Institute for Digital ›Gedächtnis‹

The Institute for Digital ›Gedächtnis‹ deals, in the context of externally-funded research, with collaborations and service projects to work on archives and questions about the sustainable management of digital objects. The research is based on an interdisciplinary team of computer, art, culture and media scientists.

In addition to orders in digital editing and merging of different goods and archiving culturally valuable artifacts with many years of experience, the research is driven by two impulses bundling the content and promotes the differentiation of the specific focus of research. Firstly, sustainable ways of dealing with complex digital objects to the specific requirements of scientific information management of research data will be extended. Secondly, a new focal point of research will be build up, which establishes an applied theory for the digital ›Gedächtnis‹ (German word for memory) that extends the interface between the archive, culture and technology semantically. The digital ›Gedächtnis‹ is understood as a place where the digital objects, actions and their relationship to each other are preserved sustainably as data. This approach has not only practical implications for the interior design of databases and digital scientific storage systems, but it raises also questions about the digital environment where users and data stored together and information has to be converted into knowledge.

Current Event

To celebrate the opening of the digital platform artemak the HfG | Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design organises a research colloquium on the topic digital ›Gedächtnis‹. The colloquium focuses on issues of storage, transmission and presentation of art works, cultural objects and their context in the digital world. In this context, besides artemak, there will be a preview to the digital archive for the city of Karlsruhe. The conditions and possibilities of the work and the digital archives will be discussed, and from the perspective of conservation and restoration, art history, digital archiving and design, with new types of socio-economic research questions will be presented: