Page 148 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

148A festival that has taken the idea of providing a better and more ethical web experience slightly further is transmediale. At a festival where, for several editions, discussions and works have been devoted to the issues commented on in this section, it seemed more than appropriate to experiment with practice in a sense.Their website appears to be sparingly designed, but the articles published on it have a particular feature: although there are buttons for sharing and posting on the social media, as foundon many Internet websites, they are visibly ‘disabled’. The buttons are grey, and each has an on/o button. When you slide the cursor over one of them, the following message appears:2 clicks for more privacy: click on this button to activate the [Facebook/Twitter/Google+] share button. Activating the share button will already transfer data to third parties. See more on i[nformation]generating con dence. Because a festival’s scope also extends to the Internet.Another feature of what we take to mean post-digital – or at least the start of a periodof social and cultural consolidation with digital – is moderation in the use of technologies. Organisations that are ‘digital natives’ (established especially between now and 2000 and operate comfortably in these environments) or underwent digitisation some time ago tend to use not a broad range of the newest digital technologies but only those they need at a particular moment.These technologies are thus already partof day-to-day life, just like paper books or ballpoint pens. The illusion that digital would undermine o -screen (‘real world’) experiences and behaviours and that we would end up ina parallel and arti cial virtual reality (we are exaggerating slightly to get the point across)is fading as we are discovering that tools such as email merely add a complementary layer or experience rather than taking something away from real life. We are returning to a focus on more human relations, direct contact whenever possible, and this is also being seen in some arts and professionals, and is fully materialised in pixel art or 3D-printing art.In this post-digital environment, however, people are calling for a return to thinking and contemplating from a human and social rather than a technological perspective, for making humans the centrepiece of any strategy and technology the tool. In this respect, practices are emerging in which analogue technologies and methodologies – the sort that have ‘been around for ages’ (doing things by hand, processing data in a more artisanal way...) – can coexist perfectly with the newest sorts.The organisers of OFFF Festival tell us that this is the approach they take to internal management and visitor relations.104 They confess that the number of people who attendIn the previous section we also spoke of Sónar Festival, which in 2015 experimented with tracking festival goers’ mobile data, informing them in advance of the experiment and inviting them to view the ow in real time, as a means of display and a tool for stimulating debate on these issues at a festival and a section, SónarD+, which has also been exploring them in recent editions.Once again, being concerned about protecting attendees’ privacy in environments increasingly populated by sensors, cookies and other tools of this kind is tantamount to being concerned about improving our audiences’ experienceat our festivals and cultural spaces, in turn3. A POST-DIGITAL AND CONTEXTUALISED APPROACH