The Federal Cultural Foundation has experience with project funding and yet is surprised at how the pandemic has made one project particularly successful. The Federal Cultural Foundation supports dance projects, exhibitions and festivals. It wants to make ideas possible and provide impetus with its funding. In recent years, digitization projects have also been supported by the Digital Fund. A five-year funding phase was planned for this very special fund, which ended as planned in 2023. Although some institutions are only presenting their projects this year, the Digital Fund is definitely coming to an end.
The Federal Cultural Foundation supported the digital transformation of cultural institutions with the Digital Fund. The picture shows the new building of the Federal Cultural Foundation at Franckeplatz 2 in Halle (Saale).
Photo: Jens Passoth
Cooperation between big and small
Julia Mai, who is in charge of the Digital Fund project at the German Federal Cultural Foundation, explains the five-year limit as part of the foundation’s remit. It provides impetus for certain topics and develops model programs for a limited period of time. The Digital Fund was developed “to drive digital change in museums and strengthen digital expertise in the institutions,” says Mai. The aim was never to support the digitization of collections alone. Rather, the aim was to support museums that had already laid the foundations for digitization and were therefore willing and able to develop new, innovative digital projects. Furthermore, the project funds of 15.8 million would not have been enough to digitize entire collections anyway.
The foundation wants to promote lighthouse projects and has therefore primarily targeted larger institutions for this project. However, if you look at the map that the Cultural Foundation has compiled for the distribution of projects, you can see that digital projects have by no means been developed and implemented in all federal states. No digital project was developed and funded in Schleswig-Holstein, most of the eastern German states or Saarland, while there were several joint digital projects in North Rhine-Westphalia.
“Interestingly, larger museums have joined forces with much smaller institutions,” says Julia Mai. As a result, 28 large and small museums, five theaters, two opera houses and one memorial site, which had joined forces in 15 groups, benefited from the Digital Fund. The collaborative work was one of the conditions for receiving any funding at all.
Overview of the locations receiving support from the Digital Fund. Photo: Federal Cultural Foundation, information brochure on the project.
Pandemic accelerated digital change
In this project, digital change did not mean digitization, but rather the application of already digitized collections and their use in creative projects. And this goes far beyond the specific needs of a single institution. The calls for proposals were already about ideas that could also be transferred to others. This is why “open source” publication was just as much a requirement as the possibility of making content available as “open access”. In addition, a digital partner – for example a university or an agency – had to be sought for the collaboration.
Despite such complex application conditions, all projects were implemented and almost all have already been published. For example, “Diversify the code”, the project by Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen and the Kampnagel International Culture Factory in Hamburg. Together with the Chaos Computer Club, they have developed open source software to simplify the management of cultural events.
As the projects involved exist in virtual space and can therefore be accessed at any time and from anywhere, a joint project between the Frankfurt am Main Film Museum and the ACMI Museum in Melbourne, the Australian National Museum of Film, Television, Video Games, Digital Culture and the Arts, was also funded. Together, they investigated how digital curating can be implemented in a “consistently open and participatory” way. It was not just about linking the two collections and giving visitors and users the opportunity to create their own digital content for the two institutions. It was also about making the application usable for others.
The “Open Worlds” project, for which four contemporary art institutions joined forces, has also already been presented. The Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, the Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover, the Museum Martha Herford and Imagine the City in Hamburg explored the possibilities of digital staging in urban spaces. An important part of the development was the possibility of networking with users, who can now feed content into the app themselves.
Mannheim and Stuttgart are planning to present their “From Work to Display” project in June 2024, as Heiko Daniels explains in the RESTAURO interview. The two museums have come up with 23 different, artwork-specific projects for 23 works of art from their collections. The aim was to answer the question: “How can art be experienced digitally?”
Looking back, Julia Mai is still impressed by the large number of applications for the program, even though the requirements “were very high”. But the program obviously addressed a need. There is still a need, says Mai, adding: “The federal states are also responding, for example by creating positions.” For example, Baden-Württemberg has a digital manager position for museums and Berlin has resilience dispatchers who deal with specific issues of digital change in cultural institutions.”
Summing up, she says: “I am very, very happy that all 15 associations have tried out innovative things and implemented all their projects.”
In her view, there is one main reason why it worked without a hitch in this case. It was the pandemic, which made it very clear to the institutions shortly after the funding was approved how important the digital transformation is for them.