COST Action CA21141 (Grassroots of Digital Europe)
This document serves as a starting point for a collaborative discussion on the hybrid exhibition, inviting all stakeholders to either reach a mutual understanding or to engage in a productive debate. The outlined information offers guidance on the potential scope of the hybrid exhibition, including suggestions for main message, key themes, goals, audience, and a proposed timeline.
The contents of this brief are based on a series of brainstorming sessions conducted during the Grassroots of Digital Europe workshop in Vilnius, Lithuania, on September 26-27, 2024, hosted by Vilnius University. The exhibition team worked in four consequent sessions to discuss and develop potential ideas about the exhibition concept, main messages, and practical aspects.
The brainstorming sessions were conducted according to the affinity diagramming methodology. It was chosen for its adaptability to creative processes with high uncertainty, and useful for initial stages of creative planning. During each session, workshop participants were asked to share ideas about different building blocks of the exhibition. All ideas were written down on sticky notes and then collectively sorted into clusters, evaluated, and discussed. The ideas were then digitised and stored on a Miro board (https://miro.com) for preservation, easy sharing, and further work.
The ideas were then further reworked and discussed with COST members interested in contributing to the exhibition, and presented in the current document.
Throughout the years, digital media has travelled across borders in many different forms: on media carriers such as cartridges, floppy disks, CDs, hard drives, and later via communication media such as the internet. Sometimes games were even copied through radio broadcasts. The hybrid exhibition about East-West media transfers focuses on the variety of media forms and contents that have been involved in trans-border exchanges, and the cultural phenomena that enabled such exchanges. Enthusiasts and collectors congregating around the consumption of games, music, or film have created unique subcultures and communities, each reflecting the Zeitgeist of a specific historical era and location.
| Vision | Mission |
|---|---|
| The hybrid exhibition on East-West media transfers will showcase chosen moments from the history of digital media travels, showing how technological means and cultural practices connected and operated within a broader political milieu and economics of the hyper-capitalistic West and pseudo-socialistic East, as well as the postmodern reconfiguration of these relations after the end of the Cold war. | To use selected research results,sources and artefacts to convey a narrative that transcends the messages present within each artefact in isolation. |
The exhibition is planned as a hybrid event, combining physical and online media. The physical exhibition will take place at the selected location in one of the participating countries. It will be enhanced with an online exhibition that will reflect the key ideas, present artefacts, and make the exhibition materials available for online audiences, reflecting the importance of both physical and online media in our everyday life experiences.
The digital online part would provide new opportunities for the hybrid exhibition, following these directions:
The digital component of the hybrid exhibition would provide the following enhancements of the physical component: