Game-changing technologies are at the heart of the EVA-Berlin 2023 conference. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain, NFT and XReality applications are the innovative drivers in the ecosystems of the cultural sector, in creative industries and in artistic production. Haptic components of a work can be made tangible and pictorial representations can be put into appropriate words. A landscape painting gains an acoustic horizon of experience as a soundscape, or it is embedded in a game setting as an animated weather backdrop.

The educational mission in cultural institutions benefits from these possibilities. There are fundamentally new ways to interact with the audience and to address a broader public. Multimodal access and personalized communication services support the inclusive demands of today’s visitors and open up for a barrier-free perception also by disadvantaged or impaired audiences. At the same time, innovative technological tools have become firmly established in the fields of documentation, conservation and reconstruction. Machine learning tools ranging from linguistic analysis of historical records to OCR on handwritten texts are already providing valuable metadata for documentation. Digital twins are successfully utilized in the conservation and restoration of artworks to analyze damage, to suggest restoration methods, or even to plausibly reconstruct the colors and textures of destroyed artifacts.

However, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Generatability’ also entails serious risks. The new coexistence of man, machine and objects predictably dissolves familiar ties to the factual, to the material testimony of the artefacts and to the physical presence at the scene of the real. This raises questions of credibility and verification. Who are we actually talking to when entering into dialogue with an algorithmic counterpart?

The 27th EVA-Berlin Conference invites you to present current positions and practical application examples on these topics. Innovative contributions are welcome for the conference and for application-oriented workshops. Novel procedures, technologies and products can be presented at an exhibition at the same time.

As part of the international EVA Conference Network, the Berlin event is a platform for international exchange and European cooperation.