Paper short abstract:

Sustainability has become a key concept in the cultural sector that is currently challenged by the dynamics of digital transformation. What sustainability means in the field of culture and to what extent digital media as new memory modalities reconfigure the concept itself is examined in the paper.

Paper long abstract:

In view of growing divisive tendencies such as radicalization and the gap between rich and poor that are currently amplified by the Covid-19 pandemic, the question of sustainability becomes increasingly pressing as a societal challenge of how we should live together in the future (Collier/Lakoff 2005). While sustainability is not a new term, it has only recently found its way into cultural policy, particularly through the efforts of UNESCO (2003) and its governance approach of sustainable development, and thus becoming a criterion for memory work in the cultural sector. However, it remains unclear what can be understood by sustainability. As it is left to the cultural institutions to fill this gap in practice, it needs clarification of what is considered ‘(un-)sustainable’ in this field.

In addition, digital media as new memory modalities put current safeguarding practices and power relations at stake, promising to open up knowledge production in the “memory complex” (Macdonald 2013). New forms of cultural production emerge in digital media ecologies such as practices of ‘creative reuse’ for remixing ‘open cultural data’ in design challenges and hackathons.

My paper discusses the current state of research on sustainability and presents first findings from a discourse ethnography on digitisation projects in GLAMs and creative reuse practices. Key questions are: which ideas of sustainability are negotiated of how cultural heritage should be safeguarded in digital media ecologies? How is the media change associated with sustainability? To what extent do digital media as new memory modalities reconfigure the question of sustainability?