THE BIG GOOD FUTURE, The Magazine of the Creative City Berlin Platform

The Magazine of the Creative City Berlin Platform

© Rosa Menkman

The Big Good Future #VisionMission: What is the future of creative work?

#2

#DigitalCulture: What are cultural stakeholders doing with digitalisation?

How does digitalisation interact with art and culture?

Focus Digita­lisation

#MoneyMoney: What funding and financing opportunities are there? What networks do you need to know?

This is where we come in: We, that is, the Creative City Berlin platform, the portal for artists, culturally minded people and the creative industries in Berlin. With this issue, we’re pub­ lishing the first “digital” magazine for the cultural and crea­ tive industries. This means two things: First, in the following 96 pages you will discover a series of essays, interviews and reports that we’ve written and compiled in recent months.

You can read more articles from the magazine directly online in the CCB Magazine on your smartphone (with the Bower­ bird app, see instructions on page 2). Secondly, for the first time, we’re bringing together the various fields of art, culture and creative industries to address issues surrounding digi­ talisation itself, be it in the realms of automated design pro­ duction, VR art, new Blockchain labels or on-demand stream­ ing services in the field of film.

We allow the most exciting professionals and networks have their say and ask: What opportunities and risks does digitali­ sation bring for each individual cultural sector? Is Blockchain the salvation? Can VR art democratise the art market? To­ gether with our partners, we have assembled the most im­ portant facts, visions and pathways to digitalisation from the fields of the visual and performing arts, from design and mu­ sic to literature, film and radio, across all sectors. Because twelve creative markets and sectors are already working on the digital future – now. But what does the designer-produc­ er know about the value chain in the music industry? What can the film industry learn from literature and vice versa? And how do we combine the digital revolution with new sustaina­ bility strategies? Will there even still be a need for artists and cultural professionals in the future?

The latter is already boldly anticipated here: Yes, people do and will have a need. No machines will replace artists in the future, even if AI algorithms are already producing art. And as a matter of fact, real people are also doing all the writing in this issue. With their help, we point out the most important approaches, include discussions about funding and financ­ ing programmes and ask: How does digitalisation changing the value of creative­work? Enjoy! The editorial staff. #readinghelps

JENS THOMAS, Editor in Chief Creative City Berlin

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Editorial

A print magazine on the subject of “digitalisation”? Every­ thing all right over there? No problem, no worries, we’re good. Printed magazines still exist, and so do books, news­ papers and journals – even if the circulation of all daily news­ papers in Germany has collapsed by about 50 per cent in the last three decades. And despite all the doomsday predic­ tions that machines would soon completely replace humans, there will probably still be plenty of real flesh and blood per­ sonalities in the world of the printed word in the future. But digitalisation is on the march. In the future, it will inevitably replace people in many places, jobs will disappear, and new ones will emerge; digitalisation opens up both new opportu­ nities and new risks, too – and it is presenting art and cultural performers and producers with completely new challenges.

36 contributions, features, reports, inter­ views and best practices from Berlin can be found in the following 96 pages – however – you can also read many articles online in CCB Magazine on Creative City Berlin on subjects ranging from copyright, digital cooperatives or new social strea­ming providers. The topic is simply endless – and we keep on going.

Here’s how it works: Download the free Bowerbird app for Android or iOS. Open the app and then scan the enco­ding in the respective image of the post. The app is available at: www.bowerbird.codes.

Sounds good? Great! Have fun!

CREATIVE CITY BERLIN A project of Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH CEO Moritz van Dülmen Klosterstr. 68, 10179 Berlin

OVERALL CONTROL & COORDINATION KREATIV KULTUR BERLIN Corinna Scheller PROJECT MANAGEMENT CREATIVE CITY BERLIN Jens Thomas GRANTS

I M P R I NT

HOW IT WOR KS

This maga­zine is not ­the end, it’s just the beginning.

IMPRINT EDITOR IN CHIEF Jens Thomas EDITORS IN THIS ISSUE Kora Annika Böndgen, Boris Messing, Jens Thomas, Katharina Warda AUTHORS IN THIS ISSUE Sabrina Apitz, Stephan Balzer, Kora Annika Böndgen, Tom Bresemann, ­Sonja Eismann, Eric Eitel, Kristoffer Gansing, Thomas Gnahm, Marte ­Hentschel, Ela Kagel, Julian Kamphausen, Dr. Bastian Lange, Dr. Klaus Lederer, Mareike Lemme, Boris Messing, Kirsten Niehuus, Andrea Peters, Andrzej Raszyk, Dr. Julia Schneider, Claudia Schwarz, Melanie Seifart, ­Matthias Strobel, Dr. Andreas Sudmann, Jens Thomas, Lena Kadriye Ziyal PROOFREADING Ralf Sonnenberg TRANSLATION Mark Kanak DESIGN Studio Bens PRINTER optimal media GmbH PRODUCT MANAGER Dr. Daniel Siebert EDITORIAL DEADLINE July 2019

We have to realise that digital transfor­ mation is more than just a technical update to what already exists. It includes completely new opportunities, but also risks. Our job is to identify the opportunities, to seize them and minimise the risks.

Opening remarks by Dr. KLAUS LEDERER, Senator for Culture and Europe in Berlin

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OP E N I N G R E MAR KS

Zero and one

Digitalisation – for some it’s exciting new territory to explore, for others it’s frightening, vast landscape. The perspective doesn’t matter, both have to yield to the plough. The pervad­ ing influence of digitalisation in all areas of life also applies to art and culture. We have to realise that digital transformation is more than just a technical update to what already exists.

It includes completely new opportunities, but also risks. Our job is to identify the opportunities, to seize them and mini­ mise the risks. If we succeed, then we’ll not only be prepared for the future of museums, theatres and collections, but we will also be able to take a big step closer to our goal of com­ prehensive cultural education and cultural participation for everyone in this city. A few key words are enough to show the bandwidth of what will be possible through digitalisation: Even if it doesn’t sound very exciting at first to speak of “digi­ tal collection management” or “digitalisation projects”, what these terms mean represents access to information, to histo­ ry, to art – for everyone. Combined with apps, city walks to­ day can be an enlightening and explanatory educational tour through our city’s culture of remembrance. Completely new ways of communication and mediation are possible here.

They save time, and even money, that we can use elsewhere.

Much more than that: For consumers of culture, completely new opportunities are opening up to watch or be part of it, especially for those who live with disabilities or whose moth­ er tongue is not German. Overall, digital development opens up new possibilities for mediation and reception. It creates new approaches to culture. Right in the thick of things. But it would be too brief to just pre-empt the chances of participa­ tion through digitalisation. Oh, but as usual, there’s just one more thing. Part of being honest also entails addressing the risks. “Will my computer do my job in the future?” This is un­ doubtedly one of most people’s major concerns. And this will also have to be dealt with in the cultural sector. However, I think the “overriding” risk is not knowing what to do. And this is exactly where my my personal involvement begins when it comes to fostering digital affinity or digital awareness in the cultural sector. In view of the backlog of investments in Berlin’s cultural institutions, the initial focus here is on mod­ ernising and expanding the digital infrastructure; the aim is to create the conditions for new opportunities. That’s why we’ve launched an innovation fund for digital cultural de­ velopment. We are also investing in our libraries. We want to promote digital projects at the cultural institutions as a whole. We provide funding to the best of our ability. And we know what we’re doing – hopefully everyone will benefit.

3 Opening remarks by Berlin’s Senator for Culture Klaus Lederer 6 #VisionMission: Here are our partners 10 A quick checklist to get you started: The five most important questions about digitalisation, Artificial Intelligence and creative work 12 AI, automation, transformation design: How important will creative work be in the future? Lead interview with social philosopher Harald Welzer 16 Funny! The first Berlin AI comic strip – By Julia Schneider and Lena Kadriye Ziyal 20 AI fantasies: Will the Terminator come with a paintbrush in his hand? – By Andreas Sudmann C O NTE NTS

22 Digitalisation & Art 24 28

Digital transformation, streaming economy: Art as an early warning system?

– By Kristoffer Gansing What is VR art and can it democratise the art market? – A conversation with VR expert Tina Sauerländer

32 Digitalisation & Design 34 38

How is digitalisation changing the Berlin fashion industry? – By ­Marte Hentschel Smart clothing and sustainability: Do they go together? – By Thomas Gnahm

42 Digitalisation & Music 44 48 52

AI music and digital breakthroughs: Progress with alternatives or the ­emergence of new monocultures? – By Eric Eitel and Julia Schneider New kids from the Blockchain: How does a Blockchain label work?

A conversation with Blckchn Records The last one standing: On the current demise of music magazines – By ­Sonja Eismann

56 Digitalisation & Literature 58 62

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Good-bye to the old, hello to the new: What literature is doing with digitali­ sation – and vice versa. A plea for new openness by Tom Bresemann How do you become a self-publisher and at what price? An interview with Michael Meisheit Are you still publishing, or are you just in your death throes? We pay a visit to three Berlin publishers. A report by Boris Messing

70 Digitalisation & Performing Arts 72

76 80

Immersive installations, gaming narrative, virtual figures: The new relation­ ship between digital and performing arts. – A journey through the reality of Julian Kamphausen Can streaming in the performing arts work? A conversation with Elisabeth Caesar Robocalypse now: Will robots soon replace people? In the piece “Uncanny Valley” by Rimini Protokoll, they already manage to do just that

84 Digitalisation & Film + Radio 86 90

Where television ends and online begins: The future of film by Kirsten ­Niehuus Podcasts are sweeping across the digital landscape. How? And why? A look behind the scenes of the podcast label hauseins

94 Kreativ Kultur Berlin – About us 96

Creative City Berlin, Kulturförderpunkt Berlin, Kreativwirtschaftsberatung ­Berlin and Crowdfunding Berlin at a glance – what we do, what we want

# Vision Mission in 1,000 charac­ ters

All right, let’s go: This is where we invite several important partners and some individuals that have been working at the interface of cultural production, cre­ative work and digital strategies for years to speak their minds. There could be many, many more – and there will be more (in the next issue). The question is: What strategies will be needed in the future?

“What’s clear is that all content is now presented digi­ tally – whether in film, music or the games industry. For creative professionals, this means that they have to ac­ quire the appropriate digital know-how. This is ­where our work begins when it comes to the media:net net­ work. We represent and network creative stakeholders at state and federal level. We ensure the improvement of their framework conditions in Berlin-Brandenburg. And in my view, the expertise of the creative industries also benefits the major industrial sectors of today. Some in­ dustries, such as the gaming industry, even function as veritable drivers of digitalisation, since utilisation of the latest technology has always been the prerequisite for development. But what we need in the future is more in­ vestment in the creative industries. Because the cre­ative industry is that sector that behaves very deliberately – and this is precisely the potential we should be seeking to tap.”

Andrea Peters has been managing the corporate network media:net berlinbrandenburg for eleven years. In the in­ terview in CCB Magazine, she tells us why she still works with Excel her view of the future of creative work.

Dr. Bastian Lange Labs in Berlin: Refuges of hope?

“Everyone’s talking about digitalisation. It’s often over­ looked that Berlin has in recent years blossomed into a diversified experimental laboratory in the form of Fab­ Labs, open workshops, real laboratories or repair cafés – combining experimental craftsmanship (“low-tech”) with the latest technologies (“high-tech“). This is where young movers and shakers compete and express an al­ ternative understanding of growth. They’re looking for ways to escape the consumption trap and the associ­ ated harmful production processes. As a scientist, I re­ cently examined these places as part of the COWERK the research project. The result: A counter-movement is growing here from below, but one that is not against dig­ italisation and is also not fundamentally anti-econom­ ic. This is a movement that opposes the maximisation and growth pressures of the present and puts social and ecological issues ahead of the economic growth para­ digm – and ultimately formulates a critique of the lifecy­ cles of digital consumer goods (e.g. mobile phones) and their rapidly declining half-lives. Now is the time to po­ litically support these endeavours. For all its supposed idealism, Berlin suddenly now has a wide-range of op­ tions following the era of “poor, but sexy”. Subsequent growth and alternative solutions are not simply empty concepts of the present; they are symbols for a better future. That does seem palpably avant-garde, but brave ideas are needed more urgently than ever.”

Dr. Bastian Lange is an author, lecturer at the Universi­ ty of Leipzig and is in charge of the Multiplicities office in Berlin. An essay about the Berlin real labs and his re­ search can be found exclusively in the CCB Magazine.

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Photo © Die Hoffotografen GmbH

“We have to invest in the creative economy”

Photo © Monika Keiler

Andrea Peters

“Digital innovations bring us closer to a liveable society.”

“This is just the beginning of a new era.”

“The digital transformation in recent years has notice­ ably driven the transformation of traditional models of coexistence, collaboration and, above all, productive creativity. Empowerment, regardless of which under-­ represented group is involved, primarily means access to knowledge, means of communication and, last but not least, resources. This doesn’t mean that digitalisa­ tion d ­ oesn’t harbour hidden dangers; after all, a large percentage of the population lives in a world increasing­ ly saturated with algorithms – for example, referral cul­ tures and technologies such as face recognition. Taken as a whole, however, digital innovation has the p ­ otential to shape a more liveable society and, in particular, to provide a sustainable and fruitful basis for creative col­ laboration, whether through the development of plat­ forms and services that consciously counteract the cur­ rent trend of monopolising creative content optimising and extending existing licensing models and rights ad­ ministration, or through cross-industry innovations such as machine-learning-based music therapy capabilities, which already enable patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkin­ son’s, and other degenerative diseases to find their way back to a more fulfilling life. Just to what extent techno­ logical progress will shape our lives in the future is in our own hands.”

Claudia Schwarz is a strategy consultant in the field of creative technologies with a focus on music techno­ logy and interdisciplinary applications. In addition, she is Vice­-President of the Federal Association of Music Technology, MusicTech Germany. Would you like to ­learn more about her work? Read the interview with her on the Bowerbird app.

Photo © Robert Novakovic

Ela Kagel

Photo © Jens Thomas

# VI S I ON M I S S I ON I N 1, 0 0 0 C HAR ACTE R S

Claudia Schwarz

“Digitalisation is creating new monopolistic positions.

But it is also creating new forms of solidarity – espe­ cially in a city like Berlin. In this instance, digital coop­ eratives can become the key to a better future because they are both flexible and fair at the same time: fair, be­ cause everyone has the same right to express their own voice, no matter how much money they have. Moreover, all members have a personal stake in the company. Flex­ ible, because ­those who leave the cooperative don’t take the silent re­serves and value increases of the company with them. And there­fore it’s no surprise that many new cooperatives are emerging right now, where on the one hand a new capitalist platform is emerging, whilst on the other hand, for this reason, many are looking for new solutions. Cooperatives are currently also the strong­ est economic organisation in Germany: Since just last year, they have grown by 104,000 to 22.7 million follow­ ers. They can become a future mode, especially for art, culture and the creative industries. Why? This is what I describe in my essay a­bout the cooperatives Resonate, Fairmondo and Smart in the CCB Magazine.”

In 2011, Ela Kagel, together with Zsolt Szentirmai and David Farine, launched SUPERMARKT, a central point of contact for creative professionals in Berlin. She recently founded Rchain Europe, a first technology cooperative that provides digital tools and know-how to its members.

“I’ve been working for years at the interface of music, the newest technologies and science. And if I do say so myself: It’s amazing in which fields the latest inven­ tions from the realm of music technology are already being used – just consider the further development of Artificial Intelligence for the musical creation process or the possibilities of fair compensation via Blockchain technology. Currently, I am networking the music scene with my new Berlin MusicTech Meetup format. The cen­ tral question is: How does current technological devel­ opment influ­ence the way we create and interact with music? And this is exactly where progress needs to be made. What we need in the future will not just be a re­ formed copy­right that enables creative work on the In­ ternet and creates fair pay. We’ll also need to find a place for new music technologies in Germany's funding land­ scape. Because subsidies that are tailored to art and culture are often not considered for developers of music technologies because they are allegedly too tech-heavy.

In contrast, incentives that are geared towards techno­ logical innovation often classify music technologies as technologies that are too focussed on art and the crea­ tive scene. This is where I see a lot of room for improve­ ment!”

Matthias Strobel is a networker, idea generator and inno­ vation consultant. In July 2017 he founded MusicTech Germany, the Federal Association for Music Technology Germany e.V. And just what does he specifically demand in terms of copyright and what exactly happens at the MusicTech Meetups? Read our interview with Matthias in the CCB Magazine.

Stephan Balzer “We have to apply pressure from below.”

“Over ten years ago I brought the TED talk from Cal­ ifornia to Berlin. It’s a format that discursively summa­ rises technology, design, global perspectives and local risks. As far as digitalisation is concerned, I don’t be­ lieve that it will ultimately eliminate jobs on a large scale.

But there definitely will be an immense need for train­ ing and retraining. We have to prepare for that. And may­ be we should also consider a base income. What we’re currently lacking in Germany is a Digital Ministry that guides and coordinates the development process. For we are a nation that has developed through our ideas, through our engineering skills, through the high quality products that we export. That was and is the basis of our prosperity. And in order to maintain this pros­perity and our social system, we’ll need more courage and innova­ tion in the future – especially when it comes to creative processes.”

Would you like to learn more about the man behind the curtains of TEDx and discover what future Stephan ­Balzer sees for his format in Berlin? Just open the Bow­ erbird app and explore.

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Photo © Karan Talwar

“We don’t just need copyright reform. We also need a new funding programme.”

Photo © Sebastian Gabsch

Matthias Strobel

A quick checklist to get started

The five most important questions about digitalisation, Artificial ­Intelligence and creative work

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Digitalisation is progressing and will change jobs and workplaces: Which jobs will disappear? What new ones will emerge?

A wide range of studies have reached varying con­ clusions. For instance, on the one hand, a study by the University of Oxford r­ evealed that jobs in the ar­ eas of finance, administration, l­ogistics, freight for­ warding and the production of di­gi­talisation are fall­ ing victim. In Germany, logistics and mechanical engineering are currently being automated. Gener­ ally, work revolving around the high­est level of so­ cial competence, leadership quality and empathy is safest. On the other hand, according to a study by the World Economic ­Forum in 2018, experts predict that digitalisation will even create 133 million new and better-paid jobs by 2025 – alberit ­­ with about 75 millions jobs worldwide falling by the wayside at the same time. There are no separate studies regard­ ing art, culture and the creative industries. Which means: we’ll just have to wait and see. Incidentally, from as early as the beginning of the 1980s, it was predicted that that societies in general would even­ tually not have enough jobs for people to fill. At least this was what sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf fore­saw.

In the 1990s, the economist Jeremy Rifkin added ad­ ditional fuel to the fire with his thesis on the end of work – as we know, that hasn’t come to pass.

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How do Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain technology in particular change art, culture and creative work?

Both are already changing art and cultural pro­ duction in many fields. In particular, the articles by ­Andreas Sudmann (pages 20 – 21) and Eric Eitel and Julia Schneider (pages 44 – 47) deal with the impact of AI on art and cultural production. In the interview with Oliver Goedicke (pages 48 – 51) we discuss how Blockchain technology can be meaningfully used for music.

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Will the gap between rich and poor increase due to digitalisa­ tion, or will it create forms of solidarity amongst various groups?

Last but not least: In cooperation with Technologie­ stiftung Berlin, the Berlin Cultural Administration has recently launched the “Innovation Fund for Dig­ ital Development in the Cultural Sector”. For the de­ velopment of the funding guidelines, a budget of 250,000 euros was available in 2018 and 500,000 euros in 2019.

Both. On the one hand, digitalisation brings with it new monopolies – which is more than evident in reading this issue. On the other hand, it creates new opportunities for access, transparency, networking and new working models. Tip: Read the complete magazine from front to back.

How much money does politics invest, especially in the promo­ tion of the arts, culture and creative industries in the field of digitalisation?

In this case, you have to take a close look at the in­ dividual areas. For example, since 2016 the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy has specif­ ically been promoting the development, networking and international competitiveness of the digital eco­ system in Germany. Every year, for a period of three years, 500,000 euros will be made available through the agency Hub:Agency. In addition, the State of ­Berlin has set up various funding programmes to support digitalisation projects both in the business sector and in the non-profit cultural sectors: In the field of economic development, the programmes “Pro Fit Early Stage Financing”, “Prof Fit Project Fi­ nancing” and the “Transfer Bonus” of Investitions­ bank Berlin (IBB) are worth mentioning. In addition, the Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Ener­ gy and Enterprises regularly initiates competitions with a focus on digitalisation and digital business models in the creative industries. In the arts and culture sector, for its current funding period (2014 – 2020), the EU is supporting projects that meet the eligibility criterion “Capacity-development for digi­ talisation” as part of the “Creative Europe” funding programme. “Creative Europe” has a total funding of 1.5 billion euros for the current funding period. Since the beginning of 2019, up to ten million euros have been available annually for the digitalisation of cin­ ematographic films at federal and state level for the next ten years. Since 2016, around 2.7 million euros has also been made available to “digitise the perfor­ mance technology of live music venues in Germany”.

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In summary: Digitalisation – do I have to participate?

We suspect so, yes. Do you have a cellphone? That’s the first step. Second step: Keep an eye on the Inter­ net – then you’re on the right path. Of course, you could still decide to avoid it altogether. 18 per cent of Berlin is forested. Here, too, there’s a “Big Good Future”!

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#VI S I ON MLIESAD S I ON I NTE I N RVI 1 . 0EW 0 0 Z E I C HE N

Herr Welzer – what’s next?

