European Digital Deal is a three-year research (2023-2025) co-funded by Creative Europe on how the accelerated, and sometimes unthinking, adoption of new technologies – such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain and algorithmic processing – can alter or undermine democratic processes.
14 European cultural organizations will develop a wide range of programs that aim to bring together cultural institutions, artists, researchers and educators to reflect on how to safeguard democratic values in the digital realm, and the role these actors can play in this endeavor.
The project also questions the current architecture of innovation processes, arguing that long-term environmental and social impacts must be taken into account when designing fair, ethical and sustainable technologies for the future.
Each organisation has formed a Local Expert Group which is in charge of defining a local challenge to which the artists submit their proposals.
Challenge at LABoral Centro de Arte
Digital environments increasingly influence and determine the forms of socialization in contemporary life, as they constitute spaces for communication, meeting and interaction. This challenge will explore new ways in which public administration, understood as a collective form of organization for the common good, can offer meeting and socialization points that innovatively connect online and offline spaces to produce meaningful social links.
Despite the great communicative possibilities offered by digital technologies, the forms of socialization through them are mainly developed in private platforms that design these environments according to corporate and lucrative interests. On the other hand, the intensification of forms of telecommunication and distance work generate new forms of exclusion and digital divides and favor increasingly individual dynamics that undermine community ties.
In this context, public administration must actively work to provide spaces and forms of encounter that promote community life and guarantee citizens the right to socialize in non-commercial and non-marketable environments, both offline and online.
This challenge explores innovative ways in which public administration can promote the connection of online and offline spaces to produce meaningful social links. Particular emphasis will be placed on proposals that seek to address the epidemic of unwanted loneliness experienced by specific individuals and groups in our society.
How can traditional meeting spaces, such as squares, clubs or even village churches, be connected to digital spaces and networks? What existing public administration infrastructures can be harnessed and reoriented to combat loneliness linked to the digital divide and isolated populations and individuals? How to democratize and expand the communicative and meeting potential of digital technologies and environments to strengthen community ties?
