‘No Culture No Future’: Virtuality and Its Discontents Reinvented

Abstract

<p class="first" id="d153834e63">When Lithuania, along with much of the rest of the world, went into a nationwide lockdown amid the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the late 2020, the situation for the country’s culture and arts sector seemed to be worse than during the first quarantine. Although there was already substantial know-how necessary for mitigating the negative effects of the closure of physical spaces and live events by transferring cultural content online, there was a growing sentiment that it was not enough. With institutional plans halted and most events streamed on the Internet, it gradually became clear that the ‘digital culture’ niche which had been in the making for several decades was perceived by the cultural mainstream largely as a supplementary layer for the conventional offline, face-to-face, ‘real’ cultural life, rather than as equivalent to the latter. <p id="d153834e65">While artists, institutions, and cultural producers were exploring mediated formats of reaching the audience and (re)discovering the potential of digital media, symptoms of a ‘digital fatigue’ were becoming increasingly evident. Several months into the quarantine, the Lithuanian culture community adopted the slogan ‘No Culture No Future’ and called for opening up the cultural sector for live, unmediated activity despite of the difficult epidemiological situation. The professed reasons for this were not so much economical but instead quasi-spiritual, based on the idea that it was precisely culture and art that ensured the society’s mental well-being (and thus resilience against major crisis like a viral outbreak), to the point of being prescribed as a kind of ‘medication’ in some countries. <p id="d153834e67">This situation prompts some important questions. What are the implications for the longstanding fascination with the ideas of telepresence and online creative practice in at least some milieus like media art or net art? Has the sudden compulsory virtualisation of all cultural activity rendered these earlier fantasies completely irrelevant and even inappropriate? Or is it a case of cultural ignorance/amnesia that points to the still obscure status of the practices and discourses of art and technology, new media art, network art and digital art within the larger context of contemporary culture? Looking at some conflicting notions of virtuality in the different art worlds and periods, the article seeks to critically reflect on the related value systems and provide some thoughts on whether the international digital culture movement of the 1990s–2010s has any legacy that is widely recognised as legitimate and influential.