School of Creative
Industries
Christina Berthram Poulsen
Christina is a Dane who worked as a fashion agent in London for 10 years previously, representing Scandinavian fashion and fine jewellery brands. She is now re-training for a new career in the arts.
Work
Research interests
Young artists, cultural policy, and cultural production
Thesis abstract
Fields interconnecting: How can emerging technology create new fields of practice and use cases for young artists exploring a mixed reality arts practice in Singapore
Asking young artists in Singapore about what they need, the answer is better wages, more opportunities and less funding bureaucracy and control from the government. When considering the opportunities emerging technology can create for alleviating such needs, the answer is that AI and blockchain can aid business processes, especially for ‘artpreneurs’, and that emerging technology can contribute to aspects of artists identity, community and creative infrastructures.
We explore five technological Web 2.0 use cases, and classify them according to five themes of fields of cultural production, habitus and cultural capital, intermediaries, critics, and sales and innovation. Based on research findings, we then propose a reiteration for Web 3.0 technology use cases, which showed us that old structures are being applied to new worlds. This prompts us to ask the question: if cultural production is shifting arenas, what is the impact for creative professionals and subsequent fields of practice?
The research shows that emerging technology and its use cases can affect cultural economics in Singapore by democratising aspects of the creative and cultural industries. It prompts policymakers to look again at how they define creatives and Singapore’s funding apparatus for the arts. We also learned that emerging technology is not as decentralised as the ‘hype’ says it is, and that DAOs can be just as focused on speculative measures and returns on investment as traditional art market structures can.