To have worked at the intersection of arts, technology, and funding for the last few decades is to have been forced to engage with the notion of digital transformation. While digital transformation has been discussed more generally ad nauseum elsewhere, it remains a somewhat under-examined concept in the arts, despite it having become the dominant way to frame technology investment in the sector. By having a better understanding of digital transformation, we can better understand how we got here and how we can find more effetive ways to fund and implement technology in the arts.
Normal technology
To understand digital transformation, I think it’s helpful to first think about it’s inverse: normal technology. I’m freely adapting/mangling this framing from “AI as Normal Technology,” by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, who argue we should think about artificial intelligence as useful in some contexts, harmful in others, but unlikely to be truly transformative in almost any case. Although their focus is limited to AI, I find this framing is broadly applicable in other technology contexts, including its deployment in the arts. As Narayanan and Kapoor state, “normal” doesn’t mean unimportant, unexciting, or not impactful (as they state, the internet itself is actually normal technology). But “normal” does place the focus squarely on deployment of technology, and the measurable benefits that result.
Up through the late 2000s, most investments in technology in the arts were investments in normal technology. The projects funded during this period tended to focus on nuts-and-bolts implementations and on paying down technical debt. Archive records were scanned. Rehearsals were recorded. Lots of websites were built on Drupal 6 for some reason. Performances were livestreamed. Digital tickets were sold.
The focus on craft and deployment meant that the benefits of these technologies could be well-articulated ahead of time, as those benefits were closely attuned to the daily needs of an organization. You could say with reasonable certainty that a website redesign would eliminate that $5K line item for “website consultant” in your operating budget. You could quantify the time saved when you didn’t have to manually reenter constituent data.
For decades, this was the primary means to fund and implement technology in the arts. But at the end of the 2000s, this began to shift. To understand why, we need to take a brief detour to talk about relevance.
When technology became “relevant”
Relevance is a funny idea in the arts, and it’s more of a driver of decision-making in this sector than is generally understood (a much younger version of me tended to dismiss it out of hand). Relevance is, essentially, a measure of the public perception of an arts organization. It is magical currency in the arts world; it’s almost like a meme coin. If your organization is perceived to be relevant, then it is relevant, and relevance gets you more coverage, more patrons, more funding. But if that perception fades, the value of your relevance drops to nil. So arts CEOs are vigilant about maintaining the relevance of their organizations.
Until roughly 2007, an arts organization’s digital profile had almost no bearing on its relevance. As a result, arts CEOs practiced a certain benign neglect as regards technology, and technical debt continued to accrue. But with the launch of Twitter and the public rollout of Facebook, this started to change, and quickly—almost overnight, there was much more public pressure for arts organizations to engage with technology. For the first time, public engagement with technology became central to arts organizations’ relevance. The discourse was clear: if your museum didn’t have a mobile app, you Weren’t Relevant. If your theater wasn’t putting VR headsets on your patrons, you Weren’t Relevant. If your poetry festival hadn’t pivoted to video, you definitely Weren’t Relevant.
In 2006, arts CEOs often had to be reminded that their organizations even had websites; by 2009, they were reporting social media metrics to their boards.
Of course, this sudden intersection of technology and relevance did not mean that the arts sector had eliminated its technical debt–it merely made clear how bad the situation had become. It’s hard to implement augmented reality applications when you still have to call in a contractor every time you want to update the holiday hours on your website. With this clarity came an understanding that investments in normal technology would not be enough to maintain relevance. Something more was needed. And that something was digital transformation.
Digital transformation
The theory behind digital transformation in the arts was that that arts organizations were now so far behind that nothing short of moonshot investments in transformational technologies would enable them to close the gap. Once CEOs and funders came to terms with the size and scope this gap, the appetite for incremental investments in normal technology waned, and the interest in bigger, bolder moves took over.
This led to a shift in the kinds of technologies that were funded. Instead of digitization campaigns, we had mobile apps. Constituent management systems were out; Second Life (!) was in.
What these technologies had in common was a focus on promise over deployment. The impact of an investment in normal technology, like hiring an information architect, could be quantified on your balance sheet; it was less immediately obvious the effect that “being on the blockchain” might have. But technologies like the blockchain held the promise of being so transformative that other technical problems would be eliminated, or at least would no longer matter.
One might find an analogue to this idea in the present-day discourse around LLMs and so-called “superintelligence.” Investors are not pumping millions into OpenAI because it makes a great chatbot; they are doing so because the promise of superintelligence is that it will transform society. Similarly, funders didn’t support VR in museums because the technology was mind-blowing on its own; they were making a bet on the expected transformation that would result. The innovation funds discussed in my previous post were essentially a reaction to this moment; these funds were created in order to produce digital transformation.
But as I also mentioned in my previous post, the issue with this approach is that by focusing almost exclusively on digital transformation, the arts sector (and arts funders) lost their focus on normal technology. During this stretch, it became harder and harder to get funding for the kind of tech that keeps the sector running. And because so few of these moonshot investments resulted in the digital transformation everyone hoped for (except for Second Life, which everyone still uses to this day), most arts organizations are deeper in technical debt now than they were 10 years ago.
Where we go next
Putting my funder hat (we have those!) on, I don’t believe that investments in digital transformation have produced the outcomes we’d hoped for. I can’t look at how the arts sector responded during pandemic lockdowns and see a sector that is fluent with technology and ready to pivot to online modalities when necessary. I don’t look at the almost total lack of coordinated response to LLMs from the arts sector and think that this is a sector that has the resources and understanding to use technology to its advantage. After 10 years of investments in digital transformation, I still see a sector drowning in technical debt.
While I don’t think digital transformation produced the outcomes we’d hoped for, I also don’t think that a return to targeted investments in normal technology are likely to result in the adaptations we need to see in the sector. The scope of these kinds of investments is simply not big enough to address the issue, and they don’t frame the problem in a way that feels relevant to either CEOs or funders.
So the challenge becomes finding a funding model that delivers three things simultaneously: adaptation that better positions the sector for current demands, relevance that ensures the work remains central to institutional survival, and impact for the funders investing in sector-wide change. I believe this is possible, and that addressing the arts sector’s technology issues (through both funding approaches and on-the-ground practice) is a solvable problem.