

How should museums remember the digital age? This conference brings together curators and theorists to share and explore approaches towards researching, collecting and displaying digital heritage in the ethnographic museum.
In the past two decades digital technologies have become omnipresent in the museum. They have changed the ways museums document, preserve, make accessible and present cultural heritage. Ethnographic museums follow this trend: they have embraced digital technologies as tools for engaging the public, for cataloguing and disseminating knowledge about their collections and for democratizing knowledge production. However, scant attention has been given by these museums to thinking about digital technologies as cultural objects and practices in their own rights. Ethnographic museums have in many ways ignored the influence of the digital on cultural dynamics and practices as well as the subjectivities associated with these practices. One of the reasons is the pre-occupation with material authenticity, aura and originality – presumably values that the digital lacks – which has prevented digital objects to attain the status of cultural artifacts worthy of a place in museum collections. As a consequence digital heritage is not yet part of the research, exhibition and collecting agendas of these museums. This conference aims to open up a space to create new definitions and roles for digital objects in the museum, to study the artistic, social, cultural and political aspects of digital practices and to explore possibilities for collecting and preserving digital cultures for the future.
Invited speakers will examine questions such as:
The conference will be divided into three sessions:
This session will focus on the ways in which digital technologies are transforming institutional cultures, methods, and knowledge creation in museums. How might the acquisition of digital objects and practices challenge conventional memory and representation processes within museums? What is their relationship with material objects? How can we start thinking of digital heritage as creative works and historical documents that have their own materiality?
This session will focus on the influence of social media in protest movements and how digital activism can be preserved for future generations. What would be essential to collect and preserve, in particular within the context of the ethnographic museum? What capacity do digital technologies bring to change power relations both inside and outside the museum?
This session will focus on the ways in which cultural and political subjectivities are being transformed, produced and represented through digital technologies, in both virtual and offline worlds. How might the study of digital cultures change our understandings of citizenship, cultural identity, locality and borders? How does the digital influence the way we perceive and communicate with the world around us? How does the digital affect our understanding of cultural memory?
Watch all lectures of the conference Digital Heritage, Virtual Selves on the RCMC YouTube channel.