Whether it’s Artificial Intelligence, car-free cities or transformation design: This man writes one hit after another: Harald Welzer. No, we’re not talking about the cook (Tim Mälzer), but rather the sociologist, social psychologist, futurologist, visionary – and pub­lisher of the print magazine ­FUTURZWEI – which fits in perfectly with our issue “The Big Good Future #2”. We spoke with the professor, a native of Bissendorf (near Hanover) who has set up shop in Berlin, about the value of creative work in the wake of digital transformation and where Artificial Intelligence ceases and artificial ignorance begins.

Interview: JENS THOMAS

Photo © Jens Steingässer

‘Creative’ work may also be automated in the future. Even now, algorithms can write reports, but the ideas, the perceptions of society, work and life, they still require people. And crea­tive work could actually be the work we do in the future because it’s meaningful.

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Herr Welzer, you write one book after another, you sit on talk show panels all the time, you debate about the future of work and digitalisation – but you don’t have a smartphone. Do your best thoughts come to you offline?

I can’t really say, mainly because I’m not spending a whole lot of time online. Then again, I probably have a lot more time on my hands than others do who are always tapping about on the phone. I needn’t write 14 messages just to set up a phone call. I just call.

Your latest book “Es könnte anders sein” (“It could be differ­ ent”) is a social sketch of the future of work, mobility, digitali­ sation, urban life and new forms of economy. When you your­ self consider digitalisation, what gives you hope for the future?

First of all, that all the shit work will be done away with.

And that’s not meant to sound disrespectful; by that I mean the physically demanding work that destroys peo­ple and those activities that require less effort. The extreme­ ly repetitive forms of work, i.e. the permanent repetition of certain hand movements and mental activities such as sorting by numbers, are also part of this; machines are already doing that now, and they will be doing so in the future. In turn, other forms of work in which the human being takes centre stage can be upgraded. For example, work in the healthcare sector. And in the overall picture there could perhaps be more latitude for the work that people really enjoy doing.

But isn’t this a utopian idea, believing that there could be a society that only produces useful and meaningful work?

Of course this is a utopian concept, but that’s how reali­ ties begin. Who would we be if we didn’t think about al­ ternatives?

How will digitalisation change the value of creative work?

The concept of creativity is centuries old. Until the Enlight­ enment, the dominant assumption was that ‘creative types’ were supposedly insane, geniuses or eccentrics. It was only later that ‘creative’ abilities were associated with achieve­ ments, and in the last two decades creativity has also even been regarded as an economic motor – something many art­ ists have resisted. Let’s assume that there will be less work in the future due to the digital upheaval; will creative work per­ haps acquire a completely different significance in society in general? Meaning, when it’s no longer about whether it’s economic activity at all or not?

Perhaps. At first glance, however, this concept of crea­ tivity bothers me. An artist friend of mine, Dieter Frölich, always says that creativity is something for hairdressers.

And I’d go along with that! Creativity is first and foremost merely the rearrangement of what already exists, and what’s now being cast as creativity at some workshop or other often has next to nothing to do with creativity. After all, we have the following situation: Since the 1980s there has been an expansion of creative occupational profes­ sions because the economy requires creativity or relies on creativity as a driving force. However, the concept of creativity has become so dodgy today that you really have to ask yourself what it will entail in the future – especially as a result of the digital revolution.

#VI S I ON MLIESAD S I ON I NTE I N RVI 1 . 0EW 0 0 Z E I C HE N

If a society is to become more environ­ mentally friendly and participatory, one has to ask: how? This is where digitalisation offers us endless possibilities. Initially, it’s just a technology. And what we need in the future will not be artificial, but moral intelligence.

Has a few ideas about how things are going to unfold in the future: Harald Welzer

Photos © Deutschlandradio – Bettina Straub

all these digital innovations. But we don’t ask why. And the reality is: To this day we do not have, and in the dis­ tant future, we still will not have an autonomously driving car that can handle snow, in which case the vehicle won’t move an inch. All of these robots to date are little more than sophisticated toasters. In fact, I would rather prefer the intelligence of some people who actually bear some political responsibility than outsourcing some intelli­ gence to certain places or environments. Environmental intelligence. Personally, I find it quite pleasant when the environment I find myself in is a bit daft, and it doesn’t have to be intelligent. I want to be able to manipulate this environment – intelligently – and I definitely don’t manip­ ulate me. And what we need in the future will not be arti­ ficial, but moral intelligence. An enlightened relationship to technology.

You recently had a discussion with economist Tilman Santa­ rius, the author of the book “Smarte Grüne Welt. Digitalisie­ rung zwischen Überwachung, Konsum und Nachhaltigkeit” (“Smart Green World: Digitalisation between monitoring, consumption and sustainability”). At the Einstein Center Di­gi­ tal Future in Berlin. In his analyses, Santarius has shown that digitalisation, contrary to the belief that it saves re­sources, is a real climate killer: The computing power per kilowatt-hour has doubled every 1.5 years over time. Couldn’t cultural and creative markets be a kind of new avant-garde in the future, as they place class before mass and increasingly focus on conserving resources?

That would be desirable, sure. And that’s what I wrote ­about with Bernd Sommer in my book “Transformation­ design”: New design with responsibility. Reductive De­ sign. Because digital innovations consume immense amounts of resources and are simply unsustainable. By the way, AI or not: We humans still have the future in our own hands, politics too. We could even set up a pub­ lic-law network for all, and we could develop new forms of housing involving creative professionals and citizens.

We could renew entire cities in an environmentally friend­ ly way; so much is possible here. You just have to do it.

In the next few pages things take a more ­comical turn ­(hopefully). We proudly present Berlin’s first AI comic strip!

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What do you think?

The question is, what will become of the cultural sector through the restructuring of the labour sector? In the end, it’s a question of distribution: How can a society be finan­ cially viable, but also function as a community of solidar­ ity, when whole branches break away as a result of auto­ mation? Even ‘creative’ work will be able to be automated in the future; even now, algorithms can write reports, but the ideas, the perceptions of society, work and life, they still require people. And creative work could actually be the work we do in the future because it’s meaningful.

Hannah Arendt used the term ‘manufacturing’ to differen­ tiate it from ‘work’, yet she never saw anything political in it.

Mightn’t that be the intrinsic value of creative work in the fu­ ture? The fact that it’s something like Ulrich Beck’s idea of civic work? Work that benefits society? One tendency in re­ cent years has been for creative professionals to increasing­ ly emphasise the importance of environmentally friendly or socially just criteria.

Yes, I see that potential. And ultimately this will give us the opportunity to think about work in a completely new way. Protestantism has influenced the value of the work for almost 200 years; today, work is regarded as a value that is synonymous with pay and performance. It’s sort of like those old Donald Duck comics. In a translation by Dr. Erika Fuchs there was a poem by Tick, Trick and Track: “Wer Arbeit kennt und sich nicht drückt, der ist verrückt.”

In antiquity, someone that didn’t have to work was con­ sidered to “free”; labour stood for toil and plague. We have freed ourselves of this thinking over the centuries, thank God. At the same time, work has become a fetish and we’re happy to get away from it. We could actually start reflecting now on which social productive forces will be meaningful and beneficial in the future. Especially using digitalisation.

Such as?

If a society is to become more environmentally friendly and participatory, one has to ask: how? This is where digi­ talisation reveals endless possibilities. In this way, supply chain transparency can be increased by disclosing who was involved in what production and under what condi­ tions. We could use digitalisation to perfectly­­organise pub­lic transport and get rid of cars. Digitalisation is just a technology for now. It can create democracy, but under certain market conditions it can also be hostile to civili­ sation, and this is what’s currently emerging. A few tech companies dominate the market and governments are chasing after every AI. What we ultimately need now is a real debate on digitalisation instead of frittering away hours on our smartphones.

What kind of debate? It seems like people are talking all the time.

Yes, but not about anything very important. The point is: What do we want anyway? What kind of society do we want where a good life is possible? In dealing with dig­ italisation, people are currently doing just the opposite: For some mysterious reason, it’s assumed that we need

At the moment, AI is mainly concerned with performing complicated but repetitive tasks.

If you define intelligence as the ability to capture the essence of a new situation...

... real AI needs to think more like us.

With intentionality, with emotions, with conscience; capturing counterfactuals.

AI - C OM I C

Actually, the methods are not new.

Just the techniques and the data.

This being said, AI is still in its early stages (although it reads differently on the news).

By Dr. JULIA SCHNEIDER and LENA KADRIYE ZIYAL

Up to now, it`s more adequate to speak of „artificially augmented intelligence“.* * Nevertheless, we will use the term ‚AI‘ in the following to simplify matters. And please, find some reading suggestions at the end of the book.

General AI

In the 1960s, AI pioneers hoped that machines could soon learn to think without human intervention.

But from 1973 onwards, disappointment and criticism in the community, followed by pessimism in the press, led to the 1st “AI Winter”. A 2nd one followed.

17

If you like Friends, I bet you‘ll like New Girl, too

Until the 2000s, AI was a dirty word that “simply didn’t work”. But when data, hardware and infrastructure were ready in 2010, a wide range of AI applications followed.

Despite their impressive progress and success, today’s AI is narrow. Its tasks are often classification and need a lot of data and a lot of energy.

I am aware of myself, I think, feel, desire.

I love New girl for instance, even though the plot repeats itself after the third season... Also, I don‘t exist.

No AI can represent causal relationships or integrate abstract knowledge, e.g., what objects are, what they are for, and how they are typically used.

We really need to adjust our expectations and stop over-hyping AI. If we don’t, we may find ourselves in another AI Winter.

Creativity Special thanks to: My dear AI. Without you I never would‘ve found the time to complete this...

AI - C OM I C

AI can save time otherwise wasted on stupid, tedious work for creativity.

But it can do even more.

When an AI sorts easier to make a our children (in our parents as a

our photos, it is photo-calendar with 28 positions) for present.

Don‘t ask me, I‘m just a generic style transfer.

When an AI puts together a playlist of up-and-coming producers of house music, it may inspire our next DJ-set.

We can also get creative directly with the AI, compiling data and coding it, in a narrow area. But the AI has no judgement.

What do you think?

So why are you always getting the credit?

Judging is an ability we possess. And we love doing it. This is where AI together with us can achieve great things, with a human tweak.

The smaller the role of humans in the process of art-creation becomes, the more AI questions traditional concepts of art.

Future Work

This involves all kinds of jobs on the social ladder. White-collar jobs like lawyers, medics, or brokers‌

‌ as well as creative jobs like artists, chefs or journalists, or blue-collar jobs such as construction workers or drivers.

AI can outperform us in doing repetitive tasks. Cheap, strong, fast, easy.

19

The share of jobs at high risk of replacement by computers or robots has increased significantly.*

liveha ck#

14

62

8

We are better in understanding non-trivial, new situations, building relationships, creating context and meaning. Custom-fit solutions.

We are also needed as partners of AI: developing algorithms that work, supervising, repairing. Combining us with AI. https://doi.org/10.1787/2e2f4eea-en

*

www.weneedtotalk.ai

S C I E N C E ES SAY

Media scientist Andreas Sudmann.

He’s been thinking about the Terminator lately.

Photo © Jan Dreer for IFK, Vienna

Al-fantasies: Will the ­Terminator ­arrive with a ­paintbrush in his hand?

The debate about Artificial Intelligence and learning algo­ rithms is becoming ever more heated: What can machines do that people can’t? Can machines even be creative? Will they soon be the better artists? In fact, machine-learning processes are already intervening in all areas of cultural creation: Machines automate film productions, they beat us at the board game Go or compose sophisticated music.

Reason enough to take a closer look at the creative-artistic achievements of intelligent systems.

By Dr. ANDREAS SUDMANN (media scientist and co-editor of the recently published book “Machine Learning. Medien, Infrastrukturen und Technologien der Künstlichen Intelligenz”, [“Machine Learning. Media, infrastructures and technologies of Artificial Intelligence”], transcript Verlag)

mond De Belamy” is probably the first work of its kind to have been auctioned at the renowned auction house Christie’s – for the not insignificant sum of over $400,000. The portrait shows a smeared “painted“ male figure that looks as though it was painted in the 18th century. A Parisian group of artists called “Obvious” is responsible for the picture. According to their own website, the collective has taken up the cause of wanting to “explain and democratise AI with art”.

However, this claim doesn’t quite fit with actual way the por­ trait was created. For the Parisian artists had used a learn­ ing algorithm, which actually was developed a 19-year-old young man named Robbie Barrat from West Virginia and which was put on online as an open-source project. More precisely one would have to say: evolved. Because the tech­ nology is a so-called Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which was originally designed by the well-known scientist Ian Goodfellow. In any case, the Paris artist collective asked Barrat whether it could whether it could use “its” algorithm for the cause of AI art democratisation. He agreed and even helped the group with the technical implementation of their project. However, when the portrait pro­duced with the neural network was finally auctioned at Christie’s, the 19-year was correspondingly annoyed. On Twitter, Barrat wrote on 25 Oc­ tober 2018, “I’m crazy for thinking that they’re just using my network and are selling the results?”

Since then, it’s been debated who is actually the creator and author of the image. In a contribution to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Bernd Graff put forward the thesis that not the por­ trait, but the algorithm itself must be considered art. At this point a humanist might sarcastically comment that, on the bright side, at least these algorithms are still being devel­ oped by humans. As a media scientist, however, a completely different intervention seems more sensible to me: It consists above all of abandoning the classical dichotomy of man ver­ sus machine and taking greater account of the fact that cre­ ative-artistic practices are in principle based on processes in which the power to act is distributed between non-human and human spheres. And so it is, ultimately, when it comes to the case of “art” generating learning algorithms.

What does all this mean? As never before in the history of civilisation, computers today can give the impression or sim­ ulate the impression that they could be creative on their own or even produce art. In fact, they are only capable of doing so because humans and algorithms can achieve this simulation achievement together.

21

1950. In an essay for the journal Mind, no less a brain than Alan Turing presents a famous thought experiment. In the following decades, it will decisively shape the international discussion about the potentials and limitations of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Today we know the experiment by the term “Turing Test”. Back in those days, the British mathemati­cian and computer scientist wondered if machines can think, and, can a machine even “look” or appear intelligent? Can a ma­ chine “look” intelligent? More precisely, can a machine, with­ out revealing itself as such, successfully imitate human com­ munications behaviour? If a machine were capable of doing so, it would also be legitimate, according to Turing, to con­ ceive of it as “thinking”.

Fast forward to the present: Contrary to other theses, no ma­ chine has yet passed the Turing test. Yet even so, AI research has been able to log quite a few other successes and leaps in performance in recent years. For example, the spectacular victory of Alpha-Go in the board game Go, in which a com­ puter program plays the board game by itself and won as a machine against a human world champion, as well as ad­ vances in the field of machine language translations, image recognition, in the field of self-driving cars, etc. Moreover, ­Google’s telephone assistant Duplex has recently impres­ sively demonstrated that AI systems can, at least to some extent, now communicate with individuals without the latter noticing it – in contrast to the Turing test, where the asses­ sor is still aware that one of their interlo­cutors is a m ­ a­chine.

In this respect, it comes as no surprise that ­these days a top­ ic that is also not new in the current AI discussion is more frequently being addressed: Can machines be creative? Can machines even produce art? One thing’s for sure: Smart ma­ chines are already participating in creative and artistic pro­ cesses. For a long time, AI technologies have been used to make films or compose pieces of music. What’s more, in many cases AI systems are not merely used as a means, but act as the actual, essential agents of creative artistic expres­ sion. This being said, one is prompted to ask: Will machines be the better artists soon?

The answer is quite simply no. For one thing, machines aren’t able to conceive of themselves as creative-artistic entities.

And they won’t be able to do that at any point in the near fu­ ture either. Also, they have no idea what art or creativity even is. They have no reflexivity, no consciousness. And you can’t really teach machines any­thing like common sense knowl­ edge yet, even though t­ here has been a lot of progress re­ cently. For example, TwentyBN, a Berlin and Toronto-based AI company, has recently ­trained artificial neural networks to detect actions and gestures, such as whether a person is sitting or standing, moving toward or away from the camera whether she hides her eyes with her hands or does things like drinking from a cup.

The fact that machines supposedly produce art currently raises a completely different question, namely that of who is still actually creating value when machines or AI algorithms themselves make art. Recently, this conflict was exemplified by the copyright dispute over a portrait entitled “Edmond De Belamy”. Created with the help of a learning algorithm, “Ed­

1

Digitalisation

Digital transformation, streaming economy: Art as an early warning system?

What is VR art and can it democratise the art market?

What do algorithms have to do with muses and natural experience?

&

D I G ITALI SATI O N & ART Photo Š Julian Paul

ESSAY

Art is an early warning ­system The Internet of the 1990s raised the question of who has access to the media world.

Today we like to think that we all have unlimited access, and yet in fact this is precisely the question being put to the test again. Art can teach us a lot about this, especially in times of digitalisation.

By KRISTOFFER GANSING (artistic director of transmediale festival for art and digital culture, Berlin)

Works by Rosa Menkman: “Menkman’s work can be read as a kind of resistance, as an indication of how we are becoming increasingly transparent and visible in today’s digital culture”. – Kristoffer Gansing, transmediale. © Rosa Menkman

In the early 1960s, as the Internet was brand-new, media theorist Marshall McLuhan had an important idea. McLu­ han, a Canadian professor of literature, widely known as the “world’s first media theorist”, introduced the term “Global Vil­ lage”, a term, which is used today synonymously for the In­ ternet. That was completely original given that the Internet didn’t yet exist. McLuhan used the term “Global Village” to describe the socio-cultural impact of new electronic commu­ nication technologies. He not only described how new tech­ nologies were changing entire fields of production, but also how media were reconfiguring human knowledge and the perception of the world. Art had a special role in such trans­ formations, which for McLuhan can act as “a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it”. Today, some six­ ty years after McLuhan formulated these reflections on the relations between art, technology and society, we can look back at a long history of artists engaging and experimenting with new media. To a great extent, this does concern digi­ tal technologies and the Internet, both of which have been the objects of artistic activity more or less since their begin­ nings. Today, digital transformation is booming and also seen as a socio-cultural process. In this context, one has to raise the question how does this effect the work of artists, what has changed?

For more than 20 years, I’ve been concerned with art and digital culture. The contemporary paradigm of “digitalisa­ tion” is however a rather recent phenomenon, which in Ger­ many is also called “Industry 4.0”, and is supposed to inno­ vate everything from automobile production to the service economy. By contrast, in the fields of art and culture, digi­ talisation mainly seems to mean bringing existing cultural and artistic content to digital platforms as well as providing new connections between audiences, institutions and pro­ ducers / makers. The time of great innovations seems to be gone, when the Internet was this great new frontier for new forms of art and ways of working together. In the Berlin con­ text, one can, for example, look back at the web-platform “In­ ternationale Stadt Berlin”, founded by a group of artists in 1995 as an attempt to make the Internet more accessible to the wider public, and especially to promote net.art, that is art made with the Internet as its primary medium of production and reception.

The big difference today, however, is that the analogue and digital world are tightly interwoven as everyone (and everything) is connected, which means that providing ac­ cess to the Internet does not seem a big as an issue as it was in the 1990s. The recent debates over the EU copyright reform however, possibly points in an opposite direction. It might just be the tip of the iceberg of a larger ongoing civil society interest in net politics, but it puts this central ques­ tion of who has access back into focus. Only now, the battle for conditions of access are more concrete as this question also becomes about who has access to the necessary eco­ nomic and organisational resources to at all be able to pub­ lish and share online content?

25

The recent debate about EU copyright reform begs the question: Who should have access at all? And it’s precisely here that art has the most to say.

D I G ITALI SATI O N & ART ESSAY

We are living in times of the streaming economy, when most digital content is provided by big commercial platforms such as Netflix and Amazon and the cultural significance of the Internet is turning more and more into something that looks increasingly like the one-way medium of Television. With in­ creasing polarisation on social media, we are also seeing the negative effects of McLuhan’s vision of the Global Village where everyone is drawn together in specialised, tight-knit communities with their own discourses, i.e. the famous filter bubbles. Against this background, the digital media and net­ work experiments of the 1990s might seem naive, but their ideals of access for all and creative use of networks regain political momentum and returns in artistic practice in new ways. Artists respond to this complex analogue-digital, or let’s rather say “post-digital” reality and here I would like to mention two artists that have also been featured at the trans­ mediale festival.

Over the past decade or so, Berlin-based Dutch artist Rosa Menkman has developed a body of work related to the glitches and interstices of the digital, inviting us to reflect on the politics of seemingly mundane and mostly invisible digital artefacts such as file formats and image compres­ sion algorithms. In one of her more recent works “How not to be Read” (2016) (in which you might detect the reference to the famous video by Hito Steyerl “How not to be Seen”), Menkman works with the common .jpg compression format that is used on a daily basis to modify the file size of images and transport them from one setting to another. More spe­ cifically, Menkman makes use of so-called DCT Syphoning, Discreet Cosine Transform, which might sound very techni­ cal but is deceptively simple. You might have come across the strange shifted block effect that sometimes appears on lesser quality jpg images? These appear because the jpg format works by reducing the image into 64 so called “macroblocks” that organise basic information about the im­ age into a grid, containing, for example, information on col­ our or hue. This reduction of complexity usually is usually undetectable to the human eye, but the sampling process doesn’t always work, and this is the task of the Discreet Co­ sine Transform algorithm. By manipulating this aspect of the jpg compression, Rosa shows how you can enter text into the jpg and make it machine-non-readable yet decodable by humans, and thus effectively installing a means of encryp­ tion into the jpg format.

By making it machine-non-readable I am referring simply to the fact that the computer can’t recognise the text as text any longer as it has been “flattened” into other visual informa­ tion. Thereby I would say that Rosa Menkman has created a beautiful post-digital intervention into digital image produc­ tion, as a means of simple encryption that has the power to transmit messages in a non-computable way, paradoxical­ ly by using digital means. For this work, Menkman won the Crypto Design Challenge organised by the Museum of The Image in Breda.

Menkman’s work can be seen as resistance to how we have become always visible and readable in digital culture, and in­ stead provides a form of withdrawal or alternative communi­

© Rosa Menkman

Criticality and autonomous infrastructures were an integral part of the early artistic experiments with digital technology and the Internet, and in this way, art has indeed worked as a distant early warning system.

Photo © Hannes M. Meier Roman Lipski: “This is about digital muses”

kling klang klong: The high art of deep sounds Experimental soundscapes and sound design at the interface of art and new entrepreneurship: that’s kling klang klong. Tech­ nological innovations become nature experiences through in­ teractive applications – and vice versa. Sometimes nature itself becomes the soundmaster – as in the project “Meandering River”: A neural network from Google was trained with record­ ings by three pianists, and in the end, an AI spewed out its own compositions – and the algorithm of river simulations was used for demanding sound productions. Elsewhere, the kling klang klong team developed a machine (sound engine) to design en­ gine sounds for e-cars that will be used by an automaker in the future. It can be quieter even when the world is too loud. As they say: “We’re all about a responsible approach to sound, design and room backdrops. We’ve been working on this for years”. We visited the sound collective in Berlin. You can read the report in CCB Magazine on the Bowerbird app.

27

Photo © KLONG

Imagine that you have the best ideas and that an AI does what­ ever you want – that, or something like it, is how it works for the Berlin-based Polish artist Roman Lipski. Together with the data specialist and artist Florian Dohmann, he has developed software that is meticulously attuned to his pictures – the AI paints the picture and follows a specific algorithm. Roman Lips­ki explains this as follows: “The software is an algorithm for col­ our and shape recognition of image data. In my opinion, art and algorithms go hand in hand. The images generated by the AI literally inspire me. My canvases are ideal for that.” Would you like to learn more about how Roman Lipski works, what exactly the AI does and what it all has to do with his Muse? Read the interview here with the Bowerbird app.

B EST P R ACTI C E

cational structure to the all-seeing network. Other artists are using new tools such as machine learning to provide new forms of critical visibility. This is the case, for example, with the Vframe project, which is a set of open-source tools devel­ oped mainly by the Berlin based artist Adam Harvey. By utilis­ ing computer vision techniques, Harvey provides organisa­ tions that document war crimes such as Syrian Archive with automation tools to more effectively analyse the vast amount of online shared videos from conflict zones. This can for ex­ ample work by using computational methods to summarise longer videos into shorter films, showing only the most es­ sential visual information, as statistically determined by the software. As imperfect as such techniques may be, they nev­ ertheless provide people a viable way to more quickly handle huge data-sets for vital information and thus, Vframe’s work is one where computer vision tools, which are usually devel­ oped for control and repression, are implemented for more humanitarian use in civil society.

Criticality and autonomous infrastructures were an integral part of the early artistic experiments with digital technology and the Internet, and in this way, art has indeed worked as a distant early warning system. Yet broader society seems not to have been very receptive, as we are living through the rath­ er harsh consequences of what is maybe the fifth (or is it the seventh?) phase of digital culture. All is not lost though, since these younger generations of what we could call “post-digi­ tal” artists and practitioners are engaging digital transforma­ tions in ways that bridge the analogue and digital, producing artistic work that can be both aesthetically challenging and critically constructive.

D I G ITALI SATI O N & ART Everything in sight – even without VR glasses: Tina Sauerländer Photo © Jonas Blume, 2018

INTE RVI EW

“At some point you ask yourself: What am I doing here?”

Probably no one has advanced the topic of Virtual Reality art in the last few years as far as Tina Sauerländer. Sauerländer was born in Kassel, later moved to Munich and now lives in Berlin and runs her own platform, peer to space, through which she makes VR art accessible to the general public and seeks to broaden the current discourse on digitalisation. But do we need digital art in order to address the issue of digitalisation? What’s so special about Virtual Reality art? And can artists earn anything doing it?

Interview: BORIS MESSING

Speculative Cultures. A Virtual Reality Exhibition, 2019, exhibition view with an installation by Scott Benesiinaabandan, curated by Tina Sauerländer, Peggy Schoenegge and Erandy Vergara, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons / The New School, New York.

Photo © Marc Tatti

Tina, the art world considers you an expert on digital art. Why does digital art need to address digitalisation?

It doesn’t necessarily need it. Digital art or VR art are sim­ ply other, novel forms of art that augment the realm of art.

Many artists today are combining analogue and digital art; both worlds are very intertwined.

You launched peer to space in 2010. What exactly is it? And what does this have to do with digital art?

The primary interest of peer to space is focussed on art that deals with the influence of the digital and the Inter­ net on our world. Digital art and VR art in particular are the focal points. Peer to space is an exhibition platform that I founded together with Maja Block in 2010 and cu­ rate today with Peggy Schoenegge. It all started as a small side project of mine that has in the meantime become my main occupation. VR exhibitions are in demand like never before. We are generally concerned with topics that are present in society – and digitalisation is a central theme.

Can you give a concrete example of exactly what you are ex­ hibiting?

Certainly! In 2015 I made an exhibition called “PORN TO PIZZA – Domestic Clichés”. It was about how the Inter­ net changed our home, our everyday life, and our comfort zone. Still in bed, we are connected to the world and gen­ erate hyper-realistic content from and about us – selfies, food, and travel. Or we watch porn. That was the main theme of the exhibition. Pizza stood for food porn.

Ok, but what exactly is VR art? A painting or a sculpture can be clearly understood. What exactly does VR art look like?

And what’s new about it?

Ok, I’ll give you a good example. The American multi­ media artist Rachel Rossin has developed a work of art called “Just A Nose”. As the user, you have a mast of a ship’s bow on your forehead in the open sea: calm water surface, rippling waters, glittering, wave sounds – every­ thing looks beautiful. And suddenly you’re covered with colourful sheets, fluttering in the air. Instinctively you try to grab them with the mast, but never succeed, they al­ ways slip away. It’s not a game, there is no next level, no points, no coins to collect. You’re only in this one place all the time. And at some point one wonders: What am I doing here? VR is a technology that has evolved from military application since the early 1960s to simulate flights or theatres of war. In the 1980s there were then first attempts to make VR suit­able for the masses, since the gaming industry was very important. With his data glove and VR headset, American programming philoso­ pher Jaron Lanier was an important pioneer in this area.

In Germany, for example, he passed on this technique to Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss and other well-known media artists.

It all sounds nice and good, but a look at the statistics s­ hows that digital or VR art basically doesn’t exist. In 2017, the grea­ test number of artworks sold came from well-known names: da Vinci, Picasso, Modigliani, Pollock. Da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” was even sold for $ 450 million. What is the reason that digital art can’t yet compete?

29

You can’t drive new techno­ logy if you don’t develop content at the same time.

D I G ITALI SATI O N & ART INTE RVI EW

The art market is based on the idea of the original: There is only one work of art and its value is measured by it. This idea influences the collectors. By contrast, photography has been able to assert itself by marketing edited prints.

This is a bit more complicated with digital art. There is an infinitely reproducible art product, a file that you can send as you like. There is no original anymore. Now it’s possible to sell limited editions of digital art via Block­ chain technology. That doesn’t work very well. Alterna­ tively, artists can distribute their digital works through companies such as Daata Editions or Sedition, which also make editions of the works. Although this does not reflect the actual character of the digital, it has currently proven to be a viable model.

And how much can somebody earn doing this?

Well, put it like this: You won’t get rich doing it. Compared to the traditional art market, the proceeds from digital art are very low. Collectors are still mainly interested in painting, which promises the biggest sales. The range on offer is enormous. With our VR art platform Radiance, we are trying to develop a new distribution model for VR art and offer people streaming or downloading this kind of art. Artists would then earn from the fees. The prereq­ uisite for this, however, is that people buy headsets in order to be able to participate in VR at all. So you could enjoy art at home and not only in the sacred halls of the museum or the White Cube, meaning that art would be closer to everyday life again. Artists are not gods! They are people like you and me, people who reflect on our society.

But some artists have a suspicious ‘god-like status’. The art market is not only still dominated by ‘classical’ art, but, as economist Magnus Resch found out in a study, sales-boost­ ing art results above all from a small network of the few: If you’re in, you’re in. If you’re not in, you can’t get in. Does the digital art scene have the potential to democratise this ­closed art market?

I can only agree with Magnus Resch’s study. But my hope is that collectors can open up to digital art or new collec­ tors can be won for it. There are now at least some collec­ tors who are interested in digital art and VR art in particu­ lar, for example a collection in London, the Zabludowicz Collection; it specifically collects VR art. The interest in it is growing. And even some well-known artists like Jeff Koons and Marina Abramović have meanwhile discov­ ered VR for themselves. But the real question is who the future collectors of digital art will actually be. And what understanding of art they will have. Because art is not just about money. Art can – and should – be a contempo­ rary object of prestige without it costing millions.

And who might these new collectors of digital art be?

Digital natives in particular have the potential to become more interested in digital art in the future, and here, too, I suspect a new customer base will emerge. One with a different understanding of art. One that doesn’t make val­ ue dependent on the material uniqueness of an object.

In VR art, I see a chance for art to become more involved

Speculative Cultures. A Virtual Reality Exhibition, 2019, exhibition view with an installation by Matias Brunacci, curated by Tina Sauerländer, Peggy Schoenegge and Erandy Vergara, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons / The New School, New York.

Photo © Marc Tatti

With Radiance, we are trying to set up our own VR art platform to create a new ­ istribution model for art. d

Photo © Anne Freitag

and connected to people’s real life experiences and thus allow new groups of interested individuals to emerge.

Tina, what does the art market of the future look like? What changes would you like to see?

The main change I want is for us to get away from the idea of the original as a value factor. I think that is very outdat­ ed in the digital age. I hope that there is more openness for digital art and willingness to engage with it. My hope rests with the young generation.

And how often do you yourself put on VR visors? (laughs) Far too seldom.

STATE Studio: Science, Smoke … and Mirrors

Smeller 2.0: Whoever doesn’t want to hear, can smell

VR Art Facts The immediate experience of art is currently being enhanced by four new technologies (immersive tech): Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, mixed-reality forms and 360-degree videos. Virtual Reality (VR) means that viewers perceive a virtual rea­ lity with a headset that puts them in the spotlight. Augmented Reality (AR) is a computer-aided extension of reality, visible on screen or in AR goggles. Mixed reality in turn refers to all forms of mixing virtual and ac­ tual reality. By contrast, 360-degree videos are films that viewers can see on a screen or with VR glas­ ses – the viewpoints of the world around them are freely selectable.

The editorial staff is not aware of any comparative scientific studies on the market situation of immer­ sive tech in connection with art.

An artistic approach to odour therapy for the chronically ill?

A co-working space in the middle of the Brandenburg forest?

Wolfgang Georgsdorf’s works oscillate in the truest sense of the word between art and science, between original experience of nature and high-tech equipment. His biggest project: Smeller 2.0. A universal scent projector, the fragrances of different times and spaces for the collective experience flow into a hall and every second, varying scenarios are imagined. Welcome to the Autobahn rest stop, a freshly mowed meadow or at the shopping stand at the fair! Here, the latest technology addresses human senses that are supposedly lost through increasing digitalisa­ tion – high frequency, but pleasant smells pour out of an organ, a new olfactory close-up experience bordering technology and nature. Sounds bizarre, but that’s only the case until you’ve had the opportunity to experience it yourself. In May 2019 and for the first time, Georgsdorf and the Fragrance Foundation opened up his Fragrance Organ to a public far removed from art – in the middle of Dusseldorf’s Königsallee. In Berlin, Smeller 2.0 2016 was part of the Osmodrama Festival in St. John Evangelist Church and in 2018 as part of the exhibition “Welt ohne Außen” in the Martin-Gropius-Bau. The artist spoke to us about uncondi­ tional olfactory cinema, art in marble halls and new sustainabili­ ty in relation to ecological awareness on the outskirts of the city.

31

Photo © Gianmarco Bresadola

B EST P R ACTI C E

Science is complex and will not become any easier to under­ stand in the digital age. Christian Rauch, founder of the STATE Festival in Berlin, takes this as a starting point: He combines science and art – artists become translators, they c ­ ommunicate complex scientific contexts and counteract the confusion of progress. Rauch himself is a doctor of physics – with a focus on nanotechnology. At the same time he is a mediator for artists.

“Ideally, artists and scientists will embark on a joint mission with us”, says Rauch. The project also involves the Fraunhofer Insti­ tute, Max Planck Institute or the Helmholtz Institute – you name it! Rauch is all about the question: What can artists convey that science cannot? What do house facades made of algae, the uni­ versal gene scissors technique CRISPR / Cas9 and the immortal turritopsis dornhii jellyfish have in common? Never heard of any of it? Never mind, just go (or run!) to STATE Studio – that might help you out. We’ve already been there. Read the report here on the Bowerbird app.

2

Digitalisation

How is digitalisation changing the Berlin fashion industry?

Smart clothing and sustainability: Does it go together?

Can product design stop climate change?

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D I G ITALI SATI O N & DESI GN

Marte Hentschel sees development potential in Berlin – and deals with the fashion industry at the interface of sustainability and digitalisation.

Photo © Daniel Gebhardt

ESSAY

Getting ahead in Berlin

The “digital revolution” is changing the fashion industry as fundamentally as the first two industrial revolutions did, for better or worse. One thing is clear: In the future, we will no longer consume as we did in the past. Soon we will stop producing the way we produce now. Above all, however, we can combine ecological standards with the latest technologies like never before in history. And we should make the most of that, especially in a city like Berlin.

By MARTE HENTSCHEL (fashion designer and CEO of the Sourcebook platform)

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The dynamic growth of online commerce is accelerating the transformation of the industry like never before. In the future, we will also see 3D printers that produce mass-produced goods. The demand for short delivery times and individualised products will increase.

Does anyone remember the first two industrial revolutions?

Well, they really had it in them. The first gave rise to the tex­tile industry from the second half of the 18th century, the second separated hand and head, with machines replacing manual work. People toiled in rattling factories for 12 to 14 hours a day – without safety precautions, no minimum breaks, and no rights. In the middle of the 18th century, industrialisa­ tion produced the modern textile industry, the bourgeoisie ­emerged – and so did bourgeois fashion. Until 1880, how­ ever, the textile industry didn’t really play a significant role in Germany. Afterwards, and especially in Berlin, the textile in­ dustry turned into a prospering industry. Later, labour rights prevailed. Today Berlin is one of the leading fashion capi­ tals in Europe along with cities such as Dusseldorf, Paris or London. Now we’re having this sort of a “revolution” again.

And the “digital revolution” is changing the fashion industry as fundamentally as the two first industrial revolutions once did. Initially this has proved to be rather opaque and involves a lot of pros and cons. Suddenly, even abandoned manual work is en vogue again. Digitalisation is the forerunner over­ all, but also bears inherent risks – with all the consequences and side effects, especially for the many small labels and mi­ cro-enterprises in this city making Berlin what it is: one of the most interesting fashion metropolises in the world.

I myself have been involved in this ‘digital revolution’ for ­years – as a fashion designer, networker, and consultant. In 2015, we launched Sourcebook in Berlin, an exchange plat­ form for fashion designers and producers for acquiring and networking in the city. Digitalisation is associated with two key developments and challenges. First, the dynamic growth of online commerce is accelerating the transformation of the industry like never before. It is already foreseeable that the value chains of the textile industry will for the most part be automated in a few years, especially in the areas of produc­ tion and logistics. The first integrated purchasing process­ es are already available in a wide variety of locations, so that digital and virtual concepts can be combined by, for exam­ ple, providing products with QR codes that allow customers to order the products via their smartphone. In the future, we will also see 3D printers that produce mass-produced goods.

The demand for short delivery times and individualised prod­ ucts will generally increase, and production times will be fur­ ther reduced.

On the other hand, there will be a shift of production require­ ments to the consumer markets – ‘Production on Demand’ is already a trend. Initially, for the small labels, that really ­doesn’t mean anything positive. After all, the potential it rep­ resents so far, its local anchoring, a kind of direct economy due to the proximity between manufacturers and consumers, is completely under scrutiny. Consumer habits and customer expectations will change so drastically in the future so that the classic offers in central city locations that are in competi­ tion with e-commerce product ranges are increasingly com­ ing under pressure. The large providers are already reacting to the demand for shorter delivery times and individualising products – even on site. Take Adidas, for example: Adidas re­ cently launched the Knit For You In-Store Manufacturing pro­

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & DESI GN ESSAY

ject at the Bikinihaus. Here you can try on the latest sneakers, ‘digitally’. Basically, that’s a great thing. Foot measurements and running habits are scanned, then the personally opti­ mised shoe is made – the customer becomes a co-creator.

But on the one hand, as online commerce increases and the small boutiques struggle to survive because it can jeopar­ dise their local roots, on the other hand, the individualised do-it-yourself shoe suddenly finds its feet through the large providers. However, small companies can’t yet afford to par­ ticipate in this suburban game with digital individual fitting.

Second, digitalisation also does a lot of good. Above all, it creates a new form of transparency and generates more sustainable production-processes and new collaborations.

Even now, successful and marketable product and service innovations in the fashion and textile markets require more and more interdisciplinary cooperation between designers, developers and production companies. Currently, exciting, new participation programmes are establishing themselves in Berlin, which are based on interdisciplinary cooperation.

Take, for example, Textile Prototyping Lab (TPL): With the TPL, Berlin is currently developing Germany’s first open lab­ oratory for the development of future-oriented textiles. Sup­ ported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), TPL is developing a textile technology workshop and a textile library in the immediate vicinity of Fab Lab Berlin in the coming months. The laboratories of highly specialised partner institutes supplement this central facility – design­ ers, engineers and researchers come together here. Another example is the CRCLR at Agora Rollberg Neukölln. In recent years, a gigantic think tank has developed into new, loopa­ ble digital concepts. The Berlin-based fashion designer Ina Budde also sits in the C ­ RCLR with her company circular.fash­ ion and has integrated an initial scannable code in her col­ lections, which makes information about supply chains and material production available in seconds via smartphone.

Whereas years ago you had to operate investigatively and search for the truth analogously, now everything is digitally verifiable. The NGO WikiRate, also based in Berlin, has re­ cently even revealed maladministration in supply chains and forced even the big chains to comply with new standards.

Even Zalando, one of the most successful German digital fashion companies based in Berlin, now uses the in-house zImpact project to create new supply chain transparency via WikiRate.

The novelty of this development is that even small fashion labels are now entering into new, strong alliances with large digitalisation and technology companies, even if the connec­ tion between the fashion industry and the start-up world so far remain the exception. Digital platforms and communities such as tbd and Betterplace Lab form a new infrastructure for the growing group of impact companies and social entrepre­ neurs who are finding fertile ground in Berlin for meaningful projects in a post-growth economy. New platforms for cus­ tomer-brand relationships are also establishing themselves, such as the sustainable fashion fair Neonyt in Berlin together with the blogger and influencer event Pre-Peek. And we our­ selves have just launched a new Thinkathon, which invites

What we need in Berlin is an offer of craftsmanship, service providers and the processing industry, because that is the ­prerequisite for a prospering infrastructure. And we need support for an ecosystem that makes it possible to integrate analogue craft with digital renewal.

Design Facts There are different assumptions about how digitalisation and automation change design and fashion production. For example, 40 to 70 per cent of our clothing may be manufactured automa­ tically in the coming years, according to the McKinsey study “Is apparel manufacturing coming home?”. On the one hand, this would have the effect of using less water, chemicals and energy, and increasing the return of fashion production to Europe, as it has increasingly shifted to China and Southeast Asia over the years due to cheap production conditions. On the other hand, jobs could disap­ pear due to automation – the McKinsey study does not reveal that, but it can be the result of increasing online commerce. For example, the share of fashion items sold on the Internet now accounts for more than 23 per cent of the total turnover of the fashion industry (source: statista). According to estimates of the Cologne Institute for Trade Research, this share could increase by 30 per cent in the coming years – and would thus account for half of all sales in the fashion industry. Whether or not anyone will benefit from it is something we’ll just have to wait and see about. Currently, the fashion industry worldwide is dominated by so-called 20 “super winners”, listed compa­ nies of the Nike brands, LVMH or Inditex, which have 97 per cent market share (source: McKinsey Global Fashion Index).

Photo © Christian Klant WikiRate – What’s up?

circular.fashion: Yes, you can go back to the future after all Every year more than 100 billion garments are produced world­ wide. Less than one per cent of these are recycled into new quality materials. The loss, which is environmentally and eco­ nomically related, is estimated by the Ellen MacArthur Founda­ tion to be more than $ 500 billion a year. The Berlin sustainability company circular.fashion takes this as a starting point – and not only using analogue methods, but also with ‘digital’ strategies.

