The pervasive use of media at current-day festivals thoroughly impacts how these live events are experienced, anticipated, and remembered. This empirical study examined event-goers’ live media practices – taking photos, making videos, and in-the-moment sharing of content on social media platforms – at three large cultural events in the Netherlands. Taking a practice approach (Ahva 2017; Couldry 2004), the author studied online and offline event environments through extensive ethnographic fieldwork: online and offline observations, and interviews with 379 eventgoers. Analysis of this research material shows that through their live media practices eventgoers are continuously involved in mediated memory work (Lohmeier and Pentzold 2014; Van Dijck 2007), a form of live storytelling thatrevolves around how they want to remember the event. The article focuses on the impact of mediated memory work on the live experience in the present. It distinguishes two types of mediatised experience of live events: live as future memory and the experiential live. The author argues that memory is increasingly incorporated into the live experience in the present, so much so that, for many eventgoers, mediated memory-making is crucial to having a full live event experience. The article shows how empirical research in media studies can shed new light on key questions within memory studies.
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This book brings together contributions that analyse how subcultural myths develop and how they can be studied. Through critical engagement with (history) writing and other sources on subcultures by contemporaries, veterans, popular media and researchers, it aims to establish: how stories and histories of subcultures emerge and become canonized through the process of mythification; which developments and actors are crucial in this process; and finally how researchers like historians, sociologists, and anthropologists should deal with these myths and myth-making processes. By considering these issues and questions in relation to mythmaking, this book provides new insights on how to research the identity, history, and cultural memory of youth subcultures.
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Collecting local memories on-line is a growing practice with participatory elements on different levels. Three levels of participation – micro, meso and macro – are introduced by describing an exemplary case: the Memory of East in Amsterdam. These levels of this particular case can be grounded in the statements of the Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society. This indicates that the Memory of East case might be a good practice. However, looking at 53 other cases shows that the three levels are present, but designed differently with respect to the degree in which residents participate. Since the convention is not specific enough we choose the notion of cultural citizenship to assess the value of cases like these. We claim that the cases that have more focus on ordinary residents participating on all three levels assures a sustainable and self-feeding system, which is the best answer to the goals of the convention.
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This Professional Doctorate (PD) project explores the intersection of artistic research, digital heritage, and interactive media, focusing on the reimagining of medieval Persian bestiaries through high dark fantasy and game-making. The research investigates how the process of creation with interactive 3D media can function as a memory practice. At its core, the project treats bestiaries—pre-modern collections of real and imaginary classifications of the world—as a window into West and Central Asian flora, fauna, and the landscape of memory, serving as both repositories of knowledge and imaginative, cosmological accounts of the more-than-human world. As tools for exploring non-human pre-modern agency, bestiaries offer a medium of speculative storytelling, and explicate the unstable nature of memory in diasporic contexts. By integrating these themes into an interactive digital world, the research develops new methodologies for artistic research, treating world-building as a technique of attunement to heritage. Using a practice-based approach, the project aligns with MERIAN’s emphasis on "research in the wild," where artistic and scientific inquiries merge in experimental ways. It engages with hard-core game mechanics, mythopoetic decompressed environmental storytelling, and hand-crafted detailed intentional world-building to offer new ways of interacting with the past that challenges nostalgia and monumentalization. How can a cultural practice do justice to other, more experimental forms of remembering and encountering cultural pasts, particularly those that embrace the interconnections between human and non-human entities? Specifically, how can artistic practice, through the medium of a virtual, bestiary-inspired dark fantasy interactive media, allow for new modes of remembering that resist idealized and monumentalized histories? What forms of inquiry can emerge when technology (3D media, open-world interactive digital media) becomes a tool of attention and a site of experimental attunement to cosmological heritage?
The eleven Universities forming the KreativEU consortium agreed to the common goal of establishing a fully European University, that places the creative potential derived from Europe’s cultural heritage at the heart of its teaching, research and knowledge transfer activities. Committing to a long-term institutional, structural and strategic cooperation the partners will jointly implement an ambitious yet inclusive vision for transforming the study of culture, identity, memory and heritage for the benefit of society. Building upon this strong foundation, KreativEU will provide innovative concepts, methods, and solutions to address both current and future challenges, contributing to a sustainable and harmonious future for communities and the environment alike. KreativEU recognizes the inseparable interconnection of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, as well as the interwoven nature of local and national traditions, crafts, cultural practices, and folklore. The alliance is dedicated to formulating cutting-edge educational and research programmes that reevaluate these elements and their associated ecological surroundings, the lived environment, especially in the context of the digital age. This ecocultural vision serves as the foundational principle guiding KreativEU's efforts, ensuring that a new generation of EU citizens working together across cultures, borders, languages, sectors and disciplines will be educated. Students from the KreativEU are expected to be leaders of change and enablers of societal transformation.To reach this vision, the KreativEU Alliance will work towards the completion of 8 work packages (WP1 - Governance and Management; WP2 - KreativEU Education; WP3 - KreativEU Research; WP4 - KreativEU Culture with and for society; WP5 - KreativEU Knowledge-creation and design network on Smart Sustainability WP6 - KreativEU Heritage European campus; WP7 - KreativEU Mobility; WP8 - Communication and Dissemination).Collaborative partners:Instituto Politécnico de Tomar, Escola Superior de Gestão de Tomar, D.A. Tsenov Academy of Economics, Johoceska Univerzita V Ceskych Budejovicich, Universita Degli Studi di Camerino, Universitaet Greifswald, Pilitechnika Opolska, Universitatae Valahia Targoviste, Trnavska Univerzita V Trnave, Sodestorns Hogskola, Adana Alparslan Turkes Bilim VE Teknoloji University
phōnē – Giving Minority Languages a Voice is a project application to safeguards and promotes cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe. We will connect people who belong to a language minority in their countries with European values across language and cultural borders. 10 institutions will cooperate for the first time, breaking new ground for the RML theatre sector and improving their standing nationallyand internationally. phōnē will be the first ever major international collaboration between theatres working for minority languages.“Languages are vehicles of our cultures, collective memory and values. They are an essential component of our identities, and a building block of our diversity and living heritage.”The loss of a language means not only the loss of a basic element of communication, but also of a complete system of knowledge developed over time. The disappearance of a language also means the loss of a unique, unrecoverable universe associated with a particular environment. It means the loss of diversity.Phōnē wants to make an active contribution to the vitalisation of endangered minority languages. In order to keep endangered languages alive, theatre is one of the most suitable media because it provides a space for language, but also because it uses non-language-based forms of communication. In this way, theatre in particular makes it easier for people who do not yet have a confident knowledge of theminority language to get started. This will safeguard cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe. Strengthening the cultures and their languages will also strengthen the economic basis of the theatres working in these minority languages.phōnē is aiming for three main objectives to strengthen theatre in its role of vitalising endangered minority languages.A – Giving Minority Languages a voiceTogether we will search for narratives that tell about the people in their minority language region. Thestories are about and from people who live and work in remote regions of Europe and are written anddeveloped in the respective minority language.B – Giving Minority Languages a European stageThe developed texts need a stage to reach the widest possible audience. As different as the expectednarratives will be, so different will be the stages (outreach / site-specific / digital) on which they are presented.Different formats support the goal of addressing the broadest possible audience in the communitiesand involving them both passively and actively in the use of their minority language.
