Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 45

Use of Digital Media
ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
There is a wealth of literature on how to use social media marketing for cultural organisations
or audience development, for instance. Eight years ago, I conducted a survey on
the use of social media in German theatres (Henze 2011). Re-reading it today, I figure
that cultural organisations have come a long way.
Just one random example of what arts institutions do is a joint project between Europeana
and Culture24: VanGoYourself, which is a website that encourages people to mimic
a range of famous Van Gogh paintings. Users find a painting they like from the VanGoYourself
website, copy the pose and take a selfie, which they then upload.
Figure 2: https://vangoyourself.com/vango/aci-iksiri-adriaenbrouwer-1605-06-1638-vangod-by-burcu-2/.
The site won several awards in 2015. It is considered to be a good way of getting the audience
interested in particular artworks and has an obvious viral element to it.
There is definitely a lot more that could be presented here to show that cultural organizations
can put media to good use, particularly when it comes to audience development,
outreach, and archiving.
Creation of Digital Tools
Things get more complex when it comes to creation. We could argue that the creation
is up to specialists and experts�and this is particularly true when it comes to games or
special effects. However, I have a strong feeling that our students will have to be able to
develop an app one day and thus must have some ideas about how to code. In the closing
chapter of his book, The End of Education, Neal Postman (1995) reminds us that “tech-
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