Media Library

The Forum addresses the question of how public discourses and memories are changing in the course of digitalisation. The global spread of digital technologies has in a very short time produced a future-oriented culture in which relationships of people with each other and to things are being reorganised. This “silent revolution“ (Mercedes Bunz) is affecting all cultures and fundamentally transforming lives. But it is also taking place on the basis of history and its collective memory, of “cultural memory” (Aleida und Jan Assmann). The past is not vanishing with obsolete technologies like floppy disks, even the media are loud with talk of turns in political memory and lines being drawn below the past from the right.

How can the future vector of digitalisation and the cultural memory of societies be thought together? What technologies permit us to carry the call of the past into the future and which demand to be forgotten? How can awareness of ambivalence be cultivated in the digital revolution? And what role does poetry play in all this between historically sensitive exploration of language and a digital poetry operating with algorithms? Questions like these will be discussed by two experts of international stature: Aleida Assmann, who has been researching cultural memory for a long time and calls for a vital culture of memory in Germany and Europe; and Mercedes Bunz, who does research on the Internet, Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence and has for years taken a public stance as a visionary pioneer of digitalisation.

Project organiser: Asmus Trautsch

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