For example, circular.fashion founder Ina Budde has integrated an initial scannable code in her collections that makes infor­ mation about supply chains and material production quickly accessible via smartphone. “This not only helps the consumer, because it creates transparency. It also serves as a blueprint for the industry to get relevant information that is important for recy­ cling“, notes Budde. Circular.fashion has meanwhile established itself as the first point of contact for the textile recycling industry in Berlin. Work is being carried out on three central themes that are also challenges: Firstly, fashion must be designed to be re­ cyclable and reusable. Secondly, products need to get back to the right recyclers so they can actually be recycled. Thirdly, the construction of sorting systems for closed-loop recycling must be promoted. For this purpose, circular.fashion offers inspir­ ing workshops and concrete decision-making aids for fashion brands with the help of special design software. In addition, they have launched their own “circularity.ID” tool to optimise sorting for recycling. We say: That may only be the beginning, please have a go. We visited circular.fashion at their workplace in Berlin.

You want to know what’s going on and if things are going to change? [Read story via the Bowerbird app]

37

Photo © circular.fashion 2019 – Linda Grönlund

How do Zalando or Zara stand on the topic of human rights? How does a fashion chain like Benneton rate on environmental pol­ lution, or Facebook in terms of transparency? These and many similar questions about company structure and metadata of different companies promises to be answered by the platform WikiRate. Like its big brother Wikipedia, entries are written by external authors and checked for accuracy. The goal: to take a close look at the way big companies operate. At a time when sustainability and social responsibility are becoming increas­ ingly important, this is actually a logical consequence. The only question is: Can WikiRate live up to its promise? And how accu­ rately researched is the data? We looked into it.

B EST P R ACTI C E

designers, developers and entrepreneurs to use digital tools to promote the sustainable transformation of the fashion in­ dustry.

This is exactly where we must continue now, because this is what makes Berlin special. Berlin is not Dusseldorf, New York, Paris or London, where the fashion industry is prosper­ ing in terms of size economically. In Berlin, even the small­ est and the lowest-tier companies have a chance. But there are also no developed entrepreneurial structures in the field of fashion that offer permanent employment. That’s why Crowd­funding has become a ‘digital’ financing alternative for the notoriously under-funded Berlin indie brands, with all the pros and cons. On the one hand, crowdfunding has become an important tool for early-stage and product financing. On the other hand, no jobs are created (as a rule).

What we need in Berlin is an offer of trades, service providers and the processing industry, because that is the ­prerequisite for a prospering infrastructure. And we need support for an ecosystem that makes it possible to integrate analogue craft with digital renewal. There are many approaches. One is to make all packaging recyclable in the future and to avoid the packaging waste that is created by the new online trade: The Germans produce more than 18 million tonnes annually the most packaging waste in the whole of Europe. Solutions are needed here. Another is to favour environmentally friendly resources in the future in terms of tax law and to provide ad­ equate start-up capital for companies that already produce sustainably. Digitalisation is the key here, too. Technological innovations make savings potential possible today, since it is easier to manage capacities and resources. At the same time, through the technology of clothing itself, sensors and geo-lo­ cation chips, value creation is becoming ever more transpar­ ent and new options for creating value and adding value in terms of transparency are becoming evidence of corporate sustainability. And this is exactly where progress needs to be made. We have the first two industrial revolutions behind us; they paved the way for the industrialisation of the fashion in­ dustry. The third is ahead of us, making it possible for the first time to combine ecological standards with the latest techno­ logical innovations. We would be fools if we failed to exploit this potential, especially in a city like Berlin.

D I G ITALI SATI O N & DESI GN

Wearing the trousers. Indeed, and what special trousers they are!

Thomas Gnahm (first from right, third from left) works in the wearables sector – and writes about it.

Photo © Florian Wenningkamp

ESSAY

Your pants tell you where to go Digitalisation is birthing a whole new industry: wearables, or ‘smart clothing’. For example, what used to be a dalliance and technological gimmick years ago is today a reality in many ways: Bandage stockings give us feedback on how well our healing process is going with our knee. A shirt responds when our heart beats too fast – and we are just at the beginning of a development thanks to these sorts of innovations.

By THOMAS GNAHM (organiser of Wear It Berlin)

What’s good for the bottom is just as good for the top: the transformer pop jacket. Looks good and flashes when you sit on the bike – developed by Thomas Gnahm. Photo © Florian Wenningkamp

When I got into cycling in New York over a decade ago, I didn’t know it would end up changing my future. These lads looked totally crazy: They wore gear jackets, looked like a mo­ torcycle gang, but were proud of their bikes. This was 2006.

In Berlin, I thought: This can be developed conceptually. So I came up with the idea of a first transformer-pop jacket, which resembled the gear jacket, which illuminated when braking.

Together with a few friends, we developed them and also inserted LEDs into the inside of the jackets, which we also controlled from a minicomputer. On some jackets, we add­ ed additional sensors that turned red when the jacket was abruptly decelerated, or that responded to tweets on the In­ ternet. All fun and games, to be sure. But funny, too! And, to­ day I realise, forward-looking. Since that time I haven’t been able to let go of the idea of wearables. I myself come from the design field, having studied visual communication at the Bauhaus-Uni Weimar, and in 2014 I initiated the first Wear It Festival in Berlin, which has been taking place annually since then. What do we do? We are advancing the field of weara­ bles, that is, smart clothing. Once a year, companies from the wearable tech scene meet industry, politics meets culture, designers meet artists – and investors meet founders, com­ panies meet research and the media discover progress – and all this in the middle of Berlin.

No question: What’s emerging here is only the beginning.

Wearables have had a great impact in sports, healthcare and industry. In ski sports, sensors are now being used to detect movements or the like, and what has developed in recent ­years is the field of workwear. For example, Proglove has de­ veloped an intelligent data glove that facilitates work in man­ ufacturing, logistics and commerce; a glove that thinks with you. By pressing a button triggered by the finger, the work action is carried out concretely. Other products such as the Motex Bandage, manufactured by Fraunhofer IZM in Ber­ lin, help to support our knee injury healing process. This is a type of knee bandage that measures the flexion behaviour of a knee. Motex is also used in physiotherapy. The Berlin clothing industry is largely organised in small parts. And of course, in a city like Berlin, the question remains as to how the small-minded creators of ideas and inventors can keep up with the big ones in the future. Already, the tech giants like Apple, Intel, Microsoft or IBM are very far ahead. However, I believe that this will bring about completely new synergies in the future. Because the necessary technology is often open source, so not very complicated and widespread – that’s just a plus for the small players. In addition, it can also be, and this is currently emerging, that an invention is reserved only for the adults and then democratised by the duplication.

What is certain is that nothing will work without collaboration in the future, both in the image and in the product areas. And that is exactly what can be helpful for the little idea providers.

On a large scale, however, it’s now a question of establish­ ing an eco-system and strengthening open source concepts against closed systems. And that means we have to set fu­ ture standards. When it comes to this, we are only at the be­ ginning. But it’s also clear that the market is developing rap­ idly. Currently, the US is very far ahead. Above all, the textile

39

What is happening here is a real step forward in human history, and digitalisation will radically change our lives in the future: New professions will emerge, others will become obsolete or disappear – creative work and what interpersonal communication will be also in the future.

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & DESI GN ESSAY

industry has completely migrated to Asia in recent years.

Germany is still the world market leader in the field of smart technologies. This is also where new jobs are being created.

We’ve been aware of this for years given the many startups that have attended Wear It Berlin. And I’m particularly en­ couraged by printed electronics: These are electronic com­ ponents and applications that can be manufactured com­ pletely or partially using printing processes. Instead of the printing inks, electronic functional materials in liquid or pasty form are now being printed. I see a lot of potential here. And most of all, you’ll be able to bring an industry back to Germa­ ny, thanks to intelligent smart production methods.

But the question will be how to financially support all these ideas in the future, especially in Berlin. Because Berlin is in­ creasingly becoming the central hub for the scene. In ad­ dition to the large number of progressive designers, start­ ups and creatives of all kinds, we have a great research ­landscape here and several universities that are addressing the topic, such as the Kunsthochschule Weißensee, the HTW or the Design Research Lab at the UDK. What is still missing is the connecting link between all those involved, a platform that brings together different efforts and runs matchmaking.

Together with many partners from industry, research and uni­ versities, we recently founded the innovation network “Wear It Hub” on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The aim is to bring Germany, and Berlin in particu­ lar, even further forward. In the future, we will also face a very central challenge. The question is: How can we ­reconcile in­ creasing mechanisation with new sustainability? So how do you dispose of clothes with sensors or batteries. That’s still a problem. One solution is to make the latest tech products modular so that the components are easy to separate after­ wards. But admittedly, that’s expensive. Technologies, LEDs, for example, are simply not compostable (yet). Another solu­ tion is to rely on printed electronics based on biodegradable substrates. Deposit recycling systems are also conceivable.

Overall, most electrical appliances are simply not yet sus­ tainable; they are also manufactured cheaply somewhere in Asia – and certainly not under fair working conditions. What is emerging is a gap between ecological clothing on the one hand and new technology on the other, which is simply not sustainable. We definitely need new solutions here. But what I find motivating: Politicians have now recognised the issue.

This is not only shown by the Europe-wide ban on plastics, which has already been decided at EU level. It is also reflect­ ed in numerous new funding programs that were launched in Berlin. This is where we have to go on. Looking to the “future” also means shaping the future. I’ve been doing this for years.

The end just isn’t in sight.

You have the technology at your fingertips: the “intelligent” data glove from Proglove. By pressing a button triggered by the finger, the work action is carried out concretely.

Photo © Proglove

In the future, we will also face a very central challenge. The question is: How can we reconcile increasing mechanisation with new sustainability? For example, how do you dispose of clothes with sensors or batteries?

41 Photo © Sonnenrepublik

B EST PRACTI C E

Smart Jacket: Generates light and flashes when touched. Practically one of your best friends – by the Berlin designer Esther Zahn.

Photo © Alexander Rentsch

Networks, contacts, education and training in Berlin?

Sonnenrepublik: power free and fun It’s total nonsense to say that digitalisation saves resources. It’s a real climate killer! The computing power per kilowatt-hour has doubled every 1.5 years over the course of time (see interview pages 12 – 16). At the same time, the power requirements of processors, screens and data centres have increased – which consumes enormous amounts of power. This is Sonnenrepub­ lik’s starting point. The Berlin-based company is building solar chargers with a modular design that will allow you to charge anything from your smartphone to your tablet – in a power-free and fun way. Oliver Lang founded Sonnenrepublik in 2013. Since then he has been working day in and day out on the energy tran­ sition in Berlin, bringing new innovations to the market and tink­ ering with ecological world peace. How do you develop a com­ pany like Sonnenrepublik? And what do small devices change overall? Read the interview with him in the CCB Magazine.

3

Digitalisation

AI music and digital breakthroughs: Progress with alternatives or the emergence of new monocultures?

New kids from the Blockchain: How does a Blockchain label work?

Last one standing: On the current demise of music magazines

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D I G ITAL I SATI O N & M U SI C A sleek AI duo: Eric Eitel and Dr. Julia Schneider.

Photo © Jens Thomas

ESSAY

Always striking the right chord Digitalisation is completely transforming the music market and culture. With all the pros and cons that come along with it. Algorithms are already creating danceable sounds and already influence what we want to hear. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is simultaneously an abbreviation, a saviour and a terrifying thing at the same time.

Is progress multiplying the alternatives or is it just the beginning of new mono­­ cultures? And in the end, can you earn anything doing it?

By ERIC EITEL and Dr. JULIA SCHNEIDER (Eric Eitel curates technology, art and cultural projects and is a founding member of Music Pool Berlin.

Dr. Julia Schneider is an independent consultant for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and member of the scientific committee of the VDEI, Verband der Exoskelettindustrie e.V.)

Screenshot from the music video “Magic Man”.

Video © Jean-François Robert

No dark future, but rather reality And this begs the question: What exactly is going on here?

The discourse about AI-generated music first raises the question of whether people in music production will need it in the future. What legitimacy will I have as a musician when AI systems are able to produce more songs that are more successful than I can? Already now, AI systems such as Flow Machines by Sony CSL Research Laboratory are able to de­ vise complex compositions – in this case, one can actually speak of specially composed songs by AI. In 2017, the sup­ posedly first ever AI-composed pop song in the world was hit the media – “Daddy’s Car”, a song reminiscent of the Beatles and Oasis. And the following year, based on the same tech platform, “Hello World” by Skygge aka Benoit Carré followed, probably the first AI-produced pop album in music history.

This shows that functional music in particular – music for film, TV and games – as well as entertainment music could in future largely be produced by AI systems. If you’re looking for background music for a video today, you’ll have no trou­ ble finding it at Jukedeck. For some years there has been a genre there where you can enter a mood and a length – for example “pop”, “melancholic” and “15 seconds” – and an AI delivers everything you need in a few seconds. No more trouble with copyright, and all that just for a few cents. The same applies to “adaptive music”. Imagine a computer game with a basic musical theme and many variations. With sys­ tems from vendors like Melodrive, “immersive” soundtracks can be produced in an original and real-time way. Immersive means that users can immerse themselves in a virtual envi­ ronment – visually and acoustically. Although this technology is still in its infancy, it is developing rapidly.

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The good news first: The cassette is still alive and kicking.

In the US, 174,000 cassettes were sold in 2017 – a five-fold increase over 2010. The CD, on the other hand, has suf­fered a landslide; in ten years’ time we will probably hardly remem­ ber this glittering mini Frisbee disc, which first saw the light of day in 1982. What’s more, digitalisation has transformed the music market significantly. Audio streaming now ac­ counts for almost 50 per cent of total revenue in the music industry. Music creators are increasingly earning their mon­ ey from live gigs – and, as we know, are paid only marginally by the major streaming platforms and record labels.

In addition to these changes in the way we consume music, digitalisation creates one thing above all else: new music for­ mats, new compositions, more gimmicks. More and more music makers are now also experimenting with AI.

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & M U SI C ESSAY

Creativity, cash, AI But does all that bring more diversity? Is progress multiply­ ing the alternatives or is it just the beginning of new mono­ cultures? And who’s making money off it? On the one hand, the original revenue models of the music industry have been shaken by the digital upheaval in recent years; the personal responsibility for music creators is increasing, but also the joy of experimenting thanks to the extensive emergence of digital options. On the other hand, uniformity is just grow­ ing – and that has much to do with the digitised market. The first 30 seconds are already decisive for success or failure in streaming. The large streaming providers are therefore cur­ rently developing many small radio stations for their listen­ ers, but Spotify currently has 4,500 curated playlists. Yet: The alternative or lesser-known artists usually are overlooked in digital searches. And this is precisely why artists are hardly earning anything. However, it is not just the streaming servic­ es and the record companies that are at fault, because they are bad at rewarding artists. We music consumers are also to blame. Economists Nils Wlömert and Dominik Papies discov­ ered in a study that Spotify users spend less money on CDs and downloads as soon as they subscribe to Spotify – whoev­ er subscribes to a Spotify premium subscrip­tion for 9.99 eu­ ros per month spends almost a quarter less on albums, sin­ gles and individual songs. Digitalisation also ­means that not every­one benefits from it and that monocultures can initial­ ly estab­lish themselves. More and more music creators and managers are already adapting music to the listening hab­ its and user behaviour online. Spotify is also investing heav­ ily in AI itself, which could lead to the platform operators in­ creasingly integrating AI music into our playlists in the future.

Therefore, by implication, existing copyright could become an important promoter for the development of artificially pro­ duced music.

So what does all this mean? Is creative personal achieve­ ment ultimately being sacrificed on the altar of Al generated music? Yes and no. Because what is really promising at the moment is “deep learning” – and in this respect we are only at the beginning. It works as a sub-form of machine learning with artificial neural networks, which recognise structures themselves, evaluate the results and improve themselves in many cycles during the running application, “learning by themselves” – without human intervention. In terms of music production, this means that artificial knowledge can today be generated from old songs. This can be certain data points of a song – or the song structure. This knowledge, in turn, can be generalised again and used for new songs.

From a music cultural point of view, the widespread use of AI could lead to more uniform AI-generated, “generic” mu­ sic, on the one hand, but it could also mean a renaissance of experimental music, which for the time being could remain a human domain. For even if a music AI were to happen to compose something like twelve-tone music, it could not con­ tribute to the socio-cultural context that would be necessary to convince other people to accept it as art. For now, humans will remain gatekeepers of what other people accept as art.

On the one hand, the original revenue models of the music industry have been shaken by the digital upheaval in recent years; the personal responsibility is increasing for music creators, but also the joy of experimenting thanks to the extensive emergence of digital options. On the other hand, the uniformity is just about to increase.

This could also be the AI E.T, but in fact it’s screenshots from the video “Magic Man” from the album “Hello World” by Skygge aka Benoit Carré, probably the first AI-produced pop album in music history.

Directed by Jean-François Robert

Other technologies will revolutionise music as a holistic sen­ sory experience. The field of music performance in particular will benefit massively from the development and use of new human-machine interfaces in the near future under the um­ brella term “gestural music”. Above all, new wear­ables, which are equipped with motion sensors that control and manip­ ulate electronic music using body movements or gestures, are exciting. “Mi. Mu Gloves” are, for example, complex and highly sensitive sensor gloves with which the Dutch musi­ cian Chagall distorts her own voice in live performances. An­ yone who has ever witnessed an electronic live act and has been annoyed at the anti-show of brain-teasing knob-turners immediately understands the potential benefits of this tech­ nology for future stage shows. In the next development step, brain-computer interfaces (BCI) will revolutionise the control of devices or effects, and not only in the area of performance.

That would then in fact be a future of more than just exper­ imental listening pleasure. It would be a broadening of the spectrum. For it wouldn’t just enhance listening pleasure. In terms of accessibility, it would also create the opportunity for people with severe physical limitations to compose and per­ form music in the future using ­brainwaves. Creating more in­ clusion through digitalisation would be a real game changer (for a change).

47

Music Facts For years the music industry was in a deep crisis. The music market has only been in the black again since 2012. According to the German Music Industry Association (BVMI), the turnover in the music industry in Germany currently amounts to 1.582 billion euros – the “digital” market share is 56.7 per cent of all revenues.

Streaming sales are especially dominant in the statistics. They now account for about 46.4 per cent of total sales in the music industry. Spotify is currently the clear number one in music strea­ ming in terms of user numbers, followed by Apple Music. But: Musicians earn little money from audio streaming. According to the Ernst & Young business net­ work, Spotify retains only 21 per cent of its 9.99 euros monthly subscriptions – the ­majority, 73 per cent, goes to record labels and rights exploiters. In the end, however, only 0.68 euros remains, which is divided among all musicians. This is another rea­ son why concert revenues have become increasingly important for musicians over the years.

Digitalisation also means that not everyone benefits from it and that monocultures can initially establish themselves. More and more music creators and managers are already adapting music to the listening habits and user behaviour online.

Because what is really promising at the moment is “deep learning” – and in this respect we’re only at the beginning.

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & M U SI C

Oliver Goedicke has been a DJ for 38 years, has been living abroad for 17, has become a dad and is simply having a block: In 2018 he founded Blckchn Records (BLKCHN), the first label based purely on Blockchain technology. His goal: to make flexible accounting systems possible, to create fair and above all transparent distribution of cash flows. Can something like that work?

Oliver Goedicke from Blockchain label, BLKCHN. We met him at the MOST WANTED: MUSIC conference in Berlin for a little back-and-forth. Photo Š Jens Thomas

INTE RVI EW

New kids from the ­Blockchain

Interview: JENS THOMAS

The problem is that with the big streaming services nobody knows exactly where the money is going to end up. At Blockchain, rights-holders can see where the money is coming from – and every artist has access to their data blocks.

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Ollie, you launched Blckchn Records in 2018. Many people don’t even understand what a Blockchain is, and now you’ve come up with a Blockchain label. Can you tell me in, say, five sentences how a Blockchain-based label works?

Ok! Five sentences. The label is based on Blockchain technology and works by concatenating blocks of data that reside on remote networks – all of which are inter­ connected. Each artist has access to these data blocks and can see when and how often songs were s­ treamed – and when he earns something. This, in turn, works via socalled smart contracts, which are not technically change­ able. This means you cannot fake or manipulate the data because the old data is never deleted. There is 100 per cent transparency and validity.

Ok, fine, but where’s the problem? What are others doing wrong?

The problem is that with the big streaming services no­ body knows exactly where the money’s going to end up.

Everything happens behind closed doors, the big ma­ jors earn 80 per cent, and the artists get a fraction of what l­ittle is left. At Blockchain, rights owners can now see who’s been streaming songs, and how often. Users also pay the royalties directly to the artists. Currently, the prob­lem isn’t even the streaming providers. The problem is the majors. Only about 21 per cent of the streaming proceeds stay at Spotify, almost all the rest goes to the rights holders, the big record companies. Real monopo­ lies have formed here in recent years. The artists’ trust in the big majors has been lost. There are only the three big majors: Universal Music, Sony and Warner Music. And there are a maximum of five to six streaming providers that are relevant to the market – Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tencent Music, Deezer, Pandora.

And Blockchain labels are supposed to be able to change this structure?

Let’s wait and see. Everything has to develop first. Block­ chain isn’t yet accessible to many people. In theory, you wouldn’t even need a Gema with Blockchain to track down copyright revenue, not even a record company that has to be behind you all the time. You will be ­invoiced with a stable crypto currency, which can then be ex­changed for real money on other platforms. We have even reached the point where money can be paid out directly in Fiat cur­ rency for the launch of our platform. We will offer services and digital distribution. Artists can integrate streams and downloads via our platform directly into their websites, which are remunerated via micropayment. The special thing about it: Artists directly provide their music to their followers, who can stream or download the songs. The whole thing is billed by single stream or download.

Ok, sounds fantastic. Why hasn’t Blockchain prevailed when it comes to labels?

Good question. Maybe we can get to the point where everyone’s gonna do it someday. Blockchain is still too obscure for many people; many don’t understand what Blockchain is or are even a bit fearful to understand. It creates the greatest possible transparency.

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & M U SI C INTE RVI EW

Does transparency also mean that everyone can see how many times my songs are streamed and what I earn from them?

No. This transparency only exists between the parties in­ volved in the contract, ie between me, the label operator, and the individual artist. And everyone has their own bill­ ing system, which they can freely dispose of.

How does digitalisation change the position of a label? Mu­ sic labels have been around about 130 years: In 1887, the American Gramophone Co. was the first record company in the world – followed by the early first labels. Labels have al­ ways been something of a seal of approval in music history.

A hardcore band on Revelation Records already had a nod of approval before they even picked up their guitars. Before even playing a single note, an act on Warp or Rephlex gets waved through in advance because it’s on Warp or Rephlex.

Won’t this be lost in the course of digitalisation?

I agree with you, it’s being lost. Because now these con­ fused playlists dominate everywhere, even if there is still a colourful label structure in the niche markets. But the crucial thing is that there will no longer be a supply bot­ tleneck. In the past, if the record or CD was sold out, it was sold out. Now the money is earned by just by clicks – but only a few earn it. This is exactly where the Block­ chain comes in. For example, we’re aiming to make it possible for everyone to be a part of it – with the excep­ tion of right-wing and left-wing extremist bands. We have also devel­oped a phased model that is fair to all.

Which means?

If our platform is only used for distribution purposes, we will only accept a maximum of 15 per cent. You upload your songs and start playing – done. The next step is socalled management tools, which we also provide the art­ ist with. For this we take up to 30 per cent. The third step is that we curate you, and take care of the marketing – and then it’s 50 : 50. You just have to finish producing what the major would pay otherwise.

Ok, but do artists earn more in the end if they pay the produc­ tion costs themselves and end up on a Blockchain label in­ stead of a major or if their songs are listed on Spotify?

In terms of figures, yes. Blockchain streaming as a ­whole pays six times better than traditional streaming. But the moths are still flying where the light is brightest, and the sky is burning with the revenues of the big streaming providers, where most of the money is made. Spotify also started with just a few artists. And to put it another way, finding a record company that gives you artistic freedom and then finances a complete album really comes close to getting six out of six in the lottery.

Ollie, where do you see Blockchain in the future? Well, the big corporations are already interested in it. Spotify has recently purchased the Startup Mediachain and now also uses the Blockchain technology. Will Blockchain lose its niche exist­ ence and soon be omnipresent? And what does that mean?

Presumably Blockchain will eventually become a “nor­ mal” technology. But that doesn’t mean that it is used in the original sense. Blockchain just means that you can

Blockchain is still too obscure for many people; many don’t understand what Blockchain is or are even a bit fearful to under­ stand. It creates the greatest possible transparency.

Blockchain When we talk about Block­ chain, many people think of the crypto-currency Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was launched in 2009 as the first cross-bor­ der technology currency.

Blockchain, on the other hand, emerged in 2008 and is ini­tially understood only as a database without a central storage medium, which can be continuously linked and expanded via a list of data records – so-called “blocks”.

The nodes are located on the computers of individual users. Each data transfer is transmitted to and authen­ ticated by an infinite number of computers – the copies are encrypted and can only be viewed by the users who are directly involved in the transaction, so they can­ not be changed. Blockchain and the crypto-currency Bit­ coin are increasingly gaining acceptance, but Germany lags behind in international comparison – some experts also see the Blockchain as a completely overrat­ ed tech­nology. According to the study “Blockchain in Deutschland – Einsatz, Potenziale, Herausforderun­ gen” (“Blockchain in Ger­ many – Deployment, Poten­ tials, Challenges”), published by the digital association Bitkom in April 2019, every seventh company now sees the future in Blockchain, and in companies with more than 500 employees it is even one in three. We’ll have to wait for further d ­ evelopments.

Photo © Jens Thomas

make things digitally more flexible, so you don’t have to disclose everything. And the big providers will know how to use Blockchain for themselves; Blockchain will also prevail in Djing. At some point the DJs won’t be coming back with their MP3s anymore, they will stream songs from the cloud live via their Pioneer players.

Melodrive – You hear what you feel

Appmusic: It plays music, too A “Linnstrument” instead of a piano? Guitar riffs on a smart­ phone? At the Appmusic Research Center, this happens every­day. For years, Berlin’s first point of contact for questions about the future of digital music has been dealing with music pedagogical and aesthetic contexts in the research of music-­ oriented practice – resulting in the research centre at the UDK Berlin. Matthias Krebs, the Director, has even launched the first professional smartphone orchestra. In addition, he founded the association app2music e.V., which supports app music pro­ jects at Berlin schools. In an interview in the CCB Magazine, he makes it clear: “Appmusic is no longer a niche and will continue to democratise the way we make music. Meanwhile, a market has evolved with thousands of powerful apps for synthesizers, drum machines, loopers or sequencers.” Nadja Grothe, who for some years now has been developing specific educational offers with apps and is involved in an exchange with app2mu­ sic, even uses music apps for music therapy. – We talked to her about the healing effect of sounds in the digital age and the chance that it might become a career. Both interviews can be found on the Bowerbird app.

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Photo © Alexander Rentsch

B EST P R ACTI C E

Imagine you play a roleplaying game with others online. But the music you listen to sounds different to each player. The music is created in the very moment you are playing it; it is original and always different, adapted to your emotions. That sounds a bit strange, doesn’t it? But works with AI. The Berlin-based music company Melodrive has launched this very thing. Music is composed in real time. In addition, Melodrive music adapts to the interactions and emotions of the users and the affective conditions of the experiences. The first prototypes are already on the market. Melodrive started in 2016; their three founders are very young (or look to be), they’re all PhDs – and have a lot in mind. “We want to produce music in real time in the quality of a Hollywood soundtrack”, says founder Valerio Velardo pur­ posefully. We’ve been on location recently, and plunged into an immersive world of musical frontiers. You can read interview with Dr. Valerio Velardo in the CCB Magazine.

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & M U SI C

Spex dead, Intro dead, De:Bug long since dead. Music magazines are dying out, which is also an effect of digitali­ sation. But is it also the end of forms of pop-cultural recognition? Ten causes of death at the end of the music magazine – which is by no means at the end of the tether.

Will she be the last one standing? No! Author Sonja Eismann's work is far from finished here. Photo © Alicia Kassebohm

ESSAY

The last one standing

By SONJA EISMANN (long-time editor of the music magazine Intro, today’s co-founder and editor of Missy Magazine)

I could hardly believe my luck when in 2002 the free magazine Intro actually offered me a job as an editor. Now Intro is dead and gone.

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At the turn of the millennium, when I started writing for mu­ sic magazines, it was still – or so it seemed to be – the golden age of print journalism. There were people who consumed pop magazines with pleasure and passion, and music mag­ azines were places of discourse. There were also people who still bought CDs of course, and even if online file sharing networks like Napster made the record companies nervous, their sales still brought in enough money to support music magazines with ads and free press. Back then I came from a feminist, lefty do-it-yourself scene and could hardly be­lieve my luck when in 2002 I was actually offered a job as an ed­ itor for the free magazine Intro – even if that meant leaving my beautiful, tried-and-true Vienna for a crazy, some­what unknown Cologne. Given the fact that my journalistic output had been limited to self-organised media and fanzines such as nylon, an.schläge, Radio Orange 94.0 or Murmel Com­ ics, none of which were able to pay much of anything, I was somewhat honoured to suddenly get not only money for my work for the first time, but also a permanent job.

Well, almost 20 years later, the print mags Intro, Spex, ­Groove and De:Bug are gone. Long gone. In financial terms, journal­ ism has never been a goldmine – most magazines had a print run of 20,000 – 40,000 a month. At around 100,000 copies, Intro was even the largest German-language maga­zine – and was still blindsided in the end. But all these magazines were not just magazines that informed readers about the latest al­ bums, they were places of confrontation – either in critical reflection of pop itself or with theories about pop. Few are still managing an online-only media presence today, such as Groove and Spex, for example, but are facing an extremely uncertain future. For me, too, the future is also certain and the present precarious, which is basically true for all of print journalism. And those who want to survive today have to find a niche. When I founded Missy eleven years ago, the format didn’t even exist yet: Missy Magazine, a maga­zine for fem­ inism and pop culture. And yet: Missy Maga­zine sur­vives!

Thanks to the permanent self-exploitation of all t­ hose in­ volved, the numbers of sales, subscriptions, advertisements and cooperations are still going up. What seemed like an un­ fulfillable, almost childish utopia to me in my time at Intro, when I was already dreaming of an explicitly feminist maga­ zine, due to its non-market-shaped, thematically sharpened orientation, is today surprisingly proving to be a more sus­ tainable – or more contemporary? – publication concept. To date, Missy has outlasted the slow dying process all print for­ mats are suffering.

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & M U SI C ESSAY

Not just one death: The ten deaths of music magazines How can the demise of so many recent music magazines be explained? Let me give you ten conjectures on how this death has come about. First, the decline of music magazines is only one aspect of a general collapse of print media. Due to the free availability of media content on the net, consum­ ers’ willingness to spend money on newspapers and maga­ zines is declining. On top of this, there’s the growing scepti­ cism and hostility towards journalists and their honesty due to the recent promulgation of fake news. Second, there’s no longer a need to engage pop culture as before. Not only does the era of great theories seem to be over, but people’s atten­ tion spans are also much shorter. Third, the fun of dissent no longer has an advocate. Instead of discussing contrary opin­ ions, our own personal filters are currently multiplying. “The dissident niches, the subcultural multiplicity, the mainstream of the minorities are now organised by a digital architecture of filters. In the gated communities of taste one doesn’t ar­ gue, but clings to people who are similar and increasingly similar (…)”, Tom Holert wrote about “Pop criticism as inter­ vention” in the last issue of Spex. Fourth, Pop has lost its rele­ vant articulation of youth cultures. It has become increasing­ ly obsolete to belong to distinct subcultural cliques. Identities are no longer based on Pop-distinctions; they are construct­ ed by more diffuse forms of thought. Fifth, there are no more pop journalistic talents worth mentioning, either on the re­ ception side or on the production side. Sixth, the traditional target group of music magazines – young people, students and graduates alike – feels like being on a hamster wheel.

Everyone is becoming formally smarter (with higher levels of education), but this still doesn’t earn him or her any money – and there is certainly no time left for journalism. Seventh: The older generation, which grew up with the consumption of pop magazines, turns away from the current discourse of age due to age. In this case, people tend to be more interest­ ed in collecting, completing, refining and archiving music, as well as in non-current genres. Eighth, music magazines have simply failed to design their own teams and their choice of topics – that is, less white, male, hetero­sexual, etc. They also have relevance for potential readers, who are becoming in­ creasingly concerned about these factors. Ninth: In the age of constant availability, the value of music, as opposed to the unique live moment, takes a back seat. This means: Music fans spend their money on concerts and festivals rather than on magazines. And, finally, record companies that have to cope with the constant free availability of music today spend less money on ads in music magazines – and cigarette adver­ tising, which was traditionally a staple in music magazines, has been banned since 2006 (except tobacco magazines) in German print products.

Print Facts The death of magazines and print media has been steadily increasing in Germany for years.

In addition to magazines and pe­ riodicals, it has primarily hit daily newspapers: The circulation of all daily newspapers in Germany fell from around 27.3 million to 14.1 million copies between 1991 and 2018 – a decline of more than 50 per cent (source: statista). Almost all print media are affected: Even Stern recently sank below the 500,000 mark; Bild am Sonntag has lost 9.7 per cent. Even the erstwhile mainstay for youth, the always popular Bravo which we have been reading for years first published in 1956), has just reached 81,607 copies – a drop-off of 91.6 per cent since 1998. For years, publishers have increasingly opted for paid content offerings on the Internet in order to counteract the digital transformation. While there were only eight newspaper publishers offering paid content in 2010, the number jumped to 212 pub­ lishers in Germany by October 2018. According to the Federal Association of German Newspa­ per Publishers (BDZV), a total of 146 online newspaper portals in Germany used the so-called free­ mium payment model in 2019 – in which the editors decide which articles are free or subject to a charge. Increasingly, magazines are also funding first editions via crowdfunding although the sums rarely exceed the limit of 10,000 euros per issue. We delve deeper into so-called ‘crowdfunding sub­ scriptions’ on pages 90 – 93.

There is simply no need today for discussions of pop culture like there used to be. The fun of dissent no longer has an advocate.

Instead of discuss­ ing contrary opinions, our own personal filters are currently multiplying.

And most of all, record companies are spending less money on ads in music magazines today – these are just a few reasons for the slow death of music print formats.

Photo © flowkey GmbH Flowkey: The app makes the music

MOST WANTED: MUSIC: It sounds good More than 150 speakers from all over the world, more than 80 sessions, numerous workshops, podium discussions and net­ working events – this is the MOST WANTED: MUSIC confer­ ence, which for years, most recently in the Alte Münze, has been bringing the music world to the floor in Berlin. It discusses the latest trends in digitalisation: What are VR technologies doing with consumers and producers? How does streaming change the music market? What new possibilities in music marketing are there and which technologies may save our world? Matthias Jung, still young but also 30+, designs the conference program as part of the Berlin Music Commission. We have repeatedly reported on the conference as a media partner; you can read an interview with Matthias on the Bowerbird app.

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Photo © Stefan Wieland

Just hit the keys and let your muse do the rest. The three-person startup, Flowkey, wants to make that possible: Flowkey wants to replace your music teacher with an app. “Imagine Flowkey as a friend who helps you learn, practice and play”, says found­ er Jonas Gössling. Movements can be trained via the app, and sounds can be controlled. You can test everything without obligation with eight free songs and first course lessons. For those who want more, Flowkey offers several premium rates. We wondered: Can an app replace a music teacher? And should it replace a music teacher, really? Is it democratising the market or is it just pushing prices? Read the interview with Jonas Göss­ ling in CCB Magazine.

B EST P R ACTI C E

And so what’s next? Is it going to keep going like this, are we all going to stop?

Yet: What’s next now? Is it also the end of forms of pop-­ cultural recognition? To a certain extent, yes. It’s never go­ ing to be the way it used to be. But something new is also emerging: For a long time already, numerous blogs have been forming and renegotiating topics. New podcast eupho­ ria is already pushing through the medial ether, whose end is far from being in sight. And magazines like Missy, which have never been based solely on pop culture analysis, but on a decidedly political perspective, keep going. It is just that we are accustomed to working at a precarious financial lev­ el and at the same time to supporting the equally precari­ ous community right from the start. One can now complain about the advent of new times, but one may also ask: How will criticism be formulated and reconfigured in the future?

Where and how do new places, new formats, new ways of thinking emerge? I remember that even back when I start­ ed writing, pop criticism was already considered in decline – partly because music labels wanted to influence expensive shows and interview trips to Miami Beach and similar places.

Which, in retrospect, rath­er than being something of a “gold­ en era”, looks rather dim.

4

Digitalisation

Good-bye to the old, hello to the new: What literature’s doing with digi­ talisation – and vice versa How do you become a self-publisher?

And at what price?

Are you still publishing, or are you in your death throes? We pay a visit to three Berlin publishers

&

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & LITER ATU R E

Reads, because he can: author Tom Bresemann. In this issue, no less. Photo © Schirin Moaiyeri

ESSAY

Good-bye to the old, hello to the new Digitalisation is becoming a buzzword for fear-based superlatives. Personally, I don’t happen to believe that digitalisation is the death knell for literature. On the contrary: It offers storytellers and poets completely new playgrounds, new rules of the game, new types of games – and not least of all, new sales opportunities. This my personal plea for new openness.

By TOM BRESEMANN (author and co-director of Lettrétage in Berlin-Kreuzberg)

Step 1: Don’t be afraid of change! On the contrary, curiosity and openness are needed.

Allow me to introduce myself: My name is Tom Bresemann and I love literature. And mainly for one good reason: It can do anything and everything! And it’s everywhere: Storytell­ ing is one of the basic elements of human existence; lan­ guage is the simplest aesthetic tool, is available to everyone and costs nothing at all. Literature has the potential to thrive in a wide variety of situations and media: Films and series function over and through their means, videogames resort to narrative means, songs borrow their hooklines from poetic approaches, etc. And against all odds: Literature flourishes and thrives splendidly! There are still around 80,000 book ti­ tles published annually in Germany. Even the reading habits of young people who use their mobile phones are still “sta­ ble” – according to the JIM study, it has remained constant at around 40 per cent for 20 years. Literature has always pro­ vided the best fake news because it invents the truth. The post-fact era can’t do damage to it because it’s not only pre­ fectural, but also super-fabulous. So what does any of this have to do with digitalisation? Everything! For I personally don’t believe that digitalisation is a threat to literature; on the contrary, it offers storytelling and poetry new playgrounds, new rules, new ways of playing – and, last but not least, new sales opportunities. Digitalisation is of course a challenge for pub­lishers, who have been asked to arm-wrestle Amazon at the table. On the other hand, publishers have to come up with something new: Only 0.5 per cent of all submitted man­ uscripts are still published by the publishers, and the num­ ber is even lower among the large popular publishers – ac­ cording to a survey by Buchtalent conducted in 2013. That is why the digitalisation of literature is opening up new spaces for development. It also viralises the ongoing search and the invention and testing of new means of design and forms of reception. And of course whatever is new presents opportu­ nities as well as risks, both aesthetically and economically.

The literary digital revolution is happening, and it’s not be­ ing televised. It’s out there, even and especially in Berlin. In the hearts and minds of a literary scene that is brimming with ideas, that feeds from the most diverse cultural back­ grounds and helps them to be mutually enriching. A scene that is trying out new forms of publishing and togetherness.

Be it through self-publisher associations, some of which now exist, or through the network of independent literary scenes in Berlin. And in this respect, digital tools are important and helpful allies that we can utilise.

As a writer and organiser, one of my professional responsibil­ ities consists of being contstructive, open and curious, and to follow current developments in political, media and social life. I marvel at the scepticism of the book scene with respect to digitalisation. Are people afraid of having to find new an­ swers to new questions? Isn’t the constant asking and con­ stant answering of new questions genuinely inherently a part of ­every literary creation and reception?

We all know that new solutions are needed, also in econom­ ic terms, in terms of attention and sales. We all know that new solutions are not about publishers trying to sell PDFs and epub files. I don’t want to create the impression that I am an enemy of booksellers and publishers. However, I can’t

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The literary digital revolution is happening, and is not being televised. It’s out there, even and especially in Berlin. Above all, digital tools are important and helpful allies that we can utilise in the process.

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & LITER ATU R E ESSAY

ignore the fact that many of my author friends are down­ grading the possibilities of social media into endless genres in commentaries, leaving digital potential largely unexploit­ ed. Among my thousands of Facebook friends, only a hand­ ful post texts or literary content, let alone using digital tools for their literary production or even trying to make their own breakthroughs as self-publishers.

How can literary authors and multipliers approach these new solutions?

Step 1: Don’t be afraid of change! On the contrary, curiosity and openness are needed. The reason why I referred above to the book scene and not to the literary scene is that there are a large number of literary artists who, apart from the book, deal with digital processes in their aesthetic practic­ es in the most entertaining, clever and aesthetically profit­ able way. For example: Jazra Khaleed is a political poet and activist who sometimes creates and explores new, unusual reading situations in live performances with the help of so­ cial media (Twitter, interactive via hashtags, the audience can design the text live), database software (databases with personal and antique poems), one’s own voice as well as one’s own body. When you witness one of his performances, you have a literary experience that goes far beyond the usual practice of reading as a product presentation. Non-repeata­ bility, performance and interaction are only seemingly new themes. For in his performances I also find the very classi­ cal functions of literature (for example the archive function, which is updated). Access to these func­tions is the new, the other. So it’s not about eventing, it’s a ­ bout always being able to do justice to what makes up the fascination of literature.

Digital literature can do so much more than digitalised litera­ ture if you are open to it – in production and reception.

Step 2: Welcome to the great wide open! Good-bye to the old, hello to the new: Nothing has to be taught or learned. This also means not being afraid of failure. We have to cheerful­ ly bid adieu to these stodgy, eternal old school know-it-alls and search for new ideas in literary production and media­ tion. Can’t each of us plant much stronger seeds through a shared fascination and awakening of curiosity, through the liking and sharing of open exchanges as equals rather than going about it like those who try to consolidate power and le­ gitimation through gestures of superiority and emulating the behaviour of the world’s elites? Can’t every organiser achieve completely different goals openly and together, integratively, with the many activists of the city’s independent scene, com­ pared to those who think that literature should be pre-pack­ aged and made commercially viable?

I believe in digital processes and tools as companions to­ ward greater openness! Openness is what makes “good” lite­ rature and “good” mediation of literature, not the educational canon, the reputation of a publishing house or the sales of wood fibres.

Step 3: Just do it, eyes wide open and go right through!

There’s a world out there waiting to be discovered and em­ braced. An exciting and stimulating component of this undis­

Step 2: Welcome to the great wide open! Good-bye to the old, hello to the new: Nothing has to be taught or learned. Don’t be afraid of failure: It’s time tocheerfully bid adieu to these stodgy, eternal old school know-it-alls and search for new ideas in literary production and mediation.

