The ZKM houses the world's largest collection of computer-based art. It reflects the technological changes of the past decades.
Awards
In correspondence with technological developments and increasing digitization, the ZKM has focused from the very beginning on the artistic use of technology. Public visibility could be generated by awarding prizes.
The focus of the International Siemens Media Art Prize, which was awarded from 1989 to 1997, was on media art and early computer-based works. The Giga-Hertz Award, which has been awarded annually since 2007, is still the highest endowed prize in the field of electronic acousmatic music. The AppArtAward, which was initiated in 2011, honored applications until 2017 that distinguished themselves through a special artistic concept and design in app format, but did not gain any visibility in the stores due to the lack of an »art« category. In 2018, the AppArtAward was replaced by the HASH! Award, which honors net-based projects in the fields of art, technology and design within the framework of Web Residencies and thus expands the scope of action of artistic reflection against the background of digitization.
Digital Organization
Digitization has a disruptive effect in numerous areas of work and requires a conscious examination of digital change, which also encompasses the structures and work processes of an organization. At the ZKM, this is based on agile workflows and the dissolution of silos in favour of flat hierarchies, which are what make »digital thinking« of information structures possible in the first place. A soft institutional matrix replaces the rigid organization chart that has been common in cultural institutions up to now. The continuous introduction of employees to the latest technological tools and findings of digital development is indispensable in the move towards agile structures. In the course of change management and against the background of digitalization, a constant review and reflection of the processes is indispensable: at the ZKM, this also means the critical reflection of artistic production as the starting point of cultural work.
