Conference Program

In galleries and art museums, creative expressions from the present and past meet a diverse audience in terms of age, socio-cultural background and motivation. As historically educational spaces, they can be formal learning environments for visitors, but also non-formal (such as guided tours or activities led by experts) and informal (with reference to audio guides, information panels and interactive screens).

Today's most innovative exhibition spaces are heavily involved in digital transformation, which is capable of attracting an increasingly wider audience that plays an increasingly active role in the visit. New technologies can play a fundamental role in the appearance of art spaces: they can influence the container, i.e. the way in which the works are displayed and presented; the content, i.e. the way in which the work itself is narrated; and the way in which the work and the visitor encounter each other, creating participatory scenarios of enjoyment that are integrated into the architecture of the cultural institution. The opportunities offered by digitalisation promote inclusive experiences, both intergenerational and socio-cultural. Generative Artificial Intelligence tools can be used very effectively. In fact, starting from the observation of collections of works, art spaces can become spaces for the transformation and negotiation of collective experience.

They can be privileged places for activating shared practices of meaning creation and for the co-construction of new narratives, through exchange and dialogue that bring into play lived experiences, past experiences, values and ideas. In particular, workshop activities integrated with visits to galleries and art museums can be configured as inclusive and transformative spaces for social practices, oriented towards sharing and generating new meanings for experiential, contextual and situated learning.

This contribution offers a reflection on these aspects and documents experiences of museum education workshops, carried out with heterogeneous groups of different age groups, based on innovative teaching methodologies that integrate generative Artificial Intelligence. It also proposes workshop activities based on the theoretical framework of Making Learning and Thinking Visible (MLTV), which is divided into various activities with specific objectives based on shared protocols (Thinking Routines) and on the methodological framework of Augmented Reading.

In a fragmented and convergent media environment (Jenkins, 2006), public service television faces the challenge of hybridizing with digital media in order to compete within an increasingly complex and stratified commercial context. This environment is characterized by the processing of large amounts of data on users’ consumption habits, algorithmic processes that shape both production and distribution, and the organization of content through continuous flows and on-demand libraries (Barra, 2022). Furthermore, within the framework of a post-serial culture (Brancato, 2011; Amendola et al., 2019; Masullo, 2025), the circulation of clips, remixes (Lessig, 2009), and micro-narratives on social media redefines the formats of linear television while simultaneously capturing the attention of audiences—especially younger ones—who engage in new practices of sharing and reappropriation through short, modular, and recombinable languages.

Rai has sought to respond decisively to these new market challenges and to the evolving ways in which people learn, access information, and interact online by transforming itself into a digital media company. The RaiPlay platform, relaunched in 2019, stands at the forefront of this transformation. This paper therefore takes RaiPlay as a case study, interpreting its distribution strategies (Barra & Rossi, 2026), formats, and original content aimed at younger audiences as components of a system in transformation that proceeds through trial and error, updating the pluralistic and aggregative mission of public service broadcasting to contemporary needs (while inevitably confronting the limitations, setbacks, and socio-political constraints typical of the Italian media context).

Several original coming-of-age productions have positioned the platform as complementary to generalist television, while its role in selecting and enhancing linear content has made it a fundamental tool for event television (sports, music competitions, major public events, and civic commemorations), partially re-synchronizing audience consumption within the vast “sea” of digital plenitude (Bolter, 2020). Moreover, projects such as “Qui c’è RaiPlay”, developed in collaboration with the Policlinico Gemelli hospital, along with other partnerships with public institutions, demonstrate the platform’s potential for social penetration, offering a virtuous example for schools, universities, training institutions, and public administrations.

Television can therefore still potentially represent a crucial space for discussion and citizenship (Ortoleva, 2011), capable of promoting media literacy, critical and conscious entertainment, and the ability to navigate saturated communication environments, thereby contributing to the construction of a democratic horizon capable of resisting the polarization fostered by commercial media. Through a structural and content analysis of the platform, also drawing on interviews with industry professionals, this paper reinterprets RaiPlay’s practices and potential as a new frontier of public service broadcasting, capable of fostering inclusive participation and informed citizenship within a fragmented and complex media environment.

Over the last ten years, music has undergone a radical metamorphosis, driven by the pervasiveness of the digital as a cultural environment, a space of interaction and an affective infrastructure. Following Pierre Lévy (2023), the digital is not merely technology, but a cultural and social ecosystem that structures thought, emotions and relationships. Henry Jenkins (2014), with his theory of participatory culture, emphasizes how users are no longer passive spectators but prosumers, actively involved in the production and reinterpretation of content. These theoretical approaches allow us to interpret digital music as a performative, educational and identity-forming device, where aesthetic experience intertwines with social practices and dynamics of collective participation.

The aim of this contribution is to explore how digital music operates as an arena of cultural democratization, fostering informal learning, the development of digital and aesthetic skills, and the construction of individual and collective identities. In particular, the role of algorithmic platforms (TikTok, Spotify, YouTube) is examined in shaping tastes, behaviors and spaces of social interaction, highlighting the tensions between democratizing potential and the risks of polarization or homogenization.