Photo © Schirin Moaiyeri

Step 3: Just do it, eyes wide open and straight on through!

There’s a world out there waiting to be discovered and embraced.

Photo © Sabine Felber

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Cultural ­Funding, Business Finance, Crowd­ funding?

B EST PRACTI C E

covered world is the digital landscape that lies just around the corner or can be seen on screens in every hand: blogs, Insta feeds, Soundcloud files, ­literary magazine apps such as “OR” – and why not recognise the smartphone and its apps as a reading tool – why not start with the obvious? This isn’t about patriarchal acquisition of some sacred land, not about the colonisation of bodies and ghosts, not about seiz­ ing power and space! It’s about taking in the view, careful­ ly roaming the landscape, making it fruitful without cutting back its flora and fauna. Let’s strike out on new roads, take new ways! But please remember to leave the walkways and commentary paths as you would like to find them again, la­ dies and gentlemen!

Mathias Voigt: “We have to be able to play the entire ­keyboard.”

What are the consequences when innovative technologies and AI-driven algorithms are increasingly determining the publish­ ing industry? And what will be the consequence if robots and systems replace the work of humans in the future? The future!­ publish conference deals with these and similar questions once a year. As the “Kongress für die Zukunft des Publizierens” (“Con­ gress for the Future of Publishing”) it brings together au­thors, publishers and stakeholders in Berlin – and raises the questions of the hour. Mathias Voigt, Managing Director of Literaturtest and organiser of the event, says in an interview with CCB Mag­ azine: “One of the positive aspects of digitalisation is that more is apparently being read.” After all, the book industry is one of the oldest creative industries – and one of the most successful in terms of sales. “But publishers need to prove themselves stronger than ever as partners with the authors.” Voigt looks to the future positively. Why? Read about this and more in the CCB Magazine interview.

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & LITER ATU R E

Sometimes he’s Michael, but sometimes he’s Vanessa, too: We talked to both of them.

Photo © Steven Mahner

INTE RVI EW

“In my mind, I’m still on Lindenstrasse” An increasing number of authors are now deciding against publishing and publishing themselves – by the end of 2017, 1⁄3 of first editions had already been published by the authors themselves. Michael Meisheit is one of those, a self-­ publisher. But not just any old self-publisher. He was a scriptwriter for the “Linden­ strasse” series for 20 years. He himself wrote 400 screenplays and contributed to more than 1,000. We visited the author in the Bergmannkiez in Kreuzberg and looked behind the scenes of his success: How does somebody become a self-­ publisher, and at what price? Why not just go to a renowned publishing house?

Interview: BORIS MESSING

“I thought it was really exciting to be my own boss and to take care of everything.

Cover, title, blurb – in a typical pub­ lishing house, the publisher decides that, not the author.

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Hello Michael. You have been working as a self-publisher since 2012. You’ve already sold more than 100,000 e-books.

Your novel series “Im falschen Film” sold 60,000 copies on the Internet alone. Since 2013 you have also been writing en­ tertainment novels under the synonym Vanessa Mansini. Do you feel more like a woman inside? (laughs) No, that’s a bit of a story. I started writing a fic­ tional blog to try out a new narrative form … … from which the blog novel “Nicht von dieser Welt” was cre­ ated.

Exactly. And the blog is written from the point of view of a woman, Vanessa Mansini. I kept this synonym once I realised that if I wanted to write a romance novel, I would need a suitable cover and a suitable title. And a match­ ing author’s name. For romance novels, women’s names are better.

In 2012, you decided to take everything into your own hands and do without a publisher – you became a self-publisher.

Why didn’t you go to a publisher?

I thought it was really exciting to be my own boss and to take care of everything. Cover, title, blurb – in a typical publishing house, the publisher decides that, not the au­ thor. I wanted to decide everything myself and also ex­ periment a bit. I didn’t have a plan B. I wanted to concen­ trate completely on my work as a novelist. And it went pretty well then.

That isn’t possible for everyone. According to surveys by journalist Matthias Matting on the subject of self-publish­ ing, the average income of a self-publisher in Germany has increased over the years – in 2018 it was 1,048 euros per month. Still, a good third of writers earn nothing at all. Isn’t self-publishing an expression of a deep crisis because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a publisher, let alone earn money from writing?

On the one hand yes. Yet I would rather look at it as an opportunity. Authors hardly earn anything from book pub­lications – except for the big names. And given the large number of submitted manuscripts, it’s also difficult to be included in a publisher’s list. And for every copy sold, an author today earns on average only ten per cent of the proceeds of his book; even many bestselling au­ thors don’t earn very well at all. It makes sense to try it for yourself.

A standard publisher assumes control over everything: de­ sign, cover, blurb, editing and marketing. For a publisher to­ day, publishing a book costs – for no-name authors – a lot of money, on average around 4,000 euros in advance. At the same time, the publisher assumes all the work. What does the production of a book cost? And what do you earn from it?

Basically, I have to say that by selling e-books as a self-­ publisher, I earn even more than an average author at a publishing house. And I also offer the e-book itself cheap­ er than the publishers. The take for an e-book is basically usually one to two euros less than for the paperback edi­ tion. I only charge three or four euros for it – and earn two euros. That’s twice what an author gets from a conven­ tional publisher. I also have a professional c ­ over ­designer

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & LITER ATU R E INTE RVI EW

and a good editor, and also someone to ­write f­ or the few print versions of my books. For this, I may spend a total of 1,000 to 2,000 euros. It keeps everything within lim­ its. The only downside is that I have to pay 19 per cent VAT on e-books, compared to just 7 per cent for print­ ed books. This is an advantage for publishers who sell more print. And, you have to develop your own brand as a self-publisher.

According to the European self-publishing study 2016 of Books on Demand (BoD), the self-publishing market is be­ coming increasingly professional: Even though half of self-­ publishers are still hobby authors. Meanwhile, for 35 per cent of all German-language authors, earning income through book sales or writing as their main occupation plays an im­ portant role – in 2013 the figure was 20 per cent. If you were to offer some suggestions, what does it take to be a self-pub­ lisher?

You have to be able to create interesting plots. You need really well defined contrasting characters, and you need to know who you’re writing for – it takes a lot of experi­ ence. I’ve learned all this over the years as a screenwrit­ er. And you also have to be able to advertise for yourself.

Years ago, I set up a mailing list, and I have a Facebook group that keeps my readers up to date. I think many self-publishers are just too inexperienced in writing. But sometimes even I have no idea how to go on. Then I go for a swim, and I usually come up with some new ideas.

Self-publishing is putting the publishing industry to a com­ pletely new test. On the one hand, they say that self-publish­ ers are those who failed to succeed in making it through the publishing houses and who are also not taken serious­ ly by the publishing houses. On the other hand, publishers are now even advertising the most successful self-publish­ ers. Mental game: If Suhrkamp Verlag offered to publish your next book – but for less money than you otherwise earn – would you accept?

For less money? No! Self-publishing is a great solution for me. And in the meantime many other very successful self-publishers have emerged who have decided against a publisher. The majority of readers are no longer inter­ ested in the publisher of a book. Which doesn’t mean that publishers are uninteresting: By the end of the year, ­Heyne will be publishing one of my thrillers. It’s a new genre, a “new” way of publishing, at least for me. Inci­ dentally, self-publishers are organising themselves bet­ ter and better. I myself am a member of the Self-Publish­er Association, we attend book fairs together. We are some­ thing of a literary social club, sometimes we meet up for a beer, or talk about our writing problems. A few years ago, a 20-strong group of self-publishers joined forces, selling more than 10 million e-books. That’s a third of the total e-book market. And that also means that we self-publish­ ers are now form an economic block.

You publish mainly on Amazon. There are also numerous oth­er providers such as epubli, neobooks, the self-publish­ ing platform Bookrix or even triboox. Amazon has been criti­ cised for years for providing dumping prices that cause real

As a self-publisher, you have to be able to produce interesting plots. You need really well defined contrasting characters, and you need to know whom you’re writing for – it takes a lot of experience.

Self-Publishing Facts Self-publishing has become established in Germany, especially since 2011, with the local launch of Kindle and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). According to Gerd Robertz, Spokesman for BoD – Books on Demand, in 2017, every third first edition was published in a self-pub­ lishing format. Although the incomes of self-publishers in Germany are still low, this is the result of the regular self-publishing surveys by journalist Matthias Matting.

However, they have in­ creased over the years: The average income in 2018 was 1,048 euros, in 2016 it was only 683 euros (2015: 512 euros, 2014: 494 euros, 2013: 312 euros). Also, the proportion of authors who earn almost nothing with self-publishing has declined, but still accounts to just over a third. The most popular platforms are KDP, Books on Demand and ePubli.

Similarly, three-quarters of all respondents are familiar with Neobooks, Tolino Media and Bookrix. Almost all self-publishers use e-books, although the paperback is becoming increasingly ­popular. Audiobook shares, on the other hand, are low so far – despite the world­ wide audiobook boom. All further information under: www.selfpublisherbibel.de

Photo © Janina Wagner Philipp Reinartz: Keep on gaming till Reinartz comes

Volker Oppmann: “We need a new digital marketplace.”

Volker Oppmann is a “serial entrepreneur”, a man of conviction and simply a voracious reader. In 2017, he created mojoreads, a new platform for readers, authors and publishers. His goal: to create a democratic alternative to the major platforms in the net­ work. Authors and publishers earn on mojoreads directly from the sales made through the platform – as well as the users who are paid for their contributions. In addition, they are currently working on a payment model for journalistic content. The spe­ cial feature: There’s no classic advertising on mojoreads with paid ads; everything is done by word of mouth. “Facebook in civilised, Amazon in idealistic” – this is mojoreads’ self-claim.

Volker Oppmann says: “In classical antiquity, people met in the public marketplace and talked to each other. For the Greeks, this marketplace was called Agora, the Romans forum. Today, public discourse has shifted to the net. The problem: Most of the attention is given to those who are the most polarising, or who combine the larger advertising budget behind them.” What we need now, says Oppmann, is a “new digital marketplace in the tradition of the Greek agora”. What does he mean exactly? Can he create a real alternative with mojoreads? Read the interview with Volker Oppmann on the Bowerbird app.

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Photo © Tobias Tanzyna

Philipp Reinartz is only 33 years old, but has already written nov­ els, works as a journalist and game developer, does research on gamification and founded his agency Pfeffermind six years ago – since then he has been developing games and advises companies on how to make learning processes about gamifi­ cation more interesting. “Gamification is about game elements in non-play context. It’s about creating a playful approach to lifelong learning – and everyone can benefit from that”, says Reinartz confidently. Gamification is especially interesting for the literature sector. Gamification means transforming the boring into the tedious. By the way, Reinartz uses gamification himself for his own novels. How exactly? He reveals that in a CCB Magazine interview.

B EST P R ACTI C E

problems for the publishing industry. Amazon literally de­ stroys brick-and-mortar retail. Why did you choose Amazon?

Amazon offers me the greatest purchasing power. Of course I have to get the algorithm started somehow. And that means: being higher on the Amazon list. No one knows exactly how this algorithm works, but it makes rec­ ommendations that ultimately affect the author’s rank­ing.

A little luck is part of it too. But when I finally manage to sell the same number of copies on the day I release my new book, the algorithm pays more attention and pushes me up. In the best case, this becomes a self-running phe­ nomenon and the wave rolls on. This, for example, was completely crazy: With my blog novel “Nicht von dieser Welt”, I overtook Dan Brown and landed in first place on Amazon!

Michael, last question: You were recruited at a young age dur­ing your studies at the Film Academy in Ludwigsburg and wrote 20 years for the “Lindenstrasse” series. After three decades, this cult series will be discontinued. Are you sad?

Sure, of course! Although I left “Lindenstrasse” as a scriptwriter two years ago, that really had more to do with fatigue than anything else; I wanted something differ­ ent, something new. But I think it’s terrible that “Linden­ strasse” is being discontinued. The number of viewers was declining a bit, true, but I think that the public broad­ casters shouldn’t only look at the ratings; Lindenstrasse is a cultural asset. In my thoughts, I will always remain true to “Lindenstrasse”.

Vanessa, thank you for the interview.

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & LITER ATU R E R EP O RTAGE

Are you still pub­ lis­hing, or are you just in your death throes?

Text: BORIS MESSING

Digitalisation is putting the publishing world to the test. Will there still be printed books in the future? Is Amazon giving publishers the permanent boot? One thing is certain: The transformation of the publishing world is no drama. More Chekhov than Shakespeare, a little melancholy, but no carnage. And small publishers, especially, will benefit from the digital possibilities, although many can hardly survive at the ­moment. We visited three publishers in Berlin for an insight into a complex industry.

First stop: Aufbau Haus The mere imposing nature of Aufbau Haus publishing impresses you when you arrive. The smooth, gray con­ crete points towards the large roundabout surrounding Moritzplatz, around which the traffic turns in continuous loop. This is exactly where the Aufbau Verlag, founded in 1945, resides, two blocks away from the geographical centre of Berlin (or so it is claimed, at least, on Google Maps). With its 30 em­ployees and 200 publications a year, the publishing house is one of the medium-sized publishers in Germany and one of the oldest in Berlin, a real veteran. There are over 400 publish­ers in the capital, and around 2,000 companies are active in the Berlin book market.

How does such a publisher master the challenges of digi­ talisation? We have an appointment with the publisher Re­ inhard Rohn for an interview. Lift up, fourth floor … bin! Rohn hasn’t arrived, is still on the train, says the receptionist and smiles – the train as always. We nod knowingly. Oliver Pux, head of the digital department at Aufbau Verlag, is expect­ ing us in the boss’s office. He comes straight to the point: “The reader decides what and how he wants to read.” Digital­ isation isn’t changing any of that, he says, only the forms of read­ing are changing. Meaning: More e-books or other dig­ ital reading formats for smartphones, tablets and other de­ vices. Pux estimates the e-book portion of the entertainment literature to be 25 to 30 per cent. In the case of more sophis­ ticated literature, it would be at most 15 per cent, which is not surprising, as the readership is mostly older and more book-oriented. Novels are the publisher’s main business – as is the case with almost all major publishers. Contrary to the thesis of the recently deceased writer Philip Roth, according to which only a small minority of people read literature at all, the situation isn’t quite so bad. The book market is stable. In 2017, more than 82,000 book titles were published in Germa­ ny. People are still reading, and while the number of readers has dropped six million in the past five years, the book is still very popular. The much-hyped e-book has still not replaced the physical book, its share of sales in the book market re­ mains at a constant five per cent. Nevertheless, the number

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Two gentlemen at work: Oliver Pux and Reinhard Rohn from Aufbau Verlag. We paid them a visit.

Photo © Silke Ohlenforst

of e-book sales is gradually increasing, especially if you look more closely at the individual divisions. The book market is also showing a tendency for print forms to shrink slowly but steadily and for e-books, but also new digital forms for tab­ lets, smartphones or audiobooks to grow slowly but steadily.

However, the transformation from analogue to digital is far from being as dramatic as the newspapers.

Rohn enters the room, apologises, it was just a problem with the train. Both radiate a serious, distinguished aura. What were the questions again? Oh yes, Amazon! We want to know if they consider Amazon the cold-blooded publish­er killer everyone purports it to be. Pux waves off casually. “Ama­ zon is a competitor to us like everyone else”, he says. And Rohn adds, “Amazon is not a real competitor to a publish­er, frankly. For us Amazon is mainly as relevant as a booksell­ er.” The platform is neither a salvation nor chronically evil. In the end, Aufbau books are also for sale on Amazon and the legally binding, fixed book price prevents price dumping. It should be noted that fixed book prices are an intervention in the free market economy as they guarantee publishers and booksellers a minimum price for book sales. The underlying idea is that books are a cultural asset worth protecting and must not be an arbitrary object of market capitalism. In 2016, fixed book prices were also extended to e-books. But what about Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited? Since 2014, the compa­ ny offers a flat rate for books: For 9.99 euros a month, you can borrow e-books and audiobooks from Amazon’s gigantic media library, but only ten at a time. The German company Skoobe also offers a similar e-book flat rate. And many librar­ ies already have so-called online flat rates in their assort­ ment that work on a similar principle. Publishers are involved through licensing agreements. So far, however, such book flat rates haven’t run into trouble. Pux has a simple explana­ tion for this: “The media use of books is very different than in movies or music, because it takes much more time.” A song is heard quickly, a film is watched quickly, and in compari­ son to a book a newspaper is a mayfly. That may also be the reason why digitalisation has not yet turned the book market into something like journalism or the music industry.

Nevertheless, the publishers feel a certain pressure to adapt.

It’s about cost savings or about making the program more mass-marketable. The goal is to remain profitable. But in the end, it’s the publishers who maintain and deliver a promise of quality through their gatekeeper function. For Amazon on the other hand, it’s all about the money: Everyone can pub­ lish here, anyone can sell. In this sense, the platform is more like a print subsidy-publishing house where the author has to pay for the printing himself. The book as a cultural asset plays only a minor role.

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & LITER ATU R E R EP O RTAGE

marketing tool due to its immediacy and high level of par­ ticipation (and the power behind it). The e-book format also saves the costs of printing and storage. Especially since most small publishers do not aim to be profitable. This opens up a field of experimentation for them and often enables them to set new trends that the big publishers then take on.

Loves literature, but cats are great, too – Christiane Frohmann of Frohmann Verlag. Photo © Christiane Frohmann

Second stop: Frohmann Verlag. Things don’t get any more digital than this!

Next stop. We pay a visit to Frohmann publishing house. Un­ like Aufbau Verlag with its 30 employees and more than half a century of cultural history, Frohmann Verlag is just one woman: Christiane Frohmann. We chat about her publishing concept over a cappuccino. Frohmann publishes genuine­ ly digital literature. In the words of the publisher: “Litera­ture that emerges from the context of digitalisation.” If publish­ ers, such as Aufbau Verlag, have to adapt to digitalisation, the Chuck Norris principle applies here: Digitalisation adapts to the publisher. Frohmann publishing house was not only creat­ ed in the midst of the digital revolution, Frohmann is also part of the ORBANISM universe – in Berlin, that’s no unknown gal­ axy. The goal is to create “good meeting formats and s­ paces for publishing, media and culture through the ORBANISM universe”, says the publisher. Frohmann’s book sum is man­ ageable: Four printed books and five to ten e-books created each year. “I work to publish”, says Frohmann – the credo of many independent small publishers. Only a few can live by it.

They are essentially concerned with publishing good litera­ ture, books that they understand in the sense of a “cultural mission”. With her project “Tausend Tode schreiben” (“Writ­ ing a Thousand Deaths”), in which she has collected a thou­ sand texts on the subject of death, Frohmann, according to her own statement, inspired the major mainstream publish­ ers to publish collections of texts on specific topics in similar fash­ion. Another special feature of the Frohmann publishing house is that it not only offers its books on Amazon, but also on the mojoreads platform, which is striving to be a kind of Amazon with social values.

Digitalisation is not too much of a revolutionary process for the handful of Digital-First publishers, of whom Frohmann, Culturbooks, OxOa, Ring eBooks and mikrotext can all be found in Berlin. Here, you simply roll along, and you benefit from the new possibilities of digital marketing. This applies in the broadest sense to all small, independent publishers, of which there are over 300 in Berlin, according to the Börsen­ verein des Deutschen Buchhandels. Creative marketing via Twitter, Instagram and Co. creates new reach today with­out devouring huge sums of money. Advertising in newspapers was yesterday. Social media has become the number one

Third stop: Verlagshaus Berlin. Practically (well, almost) analogue.

Verlagshaus Berlin, our third and final stop, shows that you can get along as a publisher without e-books. Its three pub­ lishers specialise in illustrated poetry collections. A poetry book is often dedicated to a socially relevant topic. For ex­ ample, one may deal with extinct species at different times; the illustrations for these poems depict animals dressed in the fashion of the time. Dominik Ziller, Andrea Schmidt and Jo Frank publish ten books each year, with just under 120 ti­ tles in total so far. Their clientele, a small but very loyal read­ ership, prefers the physical product; e-books are rarely sold.

The publisher evolved in 2005 from a previously distributed literary magazine. The three publishers not only share their love of poetry, but also the wearing of black clothing that has become their trademark. Digitalisation, Frank says puffing on his cigarette, benefits them above all in internal communica­ tion and marketing. “Instagram is absolutely brilliant for us”, says Ziller. You can attract a lot of attention with the hashtag “Poetisiert euch”. A peculiarity of the publishing house is not only the original combination of illustration and poetry, but also the fact that they don’t use standard typographies for their volumes. Over the years, they have developed a stable, crisis-proof brand together with their more or less set list of authors. Last year, they won the Berlin Publisher Award – a prize for innovative small publishers.

By evening our tour is over and we go around the corner to have an “analogue” beer. That’s a given and what’s also ­clear is that the changes occurring in the publishing world as a result of digitalisation are no great drama. More Chek­ hov than Shakespeare, a bit melancholic – but no carnage.

It’s the small publishers, especially, that are benefitting from new digital options, although many can barely get by from their work. Nevertheless, this doesn’t detract from their love of experimentation. Roth is dead – and may he rest in peace – regardless, literature will be around for a long time.

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They could be a band, but in fact they’re actually publishers: the team from Verlagshaus Berlin, an independent publishing house for poetry and illustration. In 2018, the publishing trio won the first Berlin publishing house prize of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe as well as for Economics, Energy and Enterprises. Photo © Hans Praefke, Verlagshaus Berlin

Literature Facts In 2018, the number of book buyers in Germany rose for the first time in six years, according to the latest fig­ ures from the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhan­ dels. In total, 29.9 million people bought at least one book nationwide in 2018.

The turnover of the book industry was 9.13 billion euros, which is roughly the same as in the previous year. Fiction heads the list of statistics, along with chil­ dren’s and youth books. And yet: The trend on the book market has been in general decline for years. According to the study “Book buyers – quo vadis?” conducted by the Börsenverein des Deut­ schen Buchhandels (2018), this dropped 17.5 per cent between 2013 and 2017 – a decline of some six million books. However, the decline in the number of buyers has so far had only a limited effect on booksellers’ sales, due to the fact that fewer buyers are buying more or even more expensive books, while others – especially younger ones – are paying less and less for their books.

Overall, the book market remains largely stable, although Internet series are increasingly competing with books and the e-book mar­ ket is growing: E-books now account for five per cent of the book market’s turnover – last year’s jump was 9.3 per cent compared to 2017.

5

Digitalisation

R

&

Immersive installations, gaming narrative, and virtual figures: The new relationship between digital and performing arts Can streaming in the performing arts work?

Robocalypse now: Will robots soon replace people?

D I G ITAL I SATI ON & PER F O R M I N G ARTS

Immersive installations, gaming narratives, and virtual figures: The Performing Arts are not only bringing technological progress to Berlin’s stages. They are also inspiring and developing entirely new models of narration and performance that will fundamentally change the way we experience theatre, dance, perfor­ mance and art in the future. A journey through the new reality.

ESSAY

New performative bonfires

By JULIAN KAMPHAUSEN (works in the Performing Arts Program of LAFT Berlin. Together with Alexandra Wolf he founded the Performersion, an exchange format between Digital and Performing Arts)

Human on the left, horse on the right. Can you tell us more?

Photos © Dajana Lothert

Theatre has a long tradition: The first theatrical stage performances were homages to the wine god Dionysus around 530 B.C. The development of the theatre was always also political, it was a companion of the democracy that originated in ancient Athens. How political is the theatre today? How is digitalisation changing the work of a theatre collective? We talked to She She Pop, who has been performing on stages throughout the world for three decades. Photo © Doro Tuch

2. With reflection comes the experience: The potential of digital technologies only unfolds when they are used critically.

This is a VR performance by the Berlin theatre and perfor­ mance artist Katharina Haverich, which was shown in the context of 48 Stunden Neukölln in 2018. Haverich is just one example of new, technology-applying art that is currently coming to the fore in many places in Berlin. In recent ­years, anyone who has seen events such as Theater und Netz, Per­ formersion, Theater der Dinge, A.Maze Festival, the Arts & Culture track of re:publica or certain productions at HAU, the Sophiensaelen, the Ballhaus Ost, Theaterdiscounter and many other venues, knows what a high level of aesthetic and theoretical work is now being achieved in the fields of ten­ sion between the performing arts and new digitalism, rang­ ing from immersive installations with highly political sce­ narios to virtual figures playing the field between man and machine to the hacking of smartphones in the audience. If the technique is used correctly, it takes the story to a com­ pletely different level: The narrative on stage diminishes in distance, it closes in, inscribes itself in its counterpart, and becomes more immersive, more intimate, faster.

You can see it on numerous stages across Berlin. For ex­ ample, the Berlin-based company Troikatronix has created “Isadora”, a standard software for the complex networking of stage happenings and various video projections. The perfor­ mance collective She She Pop uses “Isadora” together with video designer and photographer Benjamin Krieg to develop a complex, completely new stage setting for the production of “50 Grades of Shame”: Multiple cameras film several per­ formers simultaneously. Parts of their bodies are wrapped in black cloth, others in costume, and others naked. From the various parallel video channels, the software morphs a col­ laged image of the visible parts of the body together, after

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1. Performing Arts in Berlin are bringing technological progress to the stage – with enormous potential!

The location: the Neukölln Kindl brewery. We go to the base­ ment of the old bottle warehouse. The path leads through a long, tiled corridor, stickers lining the walls along the way. We enter a warehouse whose size can only be imagined in the dark. A ring of bark mulch, surrounded by old theatre chairs, gleams in the distance. A woman and a man in their black tennis outfits, wearing white gloves, emerge from the dark.

They attach a padded cuff around my ankle and hook it to the end of a steel cable winch. Slowly, I’m pulled up by the feet until I’m hanging half a metre above the ground. Next, VR glasses are put on me. At first I see exactly the same thing as before: the bark mulch, the theatre chairs all around. But then I hear something big and heavy coming closer: A white horse enters the area from the dark. Is it real or a simulation?

A white ribbon seems to connect the horse with my feet.

Slowly it begins to move and begins to circle me faster and faster, the ribbon wrapped around me like a cocoon. Now I feel the breath of the horse in my face. Is it real?! Actually, yes, be­cause although everything only appears in the display of the VR glasses, to me it seems absolutely real.

D I G ITAL I SATI ON & PER F O R M I N G ARTS ESSAY

which they are projected as new, “utopian” bodies that no­ body has ever seen live. Red, full lips speak from the face of an old man, who seems to be sitting on the upper body of a woman with hairy, muscular male arms. At this moment in the auditorium, I experience in an almost unbearably close way how body shame and intertwining thoughts revolving around physical performance intermingle.

3. Don’t just endure algorithms – perform!

Digital, automatic decision-making systems influence areas of life that impose new dependencies on us. In Berlin, free groups are developing algorithmic models that can be ethical, political, and aesthetic alternatives – including their own digital currencies for events.

Algorithms are omnipresent. You decide what messages I see and what I hear about the world. If I would like to or­ der something to wear, they regulate which selection is dis­ played for me. Algorithms mean power and with this power, monopolistic market structures are intensifying. Especially in Berlin’s free scene, however, the power of algorithms is be­ ing taken seriously and constructively inverted. For example here: In its production “Algorithms”, the Berlin-based group Turbo Pascal had the audience sort themselves into differ­ ent constellations according to common profile algorithms and other criteria. We receive questions that are an­swered in reality by algorithms: Whom would I lend 200 euros to? Do I hide my IP address or use encrypted email? Do I vote on the extreme right, or just conservative? Can I handle a firearm?

Do I have an apartment? Here I experience face to face how algorithms work in us, namely through our unconscious sort­ ing behaviour and the power of categorisation inherent in it.

By transferring the agency of algorithmic sorting, we are all perpetrators and victims at the same time, but also investiga­ tors of digital power.

Digital, automatic decision-making systems impose new de­ pendencies on us. Instead of working off only using “old” au­ tomated decision-making systems, groundbreaking artists are now forming entirely new models of how we can make and finance art. For example, the Berlin collective Omsk So­ cial Club allows visitors to their so-called “Cryptoraves” to create and mine their own digital currency in advance of the event – using Blockchain technology. To do this, I first have to calculate a digital “Monero” coin on my computer; only then do I learn the time and place of the event – at the same time the newly created digital coins make up the budget for the Cryptorave. But not only the financing is “crypto”; the iden­ tities of the audience are also concealed. The participants are given new biographies that they can explore and contin­ ue to invent with the others in an improvisational way. I don’t dance as Julian, but as Laurent, FinTech engineer from Ge­ neva, who quit the corporate world six months ago. Now he’s looking for his childhood friend Donna in Berlin, who alone knows his secret. And while I dance like that between all the people and characters and beer that was paid from my com­ puter by having to solve a math problem in advance to pay with the digital “Monero” coin, I’m thinking about a world in which people perform and light new people follow their ar­

Algorithm? Somehow, that sounds like something from an advanced maths course. In fact, however, the term originated in the ninth century and can be traced back to the Persian mathematician Al-Chwarizmi. The British mathematician Ada Lovelace developed the first algorithm imagined for a computer in 1843 – today, algorithms are ubiquitous, and they determine our lives and important everyday decisions. In their performance “Algorithms”, the Turbo Pascal theatre collective addresses the power of today’s algorithms.

Photo © Gernot Wöltjen

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tistic impulses – in short – they just start. Thanks to digital technologies, they no longer need large venues, directors, publishers or feature writers to reach an audience. While al­ gorithms guide us and digitalisation exacerbates power and market concentration, free groups in Berlin are developing algorithmic models that can be ethical, political and aesthet­ ic. Algorithms are not tolerated, they are performed. And only reflection brings the experience. I’m curious how all these stories will unfold in the future. I hope you will, too.

Will we still need money in the future? The Omsk Social Club collective is raising just this question: Paper money was invented in China in the 11th century. More than 20,000 years ago, our ancestors exchanged small stone axes for other goods in Western Europe. What’s the next step? It has already been possible to pay by EC card in Germany for almost 30 years. The first cryptocurrency was launched in 2009 with Bitcoin. The Omsk Social Club collective has been using Monero (XMR) for quite some time to organise its own cryptoraves. So what lies ahead? Is this the end of money altogether, or is all this just performative bauble? Read the interview in the CCB Magazine. Cryptorave # 9 Image Courtesy of Omsk Social Club and Media Group Bitniks.

Photos: Mike Tsolis 2019

D I G ITAL I SATI ON & PER F O R M I N G ARTS INTE INTE RVI RVI EW EW

Laptop open, performing arts in her heart: SPECTYOU’s Elisabeth Caesar. Elisabeth worked for us as a creative consultant in 2018 and is now working on a new streaming model for the performing arts. Photo © Sebastian Graf

From the stage to the net and back again SPECTYOU is the first streaming platform for the field of performing arts in the German-speaking world – bringing together dancers, theatre makers, performers and art lovers. Can streaming in the performing arts work? What’s it all about?

We talked to founder Elisabeth Caesar.

Interview: JENS THOMAS

Hello Elisabeth, your streaming platform SPECTYOU will be online soon. How does it work?

SPECTYOU is a new location-independent networking platform for theatre professionals. Video recordings of German-language productions in the fields of dance, dra­ ma and performance – in full length and free of charge – can be uploaded. We offer a safe place for this, and tech­ nologically up to date. Our goal is increasing the reach of the performing arts.

Who exactly can upload and create a profile? Can anyone do that? And are all recordings free for the user?

All theatre professionals can create a profile. However, only the rights holders, ie companies, groups and thea­ tres, can upload recordings. You also decide who can see their videos. And the user can conclude a subscription: In the first half of the year, it costs around five euros per month, after which the monthly subscription price will range between 15 and 20 euros.

Streaming is now regarded as a saviour in music statistics and accounts for almost 50 per cent of all revenues in the mu­ sic industry. Music is listened to over and over again. Music has something to do with consumption and listening habits.

That can’t work in the field of the performing arts. Aren’t peo­ ple just going to the theatre and experiencing everything live, on-site, in real time?

The two things are not mutually exclusive. And of course, streaming works differently in performing arts than in music. Our sector is smaller, but not so small: In Ger­ man-speaking countries, 8,500 different productions are presented each year. So, in the current situation, you would need a full-time job to see nearly five per cent of these productions. There are about a thousand theatres in Germany, 65,000 theatre professionals and 25 million theatre visitors nationwide. We also aren’t looking to re­ place live experiences, but want to create an expanded offer and an overview, thus arousing interest and facilitat­ ing access to performative arts. Because the great thing about the performing arts is the live experience. Often, people don’t have the time and money to “travel” to the desired productions. We are now creating a new central location online. We also see this as a kind of democratisa­ tion: small institutions stand as equals alongside the larg­ er ones. One can follow all work equally and network with the actors.

Sounds simple and promising. Why has it taken so long for such a platform to emerge?

This is the crux of the issue. I really spent weeks at solic­ itors’ offices, because it’s quite complicated from a data protection point of view: Many theatre-makers haven’t yet dealt in detail with the question of what it means to make art accessible on the Internet. Former participants in pro­ ductions must agree to the publication – this in­cludes ac­ tors from the fields of choreography, stage design, act­ ing, directing, dramaturgy, etc. For this purpose, we have developed a comprehensible and manageable contract with a law firm specialising in copyright law. T ­ here are also questions about the copyright of texts, which must

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Streaming in the field of performing arts works differently than in the music sector. The primary goal is not about making money; it’s about networking, about self-empowerment. And the value of the theatre lies in the fact that the platform provides free marketing for theatre professionals.

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be clarified with publishers. But here too we have already received positive feedback from many authors and pub­ lishers. For music streaming platforms, this is easier: The contracts between major record companies and the streaming platforms are agreed upon.

One repeated criticism of the great streaming services is that there is little left for the artists in the end. How are artists fi­ nancially involved in SPECTYOU? And what do you make from it yourself?

The primary goal is not not about making money; it’s about self-empowerment, about not leaving everything to ­Google & Co. And the value of the theatre lies in the fact that the platform provides free marketing for theatre professionals. We make dance and theatre accessible to a wide audience. The platform should also become a liv­ ing and easily accessible theatre archive. We’ve received so much enthusiastic response from various sides. There­ fore, we assume that at some point, SPECTYOU will be­ come financially worthwhile. And once we make a profit, we’ll find a key that will fairly engage all those who put the work, time and creativity into the platform and its content.

You recently visited us in the creative business consulting department and learnt about possible financing options.

Which seemed to work best? And how do you want to finance SPECT­YOU in the long term? Do you have a plan?

Of course we have a plan! In the consultation, we worked out a strategy together. However, it turned out to be diffi­ cult to obtain funding in Berlin. We are not project-based enough to get an arts and culture grant and are too tech­ nologically oriented for the current funding criteria. Cur­ rently we are working with a start-up capital commensu­ rate with the size of the project. But we consciously do so without advertising, which we don’t consider appropri­ate in the artistic context. Ultimately, we hope the platform will eventually be supported by subscriptions. We want to provide careful and free support – and we can only do so if, in the long term, we are independent of the interests of big donors.

As you look to the future, what challenges does the field of performing arts face in times of digital transformation? And where do you want to go with SPECTYOU in the long term?

Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence are advancing in society. But what happens if culture fails to “keep up” with the new technical means, yet needs to reflect it? In the fu­ ture it will be about taking decisive steps: Should we keep writing and send out carrier pigeons? Or do we open our­ selves up to new technologies by making them our own and using them playfully? On the whole, I hope that we will have more courage to open up to the present, to ex­ plore the current possibilities and to enjoy all the positive aspects of digitalisation. We now have the opportunity to create completely new forms. In addition, digital technol­ ogies offer a huge artistic potential that has so far only been explored by a few experimental pioneers – and un­ fortunately often reaches only a small number of people.

That should change, and we can make a positive contri­ bution to that change.

A streaming platform for the performing arts is highly complex under data protec­ tion law: Many theatre professionals have not yet dealt in detail with the question of what it means to make art accessible on the Internet. And all production participants have to agree to publication.

Advertising and finding jobs – for free?

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Robocalypse now

Rimini Protokoll is Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel. Together, they have been dramatising social progress and questioning it since 2000: What will life look like in 2048 after digital erosion? Are humanoid robots going to soon replace us? Rimini Protokoll addresses all this in their latest work, “Uncanny Valley�, which offers a disturbing look at our reality. The piece features a humanoid robot in the person of writer Thomas Melle, who sits on stage speaking to the audience in his own voice. An eerie encounter? Perhaps. But in the future, most likely a reality. We spoke about this and more with Stefan Kaegi (the real one).

Interview: JENS THOMAS

Photos © Gabriela Neeb

Hi Stefan, you’ve been addressing complex social issues on stage for years, often relying on amateur actors and subject matter experts. This time a humanoid robot is performing, a symbol of digital progress. How is it working with a robot?

Are you “friends”?

Of course. And at first it wasn’t that easy to create it at all.

We really wanted to emulate Thomas Melle’s physiogno­ my; every facial expression, every gesture was to be mod­ elled exactly according to his own. To do so, we had to create a silicone impression of Melle’s head, the real one, which gave it its shape. This was followed by meticulous programming work in order to make his facial expres­ sions – lips, eyes, and eyelashes – appear as authentic as possible. After each performance, the robot had to be packaged away carefully again. I think I’ve never worried about a performer as much as Melle 2, as we refer to him.

Thomas Melle wrote the piece himself, he suffers from a manic-depressive illness, which he addressed in his 2016 book, “Die Welt im Rücken”. And he said that thanks to the robot, he could regain a sense of control – you can then sim­ ply send the robot to the next meeting or to the stage without being physically present yourself. Will we have to get used to humanoid robots in our everyday life in the future?

I believe so. People are already experimenting with us­ ing these robots in professions such as nursing, and in­ itial experiments with them, for example in Japan, have shown that it works. Japan in particular is considered a showpiece of New Robotics in the working world. This is due to the fact that fears of surveillance and uncontrol­ lability are much lesser prevalent there than here. Many Ja­panese even expect these technologies to enrich their lives in the future. Not least of all, this has to do with positive portrayals in manga and popular culture, which means that the Japanese have less fear of contact with humanoid machines. The demographic change, which is even more serious than in Germany, makes the use of ro­ bots almost necessary. According to forecasts, of Japan’s 127 million people, 28.1 per cent are older than 65 years of age – and this number will decline to 88 million by 2065. Rural regions are threatened with abandonment, loneliness and a shortage of labour. Robots are seen as an aid in Japan, even in areas such as elderly care, where work is ‘human’. In Germany, people are far more cau­ tious. But also here research results show that we accept robots in our everyday life, if they have social abilities, if we consider them to be human beings. This is where our piece “Uncanny Valley” comes in. Cause if we’re in the realm of the Uncanny Valley, robots scare us.

Can you explain the term “Uncanny Valley”?

The term “Uncanny Valley” originally comes from the Japan­ese robotics researcher Masahiro Mori from the 1970s. At that time, Mori realised that humanoid robots were particularly scary when they looked almost, but not entirely, like us. For example, if they only reproduce us, say, to 70 per cent, then we don’t perceive them as hu­ man-like and may or may not find them sympathetic. But if they are not quite similar to us in certain respects, may­

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I think I’ve never felt more unnerved by a performer than I did by Melle 2. And at first it wasn’t that easy to create it at all. We really wanted to emulate Thomas Melle’s physiognomy; every facial ex­ pression, every gesture was to be modelled exactly according to his own.

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be only just a bit less than 100 per cent, then we perceive them as zombies – then this is what is referred to as Un­ canny Valley.

The attempts to replace humans with mechanical things are not new. Even in pre-Christian times, the Greeks invent­ ed simple automata that could perform activities without di­ rect human intervention. This is how the first water-powered clock was made in 270 BC. Robots have been around in in­ dustrial settings since the 1960s, although in 1927 the movie “Metropolis”, the first human machine hit the big screen. Is your piece a critique of the robotisation of society or should we look forward to it?

On the one hand, it is a criticism of the circum­stances.

Yes. Because we have become technical beings for a ­while now and are literally helpless when our smart­ phone fails. That’s why our theatre always addresses in­ terface problems – we try to mirror society, and the audi­ ence experiences the reality it needs. On the other hand, humanoids will become part of daily routine in the future.

And not only in retirement homes. Human-like dolls are also increasingly becoming part of our sex lives. There are already the first robot brothels.

The aim of your pieces is to reach the audience emotional­ ly and confront it with reality. How did the audience react to Melle 2? Was it disturbed?

Some people actually thought it was a human being play­ ing a robot and not the other way round. They thought, “damn, he’s good.” Our intention was not to pretend that it was not a robot on stage; that would have been silly.

The back of the head is therefore open. Nevertheless, for some, the presentation seemed deceptively genuine. His authenticity evokes empathy among the audience: a cer­ tain glow in the eyes, a certain angle around the lips. It brings him closer to the audience and they cannot resist the sympathy for him, even though they know that it’s a robot.

Rimini Protokoll has long been concerned with technical and digital progress and its implications for us. In your piece “Staat” (“State”), you posed the question as to how digital development will change our lives by 2048. Now it’s the hu­ manoid robot Melle 2. We are currently experiencing a strong digital penetration in our lives and everyday work. What does that mean for the performing arts?

Theatre basically has the chance, as live art, to very close­ ly examine the present, to stage coexistence in the pres­ ent time. And since a large part of our efforts, creativity and debates in the post-industrial age have to do with the question of how we want to live together, theatre is the art of the age – an art that doesn’t isolate us from each other, but draws us out from behind our screens. It’s up to us not to let this being together degenerate into an end in itself, but to use this social space to critically question the complex issues of our time. Of course, this also includes socio-economic interrelationships of power, which seem to leave less and less leeway for policy-makers (or poli­ tics in general). Theatre will continue to outsmart reality in the future.

Humanoid robots could become commonplace in the future. In countries like Japan, they already are. And here, too, we won’t just find them in retirement homes. Human-like dolls are also increasingly becoming part of our sex lives.

Last question: Can machines become friends and if so, how many can do so?

Maybe they can, but in a way that would be very sad, too. For my part, at least, I’m very happy with my human friends. And they won’t be replaced by any machines in the future.

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Some people actually believed that Melle 2 is a human who plays a robot and not the other way around. They seemed to be thinking to themselves, “damn, he’s good!”.

6

Digitalisation

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Where television ends and online begins: The future of film Podcasts are sweeping across the digital landscape. How? And why?

AÂ look behind the scenes of the podcast label hauseins What does cinema have to do with inclusion?

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & F I LM + R ADI O

The future of film looks positive. Kirsten Niehuus from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.

Photo © Sabine Engels

ESSAY

Where television ends and online begins Once again, the film industry is facing tremendous upheavals. Film and serial productions using on-demand streaming platforms are not only changing our viewing habits and tastes: They’re also putting pressure on film producers and filmmakers.

