"Between Diversity and Restriction". A Cultural Emergence into the Digital 21st Century

The historical phenomenon of emergence marks social and cultural changes, the magnitude of which is hard to predict and calculate. These changes offer new perspectives for individual and common processes of life and work. The transition from the 19th to the 20th century in Europe was characterized by the downfall of the political, economical, and intellectual basis - a time of new emergences which was announced as a drastic change in the arts as a counterweight to the progressive technical development of modernization, a change which included all cultural ways of expression and areas of life (Gruhn, 2003, 163-164). The continuation of the digital development has led human beings from the 20th to the 21st century. The digitisation in which human beings are involved worldwide is driven forward by the meanwhile two years lasting Covid-19 restriction of online communication for groups as one of the strategies to delimit the pandemic. This restriction is a perceptible personal limitation, because a real cultural exchange between people is absolutely necessary and fruitful for social and individual life. But how can cultural action and reception be combined on the virtual and the real world level? The following text is an approach to the cultural emergence into the 21st century from the perspective of practicing art. I invite the reader to debate the phenomenon of improvisation as an online and offline aesthetic practice, which connects people and cultures. As an example of cultural cross-border cooperation 1 introduce the online music-dance-project DISDANCE, a work in progress with mostly improvised but also some composed parts of body movements and experimental sounds. A short historical look back points out pioneering achievements of the 20th century in the fields of computer and music as requirements for the cultural emergence into the 21st century, which I discuss afterwards.