Philip Auslander, as highlighted by Gemini and Brilli (2024), analyzes “mediated performance” as a process in which identity is never fixed, but constantly negotiated and represented in digital public spaces. In this sense, music—integrated with video, images and text—is one of the most effective tools for this negotiation, allowing individuals to construct and communicate their personal stories in an immediate and recognizable way. In the algorithmic context, music takes on the function of the emotional soundtrack of digital life, making visible and amplifying a process of identity construction that in the past manifested itself in more implicit and private ways.

The analysis is based on a socio-technical and qualitative approach, integrating a historical analysis of transformations in musical media, from vinyl to digital; an analysis of digital trends and viral phenomena on social platforms; and observation of user behavior as prosumers, through the documentation of mashups, choreographies, challenges and creative reinterpretations.

Within the contribution, two emblematic phenomena illustrating these dynamics will be examined:

1. the digital mashup Celebrate the Good Times by DJ Earworm, which combines more than one hundred pop hits, generating a modular and shared musical flow;
2. the viral trend Savage Love on TikTok, which exploded during the lockdown, where choreographies, remixes and videos created collective memory, a sense of community and widespread social participation.

Digital music emerges as a space of educational and cultural innovation, with the potential to develop media literacy, creative skills and practices of digital citizenship. Future challenges include the critical analysis of algorithmic influence on musical preferences, the inclusion of micro-scenes and emerging genres, and the construction of resilient online communities capable of transforming music consumption into a democratic, participatory and conscious experience.

The advent of digital technology has precipitated a radical transformation in the media ecosystem, which is characterised by the preeminence of algorithmic platforms, the proliferation of content, and the emergence of participatory forms of cultural production and dissemination. In this paradigm, the visual and interactive arts are undergoing profound transformations that impact not only expressive languages but also the very conditions of production and aesthetic enjoyment. The artistic experience is theorised as a situated and participatory process, in accordance with Dewey's conception of art. According to this theory, the work takes shape in the experience generated by the interaction between the individual and the environment (Art as Experience, 1934). From this perspective, the artistic process is embedded within creative media ecologies, in which bodies, technological devices, algorithmic infrastructures and the public contribute to the shared production of experience, giving rise to new dynamic configurations of perception, relationship and the construction of meaning.

This paper will analyse the work of artist Marco Donnarumma, with a particular focus on the performance Ex Silens (2024), which forms part of the I Am Your Body project. This project is based on research conducted with a group of deaf people (including the artist himself) on the concept of embodied knowledge, and explores how normative power is imposed through the technological mediation of the senses. In this performance, AI-based cochlear implants are divested of their corrective function for individual use and reconfigured as collective sound prostheses, capable of generating shared perceptual environments in which all participants - whether hearing or with hearing impairments, in an inclusive perspective - can engage in unprecedented sensory experiences. This process of reframing facilitates the transcendence of sensory boundaries, thereby fostering novel forms of co-participation between performers and audience members.

The performative act provides a highly intense experience for participants, giving shape to a radically alternative sensorium commune, which opens up new thresholds of shared perception.

The theoretical framework draws on the work of authors such as Marshall McLuhan, Donna Haraway, John Dewey and Judith Butler, as well as studies on embodied knowledge. From a methodological perspective, the research adopts a comparative qualitative approach, based on an interpretative analysis of Donnarumma's work, through an analytical examination of the performative structures, the technical devices employed and the modes of participation activated.

The present paper aims to demonstrate how contemporary multimedia and performance art, through the integration of digital technologies and AI systems, helps to redefine the notion of liveness as a sensory, interactive and collective experience, transforming the artwork into a processual space in which dynamics of democratic negotiation of perception and shared experience are activated. From this perspective, interactive artistic practices become experimental laboratories in which to explore new forms of relationship between body, technology and the media environment. This suggests the possibility of considering art as a potential epistemological and pedagogical environment in the post-digital society.

In recent years, cinema has undergone a profound transformation affecting its aesthetic forms, models of production and distribution, and modes of spectatorship. This metamorphosis is not merely technological in nature; rather, it is deeply epistemological, insofar as it reconfigures the role of the author/director, the practices of spectatorship, and the operational logics of the cultural industry within an ecosystem increasingly shaped by algorithmic platforms and participatory forms of production. This contribution examines three coexisting paradigms within the contemporary audiovisual landscape: classical cinema, grounded in the photographic indexicality of reality; so-called digital cinema; and cinema generated through Artificial Intelligence. Moving from Bazinian ontological realism to the category of the archive-image, the article aims to conceptualize contemporary cinema not as a form that records the Real, but as a practice that simulates it through generative models. It further interrogates how the competencies of directing, editing, and aesthetic construction are transformed when the image becomes “computed,” and what kinds of changes affect practices of spectatorship on on-demand platforms. Adopting a socio-semiotic framework that brings into dialogue media studies, the sociology of culture, and critical theories of the audiovisual industry, the contribution also seeks to investigate the educational and democratic implications raised by this transformation: in what ways does this transition in cinema enable or hinder critical capacities, informed participation, and the collective construction of meaning? The theoretical and socio-cultural re-elaboration advanced here redefines the audiovisual as a fluid, transmedial, and co-evolutionary cultural practice, reflecting on how the transition from the frame to the algorithm anticipates broader transformations in visual culture and collective sensibilities in the age of artificial intelligence.

The digital era has radically transformed the paradigms of music production, distribution, and consumption, raising urgent questions about the sustainability of listening practices in the platform society (van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018; Bonini and Magaudda 2024). This contribution analyzes the socio-cultural challenges stemming from contemporary musical homogenization, fragmentation, individualization, and disintermediation (Airoldi 2021; Ocaña Fernández 2014).

Streaming platforms and short-form audiovisual social media (such as TikTok) foster fragmented, hyper-individualized (Webster 2023), and decontextualized listening experiences, inhibiting active selection amid an overabundance of supply (Bonini and Magaudda 2024; IFPI 2025). Here, the apparent freedom of direct access masks a new form of invisible, algorithm-driven intermediation. Without human curation or critical skills to guide users, algorithms and market logics dominate, confining listeners to filter bubbles that limit exploration and depth. Music thus becomes mere functional background or fleeting commodity, stripped of its relational and semantic depth. Moreover, massive overproduction - such as the roughly 150,000 tracks uploaded daily to Deezer, 78% of which go unplayed (Rosenblatt 2025) - drives an inequitable musical economy, privileging standardized cultural hybrids over local productions (Bourreau et al. 2022; Hagen 2022; Navarro Lalanda 2025).

In line with the European Parliament's recent resolution (2024) on protecting cultural diversity and ensuring fair remuneration, this study proposes redefining listening culture through a cultural "re-mediation" that reinstates the human element in the musical experience. To counter homogenization, disintermediation, fragmented discourse, and algorithmic isolation, it advocates a renewed approach to listening education as a strategy for cultural sustainability, targeting: 1) critical literacy in consumption technologies and media logics (Altheide and Snow 1979); 2) skills for situated listening attuned to cultural plurality (Blacking 1995); and 3) music's relational potential via dialogic practices, cooperative models, and participatory user interactions.

Positioned within a critical perspective on listening education and democratic citizenship (Arditi and Nolan 2024), this contribution advances an audience-education policy aimed at fostering critical awareness of technological mediation and encouraging active participation, with the broader goal of supporting a plural and equitable musical ecosystem that strengthens collective cohesion, repositions musical practice within shared public spaces, and reaffirms music as a common good for multicultural dialogue and recognition.

In cultural ecosystems increasingly shaped by media dynamics, political pressure, and reconfigured funding structures, Italian performing arts festivals often operate as arenas where artistic production, public discourse, and institutional power intersect. Within these environments, festivals can function as spaces in which cultural and political negotiation takes place, and also as spaces of protest — framing them as territories of resistance and artistic contestation.

This proposal investigates how a performing arts festival may become a site of resistance within contemporary cultural policy and media ecologies. Focusing on Santarcangelo Festival (Rimini, Italy) — one of the longest-running experimental theatre festivals in Europe — I analyse four key editions: 1985 (directed by Roberto Bacci), 2015 (Silvia Bottiroli), 2018 (Eva Neklyaeva and Lisa Gilardino), and the most recent 2025 edition (Tomasz Kireńczuk).

Each of these editions marks a moment in which artistic programming interacts with broader political and media environments. The 1985 edition became emblematic due to a violent media scandal and institutional backlash surrounding the performance Genet a Tangeri by Magazzini Criminali. The editions of 2015 and 2018 were characterised by controversies involving accusations of moral offence and media-driven censorship. Meanwhile, the 2025 edition unfolded in a context of severe cuts to public cultural funding in Italy. During the festival opening, artistic director publicly defended the autonomy of cultural institutions and freedom of artistic programming, transforming the festival into a space of mobilization and resistance in support of artistic labour and freedom of expression.

Through this comparative analysis, the paper examines how festival programming negotiates tensions between artistic autonomy, institutional governance, and audience participation. Programming decisions, labour conditions, and funding structures become part of a broader cultural infrastructure that shapes how artistic knowledge circulates and how artistic practices are legitimised or contested.

The paper therefore asks: do different artistic directors and their programmes refrain from imposing meaning on political bodies and artistic practices? What strategies for democratising artistic knowledge emerge through festival curation? By analysing labour production, programming, and funding structures, the research explores what forms of resistance are enacted and what potential escapes exist from the economy of debt, exceptionality, discontinuity, precarity, and inaccessibility of artistic work (Kunst 2024).

Drawing on Bataille’s reflections on transgression, the paper proposes that cultural programming can operate simultaneously as contestation and transgression — a space where political and aesthetic boundaries are continuously negotiated (Bataille 1986). Rather than abolishing taboos, festivals may suspend or displace them, revealing persistent tensions between artistic autonomy and institutional control.

Instead of simply mapping cultural policies, this study interrogates the fractures, contradictions, and unresolved conflicts that shape the relationship between performance, power, and the processes of subjectivation that these dynamics impose (Butler 1997).