The film industry needn’t necessarily be afraid of that, but it definitely has to react to it. And with better content ideas.

By KIRSTEN NIEHUUS (managing director of film promotion at Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg)

Daniel Craig stands on the edge of an abyss and looks grim­ ly behind a truck, which rushes whispering into the depths.

Next to him, pretty and a little bit screwed up, Jennifer Law­ rence – the new Bond girl. The two stars are not real. They are avatars – developed by the motion capture system. All ac­ tors in the new James Bond movie are avatars, all deceptive­ ly real. Will we only see avatars on the screen in the future?

Of course not. Because the new Bond film hasn’t yet been released and will probably never appear in this form. Ava­ tars in movies are still science fiction. And yet, technically, this is already feasible as an idea. In the not too distant fu­ ture, it will be possible to use the motion capture system or a similar method to authentically represent any human being with facial expressions, gestures and all that goes along with it. Can the acting profession survive it all? I am convinced it can. Compared to the music and media industry, digitalisa­ tion in the film industry is occurring very quietly, mostly un­ noticed by the public. To a certain degree one could assert that it’s always been there. The development of the (today) digitally based blue or green screen goes back to the 1940s.

When a director films with an analogue camera today, it’s not a question of technical limitation, but a question of style and aesthetics. The same goes for visuals and special effects – you can, but do not have to, depending on your conceptu­ al orientation and your budget. Digital technology has long been standard in film. That fact is that, in the future, more programmers and technicians will be needed in the field of visual and special effects, but occupational jobs such as the post-production sound will gradually disappear. In the end, I suspect, increasing digital networking will create more jobs in film and television.

According to a 2014 study, Berlin-Brandenburg is home to the most internationally awarded large-scale productions, and has highly qualified film staff. There are also numerous film festivals and events that attract international producers and celebrities to the region. Everything will stay progressive here. Recently, after years of negotiations, the federal gov­ ernment, the federal states and the Film Fund have a­greed to provide at least 100 million euros over the next ten years for the complete digitalisation of German film heritage. T ­ hese are good signs. In fact, the film industry has always been a driver of advanced technology and, more than other crea­ tive industries, has become a driver of digitalisation. It isn’t and hasn’t been especially noteworthy – because it’s taken for granted. The film projectionist who places the film reel in the spool has long since ceased to exist. Today, every movie can be started with a mouse click. Cameras, microphones, cutting, effects and audio programs – everything is digitally based. Only the catering food is still served analogously, to put it pointedly. Much more interesting than the digital tech­ nology of cameras and cinematic equipment is the influence of the so-called on-demand streaming services, themselves children of the digital revolution, on the content and dram­ aturgy of the film productions. And content, as we all can agree, is still the heart of every production. So how does a

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Compared to the music and media industry, digitalisation in the film industry is occurring very quietly. In the future, more programmers and technicians will be needed in the field of visual and special effects, but occupational jobs such as the post-production sound will gradually disappear. In the end, I suspect, increasing digital networking will create more jobs in film and television.

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & F I LM + R ADI O ESSAY

streaming service like Netflix change cinematic narratives?

Since 2004 I have been Managing Director of film promotion at Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg. Berlin-Brandenburg as a film and television location ranks No. 1 in Germany. This is the result of a study by the auditing firm Ernst & Young. In or­ der to hold this leading position, it needs financial support.

The film funding of the media board consists of two pillars: 1. The funding of films and high-end series and 2. new me­ dia funding, including, for example, games, web formats and comedy productions. Five years ago, we began financially supporting high-end series. Today, the scope of that support amounts to a whopping six million euros, or 20 per cent of our total budget. Many German directors are mi­grating to the world of serial production production as they can tell more complex stories with unusual stylistic devices and because they earn more money when a project is filmed over several seasons.

And that’s the value of Netflix and Co. And of course indi­ rectly from you, as you use these providers. Thousands of series are available exclusively on Netflix, many of them pro­ duced in high quality. That’s where the hatchet’s buried: The series’ often exaggerated dramaturgical progressions, their complex, interwoven narrative strands and their love of so­ phisticated details intensify the pressure on cinematic and television productions. Because they profoundly change the viewing habits of their audience, just like the music stream­ ing services do. And much like the music industry, the film industry is having to adjust to new structures. The audience’s tastes are changing. Series on Netflix, Amazon or Sky act as trendsetters. It is no longer enough to tell a simple love sto­ ry. To succeed, you need far more – more involvement, more backgrounds, and more attention to detail. The on-demand streaming services make it possible. By the way – and just in­ cidentally – the porn industry has long since discovered the online business; streaming services came later. Today, they are indispensable.

Nor do I want to forego any of it, especially since it has yet to be proven that cinema and SVOD cannot live in entertaining coexistence. But there’s a large intersection of people watch­ ing art-house films and series, so it’s important that the cin­ ema re-invents itself as a destination. Yet on the other hand, the many on-demand platforms provide great competition for classic cinema. Overall, the repertoire of productions has expanded enormously, and at some juncture the point su­ per-saturation will possibly have been reached, but for now I can see no signs that this trend will soon have passed. Al­ though the oversupply of cinematic and serial productions makes everything more fleeting. But, for example, films from the subculture sector can gain easier and faster attention through online distribution. In the end, the digitalisation of distribution channels will strengthen cinematic diversity. In summary, the advent of on-demand streaming services has more benefits than negatives. For us as a media council and funding institute, this means taking up this development and evolving with it and not against it. Ultimately, it’s the audi­ ence that decides what it wants to see and experience.

It’s no longer enough to tell a simple love story. To succeed, you need far more – more involvement, more backgrounds, and more attention to detail. On-demand streaming services make it possible.

The advent of on-demand streaming services has more benefits than negatives.

Ultimately, it's the audience that decides what it wants to see and experience.

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Film Facts Film and digitali­sation – today, one simply can’t live without the other. Whereas cinema and television used to be home to “technical” achieve­ments, today the streaming platforms Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Maxdo­ me are the digital innovators.

According to a study of the Ge­ sellschaft für Konsumforschung (GfK), in the first quarter of 2019 around 22 million persons, ages 14 and up, used these platforms for a fee. Overall, Germans spent about 1.2 billion hours on strea­ ming platforms – of which about 1.4 billion total views, or about 70 per cent, were for series. This development is also reflected in the funding structures: Recently, after years of negotiations, the federal government, the federal states and the Film Fund have agreed to provide at least 100 million euros over the next ten years for the complete digitali­ sation of German film heritage.

In addition, the media city of Babelsberg will be “digitally” upgraded: In 2018, the VoluCap opened in Babelsberg. It is the first commercial, volumetric studio where people and objects can be scanned three-dimen­ sionally and placed in real or virtual worlds.

Free workspaces, partners for cooperation, equipment and know-how?

D I G ITAL I SATI O N & F I LM + R ADI O

One is Klein (Holger Klein), the other Rönicke (Katrin Rönicke): Together they produce the “Wochendämmerung” podcast.

Photo © Götz Gringmuth-Dallmer

INTE RVI EW

“This is the kind of p ­ odcast you can listen to while you’re cleaning” A podcast wave is rolling across the land. Currently, every third German regularly accesses free on-demand broadcasts – with news-themed shows in the lead, followed by entertainment and music formats. But can anybody really make a living podcasting? Katrin Rönicke can! Together with Susanne Klingner, she runs her own podcast label, hauseins, and produces her own podcasts – one of them, “Wochendämmerung”, is financed by a so-called crowdfunding subscription. We wondered: Just how does that work?

Interview: KORA ANNIKA BÖNDGEN and JENS THOMAS

Hello Katrin, you’ve been producing your own podcasts for years and you’re the industry leader in the Berlin podcast scene. What do you consider a good podcast?

For me it’s a good podcast if I can learn something and afterwards know something I didn’t really know before.

After all, a good podcast is as rewarding as a good book.

You have your own podcast label, hauseins. With your “Wochendämmerung” podcast, which you produce with Hol­ ger Klein, once a week you provide a very subjective summa­ ry of the events of the past week. What’s the podcast about?

And what sets you apart from the other podcasts?

Podcasting is all about niches, about storytelling. And what makes us special is our very own touch. Holger and I are very different. That’s why we both approach things differently; sometimes we argue. And we reflect on the things that we found remarkable or even strange; things that we felt we had to think about longer. We want to en­ tertain.

Podcasts are booming. Since 2016, usage has been steadily increasing. Above all, knowledge and news formats are be­ coming increasingly popular, a study by the Hamburg mar­ ket research institute SPLENDID RESEARCH recently found.

Many listeners are young, but most of them are in the age range of 30 to 49 years. Nevertheless, podcasts can hardly prevail against big public stations. Why is that?

The problem in Germany is that it’s still difficult to adver­ tise. This is very different in the USA, which is sort of the mother country of the podcast: There, podcasting is a real business. Podcasts can be financed through adver­ tising partners, which really only applies to a few in this country. And if we were to advertise as a podcast label, there would be criticism – and even though a study by Podcast Marketing Network Podstars by OMR last year showed that over 80 per cent of podcast listeners would accept advertising – I can’t confirm that would be the case for us. Actually, it’s all about the question of how we can live on good ideas in the future. And podcasts themselves are creating a whole new and different way of mediation.

Which would be?

For podcasts, what matters first and foremost is person­ ality; you can even listen to podcasts along the way: while cleaning, in the subway, or riding a bike. Or even “free of distractions” – this was recently determined by the study SPOT ON PODCAST. For example, with our second pod­ cast “Lila Podcast”, which also runs on our haus­eins la­ bel, we are now reaching a younger audience. There’s a lot going on right now.

Altogether, there are eight more podcasts under your haus­ eins label. Can you make a living from your label and pod­ casts?

Yes, at this point I can. I live from podcasting but also from my hauseins label. All in all, however, I have two more mainstays: one at the Deutschlandfunk Kultur, with a podcast called “Lakonisch Elegant”, and one as a writ­ er. My last book, published by Reclam Verlag, was about emancipation. I am currently writing my fourth work –

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Podcasting is all about niches, about storytelling. What matters first and foremost is personality; you can even listen to podcasts along the way: while cleaning, in the subway, or completely free of distractions.

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it will be a biography of Beate Uhse, who would have turned 100 this year.

You have been financing the broadcast of “Die Wochendäm­ merung” since October 2017 through a so-called crowdfund­ ing subscription on the platform, Steady. In the meantime, you are garnering more than 3,700 euros per month – and the trend is rising. Tell us: How does that work?

Steady is a crowdfunding platform offering a s­ o-called crowdfunding subscription. The listeners pay month­ ly, but they can cancel at any time. On Steady, you can ­choose different packages: With us, the first costs only one euro per month – but there’s ad-free content. The second is 2.50 euros, and the limit is at 20 euros a month.

We pay a ten per cent commission to Steady. The spe­ cial thing about the crowdfunding subscription is that, yes, you needn’t start from scratch every time. The sub­ scription is similar to a newspaper and it allows bloggers and podcasters to secure a monthly amount. Originally the model comes from the USA. The US platform Patreon was the first one on the market.

What criteria does Steady have? Can anyone do it? What are the terms and conditions?

There are no fixed criteria, anyone or everyone who wants to can do it. Just sign in to Steady and off you go. As is the case with crowdfunding in general, an appealing presentation is important. Regular updates are also use­ ful. And the nice thing is that you have your own regular income. Every month you receive a prepared invoice from Steady. We now have almost 700 supporters and are very happy that we as a company don’t have to book every sin­ gle donation. We can do it in a single invoice and settle taxes without any problems.

It is noteworthy, however, that a ‘crowdfunding subscription’ primarily makes sense for those who are already established.

So far, crowdfunding was considered the first market test. In Germany, the average value of a successful campaign is also ‘only’ 8,000 euros. Do you see crowdfunding subscription models as a real financing alternative for the future?

I believe so. It’s early days, to be sure. But you can see that it works just by looking at us. The whole Internet hype about advertising is going to end anyway. It’s just not as lucrative as it was a few years ago. And 90 per cent of the advertising revenue in the digital world goes to Google or Facebook anyway. But what do the small pro­ ducers get out of it? Nothing. Crowdfunding subscription models are a real alternative here. The money goes, mi­ nus the commission, directly to the producers.

Katrin, last question: What are you busy with when you’re not producing podcasts or writing a biography about Beate Uhse?

My podcasts and writing actually keep me pretty occu­ pied. And privately, I lead a normal life in Berlin: I have two children, with whom I often spend time in the city, or doing homework with them. And I like to dance. Oh, sorry, I have to run! Did you have another question?

No, you?

Nope! Ok, bye!

Bye!

Podcast Facts The word “podcast” consists of the term “pod”, which stands for “play on demand”, and part of the English word “broadcast”.

The term podcast used today seems to have been invented in 2004 by British author and jour­ nalist Ben Hammersley. Since 2016 in particular, the use of podcasts in Germany has been on the rise – at the moment, almost every third German listens to podcasts, according to the study of the Hamburg market research institute SPLENDID RESEARCH. Thematically, know­ ledge and news formats rank at the top. Most listeners are in the age range of 30 to 49 years – and are mainly educated. The most popular platforms for use are currently the respective web­ sites of the podcast providers as well as streaming service provi­ ders such as Spotify. Podcasts are financed mainly through advertising, but also through crowdfunding.

We offer a crowdfunding subscription through the ­Steady platform. It’s com­ pletely unbureaucratic. And we now have a regular income of over 3,700 euros per month.

B EST PRACTI C E

Photo © Frank Blümler

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Workshops, panel discussions, continuing education, festivals?

Greta & Starks: Cinema for everyone!

Seneit Debese developed two apps in 2012 and in the process created a piece of Berlin history: For one app, Greta, makes it possible for blind individuals to enjoy cinema, and with the oth­ er, Starks does the same for the hearing impaired – meanwhile, both have been merged into the Greta app. Greta is free and works like this: You download it in the App Store or on Google Play, Greta then plays the audio descriptions or the subtitles in the cinema, matching the movie. “Cinema for all”, is what Seneit Debese calls her concept. The entrepreneur says of her work: “Inclusion can also mean innovation. And the funny thing is that nowadays it’s possible to fly to the moon, but visually-impaired or hearing-impaired people have almost no means of experienc­ ing the world of cinema. I wanted to change that.” And that she has. Today she is part of a three-woman and-two-man company in Prenzlauer Berg. Supported by numerous programs and initi­ atives, her clients now include many independent distributors, as well as studios such as Universal or Disney. We paid the businesswoman a visit and asked: How do you start a company like Greta & Starks? Read the interview on the Bowerbird app.

Networking, consulting, wrestling with progress Brand new, every day Photo © Philip Nürnberger

Since 2016, together with Kreativ Kultur Berlin in Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH, we have been advising on cultural promotion issues and the financing of creative industries using a door-to-door approach: whether for applications, start-up projects or crowdfunding.

Kreativ Kultur Berlin, this refers to Creative City Berlin, Kulturförderpunkt Berlin, Kreativwirtschaftsberatung Berlin and Crowdfunding Berlin, all under one roof. Our work starts where artists, creative artists and the self-employed reach their limits: face-to-face, free of charge, right on Alexanderplatz in Kloster­straße 8. At this point we’re going to write about ourselves…for a change.

Digitalisation is changing art and culture. We advise art and culture professionals every day. We have to be prepared for everything.

By SABRINA APITZ and ANDRZEJ RASZYK (Kulturförderpunkt Berlin)

The art and culture scene has long since ceased being a mere old geezer. Years ago, artists and cultural figures dis­ covered digitalisation and are now exploring new horizons.

New variations on themes, new forms of presentation, new perspectives. All well and good, but that also requires new funding models. And that’s where we come in. We, that is the Kulturförderpunkt Berlin, a free advice centre for Berlin artists and cultural workers of K ­ ulturprojekte Berlin GmbH. Our target group is artists, associations, networks or even non-profit and non-commercial projects. Of course, the most common questions we ask are: Where can I get mon­ ey for my project? What grant programs are there? How do I start? Let us give you a hint: There’s some­thing happening in Berlin when it comes to digital arts and cultural projects.

Breaking old patterns of thinking Photo © Philip Nürnberger

Together with Kulturförderpunkt Berlin and Crowdfunding Berlin, we advise cultural and creative industry stakeholders about financing issues: How do I finance my project or company? And is digitalisation crea­ting new opportunities?

By MELANIE SEIFART and MAREIKE LEMME (Kreativwirtschaftsberatung Berlin)

One thing is certain: Digitalisation doesn’t stop at our consultation door. For four years, we have been advising creative self-employed professionals and creative entre­ preneurs in the various cultural and creative sectors as Kreativwirtschaftsberatung Berlin in Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH. Every day designers, filmmakers, artists and en­ trepreneurs from the fields of literature, visual arts, press or the music sector come and go. And we’ve come to re­ alise: The topic of digitalisation is affecting all art sectors and cultural industries – whether cultural stakeholders are devising new streaming applications, developing new apps that make participation in art and culture more inclusive or creating new supply chain transparency in fashion through digital progress. Culture and creative industries are often also early adapters of the latest technologies: They’re not only developers, they also apply them and show what’s possible through digitalisation.

However, the most common question that we are still ­asked in the deliberations is: How do I finance my project?

And it’s precisely here that professionals continue to ­reach their limits, above all with regard to the structures of the funding programs. Because many projects are “too com­ mercial” for art and cultural grants. The industry, on the other hand, may feel that they are “not economically orient­ ed enough” or “too project-related” – this is exactly where our work comes in: We look to find the best way with the professionals. We advise new streaming services such as

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The Berlin Senate, for example, has just launched an in­ novation fund whose trial phase is still underway – from 2020, solid support programs will result. At the same time, the Federal Government Commissioner for Cul­ ture and the Media (BKM) is supporting projects in the fields of digital curating, digital artistic production and digital mediation in cultural ins­titutions with the “Kultur Digital” program and has created the special program “Konfiguration” especially for the performing arts. The aim is to promote projects in the field of figure and ob­ ject theatre with a focus on digitalisation. Since 2014, the project “Work of the Future” has also been funded through the EU program “Creative Europe”.

This shows that the subject of digitalisation is only just starting to gain traction. Although there are still a few artists and collectives in Berlin – such as the Peng Col­ lective, CyberRaiders or virtuellestheater – these are­ as will grow in the future, especially in the independ­ ent scene. And we already have projects coming in and going out every day that are dealing with the subject of digitalisation: Years ago, for example, Dr. Christian Rauch from the STATE Festival, who is also in this issue (see p. 31), was our advisor. Subsequently, he ad­vanced the STATE Festival cause even further – and now he has founded STATE Studio and is connecting science and art. Other actors such as the curator Tina Sauer­ länder (see interview p. 28) led a workshop focussing on “Where do I begin?”. That’s what we’re all about: The first steps, which are usually not the last.

Of course, knowing all the programmes and monitor­ ing progress is extremely important for us in order to be able to inform and advise artists and cultural pro­ fessionals well. This provides daily challenges. We are constantly networking with other advisory structures, not just with associations, but also with many individual artists who want to do something new in this city – just like we do. And we provide workshops as well as infor­ mation events – there have been more than 130 since our founding in 2013. We’ve already conducted more than 1,750 consultations. And one thing is certain: Dig­ italisation will continue to change the art and culture market. We should be prepared for that.

All information under: kulturfoerderpunkt-berlin.de

­ PECTYOU (see interview page 76), new co-working S spaces such as Tuesday co-working or actors like gig­ mit, a Berlin platform for artist discovery and booki­ng.

We also advise on alternative financing options such as crowdfunding, sponsoring or acquisition opportu­ nities from private investors. And we invite the actors as speakers to our events so that they can learn from each other and a constant, practice-based exchange of experience is possible. Only in this way can crea­tive business models be successfully developed in the long term, and we are working on this – since 2016 we have organised over 40 events, 850 consultations have been carried out by us, and the demand is far from being met.

But is digitalisation creating new financing opportuni­ ties? Yes and no. On the one hand, there is now a Dig­ ital Agenda from the State of Berlin. Programs such as “Transfer BONUS”, “Pro Fit Frühphasenfinanzierung” (“Pro Fit Early Stage Finance”) or “Pro FIT – Projekt­ finanzierung” (“Pro FIT – Project Finance”) support in­ novative founders as well as companies. However, the programs are not tailored to the needs of creative indus­ try actors, but are accessible to all economic operators.

On the other hand, digitalisation is just beginning to cre­ ate new opportunities for financing and value crea­tion.

This trend is not only reflected in forms of financing such as crowdfunding, which are in and of themselves a “digital” financing alternative. It is also apparent from the numerous projects and start-ups we deal with on a daily basis. gigmit, for example: gigmit was launched in 2012 with the aim of making the booking process more transparent for musicians and the events industry and, above all, to transition it into the age of digitalisation.

For to this day the booking process is still very much influenced by personal contacts, telephone calls and emails. Today, the company is firmly established and growing. gigmit has made the leap forward thanks to a great deal of personal commitment and private cap­ ital, but also with support from programmes such as “Profit Frühphasenfinanzierung” (“Profit early phase fi­ nancing“) by the IBB, INP II by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe and European funding such as Creative Europe Kultur. In the end, the success of our work becomes clear from such stories. We worked with gigmit again and again, we booked them for events and recommended them as best practice. What will be needed in the future is know-how, the possibility of networking and mediation. Especially in a time and world that is becoming increasingly complex as a re­ sult of digital progress. And we are convinced that this can only succeed by breaking old patterns of think­ing.

That’s something we work on every day.

Find out more at: kreativwirtschaftsberatung-berlin.de

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