Executive Co-Editors for the Special Issue:
- Professor KAWASHIMA, Nobuko (Doshisha University, Japan)
- Professor WANG Li-jung (National Central University, Taiwan)
- Professor LI Shih-Hui (National Chengchi University, Taiwan)
Call Ends: November 30, 2023.
Digital technology, platformization, Big Data, algorithms, virtual reality, augmented reality, metaverse, artificial intelligence (AI), etc., have been widely adopted for cultural arts creations. According to the 2019 “Digital Environment” published by UNESCO, the cultural technology industry has been a key driver of the digital economy and contributed over US$200 billion in global sales for the digital technology industry. This is especially impressive because we must participate in cultural arts without gathering in closed spaces during the COVID-19 crisis from 2020 to 2023. We have to run exhibition performances online, take advantage of AI museum guides, and constantly create innovative cultural science technologies. Notwithstanding COVID-19, today’s art and literature industry has also used Big Data to analyze and contact potential targets for marketing, promotion, and recommend creative works. Application software or AI creation tools can enable people with little or no musical or artistic background to compose or draw using machine learning. They have significantly lowered the artistic creation thresholds of the past. AI and digitization have become critical to facilitate the promotion and sales of art performances and audio-visual creations across international borders to boost economic benefits. In 2018, the United Kingdom’s Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) proclaimed that “Culture is Digital.” It encourages the various cultural institutes and performance teams to collect a large amount of audience information, subsidize artists and art administrators to learn AI technology, and increase online performance activities to attract more income. The goal is to build the future hope of cultural arts based on technology, digitization, and AI.
In particular, the application of AI in cultural arts has grown rapidly and vigorously. The following were introduced in 2016: “The Next Rembrandt” program that enabled a computer to imitate the painting style of Rembrandt, the song “Daddy’s Car” composed by an AI in the style of The Beatles, and the literary works published by the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award that were co-written by AI and novelists. In 2017, the poetry collection “The Sunshine Lost Windows,” created using Microsoft’s AI program “Xiaoice,” was released in Beijing, China. In 2018, the “Hello World” score created by an AI independently was released. The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 also ignited global attention, and the possibility of writing papers and creations using AI in the future has vastly improved. MusicLM, an AI that can create music by accepting word instructions to freely mix and match various music styles, was launched in 2023.
Everyone can be an “artist” with the assistance of cultural arts technologies, and numerous “arts” can be created at low costs. But we tend to turn a blind eye to the plight of artists and art production. The concerns focused by “Cultural Crash: Murder of the Creative Class” published in 2015, “The Death of the Artists” published in 2022, and many art journalists or cultural policy scholars are that technology giants have platforms that allow them to obtain excessive profits from contemporary cultural and artistic works and use them to attract audiences to the platform and generate advertising funds, but the profit share given to creators are pitifully small. Consequently, it is difficult for art creation to become a professional career. Artists must teach part-time classes, accept government bids, solicit sponsorships, and do odd jobs to support their creations and pay for food and health care because their incomes are scattered and meager.
Additional cultural technology-related problems include high market concentration, concerns about personal data security, algorithm black boxes, and unbalanced profit-sharing systems. Governments worldwide have gradually paid attention to AI’s positive and negative impacts on culture and art. Therefore, this paper solicitation aims to explore how technologies such as AR, VR, platformization, dataization, algorithm, machine learning, image recognition, AI question answering, and AI content production have entrenched the production, distribution, intermediary, consumption, profit model, and profit sharing sides of art culture; and investigate their positive and negative impacts. Are the policymakers, academians, artists, and audiences aware of such impacts? What can they do in response to such impacts? How should the various nations’ cultural policies support cultural science and technological developments while supervising, protecting, maintaining, and balancing science and technology’s impacts on society? How should governments prevent platform owners, technology developers, and industry players from monopolizing this process? How should artists, arts organizations, civic movements, or civic groups confront or respond to such issues? Are there any pilot cases or methods?
The topics suggested for this special issue to investigate the preceding questions are as follows:
- What are the impacts that contemporary technologies (digitalization, dataization, digital technology, platformization, Big Data, algorithm, virtual reality, augmented reality, metaverse, artificial intelligence, etc.) have on cultural and artistic creation, intermediary and dissemination, consumers, profit models, and creative labor?
- What significances and impacts do contemporary cultural technologies have on museum collection and display, visual art, performing arts, video and audio music, cultural assets, news media, communication, photography, literature and publishing, design, and education? What new cultural arts commodities, industries, markets, or profit models have been created?
- How do cultural technologies impact art creation, artistic quality judgment, and creative work value?
- How do various nations’ cultural science and technologies affect their policy goals and tools, policy formulation, policy evaluation, and policy results?
- What are examples of how various countries use cultural technology to promote cultural and art industries, strengthen national cultural soft power, and promote cultural equality and diversity? How do we cultivate good digital art consumption habits for the public? How should we reduce the digital divide and inequality? How do we establish a sound cultural and technological ecology and environment?
- How does cultural technology affect cultural life, consumption taste, cultural capital accumulation, cultural-intermediary roles, cultural goods distribution, and audience management?
- How does cultural technology affect the cultivation and education of artistic talents, the artistic and cultural labor environment, and the definition of artists? How should we further enable or develop new cultural arts practitioners, career types, translators, or professionals? What are the new skills that we might need to strengthen or develop?
- How can civil grassroots movements and non-governmental organizations develop arts and humanities, digital education, or social programs (cultural g0v open government, hackathon, etc.) to inspire harmonious and independent cultural and technological innovations?
- What are cultural technology’s effects on culture, economy, politics, law, system, organizational system, and social equality?
- Other topics related to culture and technology.
Article submissions (no longer than 10,000 words in English, and 12,000-20,000 words in Chinese) should be emailed, as Microsoft Word attachments, to T3CPME at cpme@tacps.tw by 30 November 2023 in CMS Style. The Special Issue will be published in May 2024.
CPME is a high quality, open access, peer-reviewed Chinese and English languages journal published dually online (http://cpme.tacps.tw) and in print by Taiwan Association of Cultural Policy Study (TACPS) every May and November. The journal follows the standard for Ethics and Publication Malpractice set by the COPE.