Digital transformation

Digital offers

An exhibition you can visit from home via a remote-controlled robot. An advent calendar with a digital mini performance behind each door. Festivals on an imaginary island or in a virtual hotel. These are just some of the many creative ways the cultural sector can share digital work with a large audience.  

An important added value of the online offering and digital presence is the international reach. This applies, for example, to museums and presentation institutions. Interestingly, some smaller institutions see this reach as one of the main reasons not only to (continue to) organize hybrid cultural events where online and offline visitors can experience the program together, but even to go completely online. An example is The Hmm, platform for inclusive internet culture. Their freedom in hybrid experiments, including the event The Hmm @ 4 rentals (organized simultaneously in four places in the Netherlands and online) led to admiration among larger cultural institutions, who see it as a breeding ground for their own digital portfolio. 

In addition to a broader international reach, the possibility of virtual experience also increases the accessibility of events, and offers opportunities to reduce the ecological footprint of speakers and visitors. Esther van Rosmalen of Witte Rook in Breda sees that this can also play a role in artist residencies. Their artists realized that you can work perfectly well digitally during the (initial) research phase, which opens up the principle of time, space and context, and a greater reach is possible among artists who are not based in the Netherlands or Europe.

For example in the domain Literature the value of digital offerings is recognized: organizations such as De Schrijverscentrale have discovered how much online can be an enrichment. They offer numerous online initiatives to promote reading culture. The in 2020 started Writer on your screen is now offered worldwide. Literary festivals are increasingly programming online. In addition, there are some new players on the market that view digital reading in a completely new way: for example, Wattpad, a platform that mainly attracts readers between the ages of 12 and 26, where conversations about (mainly) fiction are actively conducted via chat. Furthermore, booktok, a community on the popular platform TikTok in which young people exchange numerous book tips, has acquired a permanent place in the sector.

Research into the wishes and needs of various target groups for online cultural offerings revealed, among other things, that the public has different needs online than with physical offerings. In addition, there are some organisational conditions for online culture to be a valuable addition to physical culture. For example, the digital offering must offer something extra and the platform must work well. 
In Rotterdam it is research done to the online cultural offering and the many innovative ways in which the sector has made efforts to reach the public in recent years.

Finally, digital offerings can play a role in increasing accessibility. For example, people who have difficulty seeing or hearing can still experience the offer via special software. From June 2025 the European Accessibility Act (EEA) in effect. This law requires organizations to make certain products and services, such as ticket shops, accessible to people with disabilities. In line with this, DEN advises cultural institutions to make their entire website accessible accessibility to be tested (DEN 2024a). 
Accessibility is already being addressed extensively in the sector. The Dutch Dance Days, for example, is developing one digital platform that, in addition to the annual physical festival, makes the offering available to the widest possible target group.

Digital consumption

Digital transformation leads to additional opportunities to reach audiences. Within many domains of the cultural sector, these opportunities have been used as an opportunity under the pressure of corona measures. The national survey on leisure activities (VTO) shows that two out of five Dutch people (38 percent) watched one or more online performances or performances (of music, theater, dance, cabaret or other performing arts) in 2022. Almost a fifth of Dutch people (17 percent) viewed a museum collection or exhibition via the internet once or more often in the same year and 24 percent viewed visual art via the internet or social media. See the page Culture and Participation for more information about the VTO.

In the music industry, digital consumption is nothing new: since 2015, the largest share of recorded music revenue has come from digital distribution, mainly via streaming platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify (NVPI Audio 2024). More than two out of three Dutch people (68 percent) listen to music via such streaming services (see the page Culture and Participation). The switch to digital platforms has also made it possible for artists to do more themselves and interact more directly with their audiences. However, these online developments also create new competition for artists, such as influencers with a wide reach who start acting or making music (SBB 2023).

We see a similar situation within the domain Audiovisual: the number and turnover of VOD platforms (video-on-demand) has increased significantly in recent years. Three quarters of Dutch people indicate that they watch films or series via streaming services such as Netflix, Videoland or NPO Start (76 percent) and one in three sometimes rents a film digitally via platforms such as Pathé Thuis or Picl (34 percent). See also the theme page Culture and Participation.

Digital technologies

Digital transformation is not only about making collections or performances available and consuming them online, but also about creating different audience experiences, for example through new technologies. 

One of these technologies is Extended Reality (XR), an umbrella term for technologies that immerse the user in a completely or partially virtual reality: Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) (Moonshot Digital Culture 2023). Virtual Reality in particular has undergone a major transformation in recent years. With big investments in development, as well as the emergence of standalone and wireless headsets, the technology has become increasingly accessible and applicable for cultural institutions. VR is therefore increasingly returning to museums and has acquired a permanent place at film festivals such as NFF and IDFA. 

Artistic applications of XR are often referred to as 'immersive' and 'interactive' productions. Since 2023, the Immerse\Interact scheme, a collaboration between the Creative Industries Fund NL and the Netherlands Film Fund, was created to stimulate the development of these types of productions. The selected makers can additionally receive a presentation contribution applications. In addition, in December 2023 a voucher scheme written out that is aimed at improving the visibility of such productions. Parallel to this scheme, a research trajectory is taking place that will lead to concrete advice for improving the visibility and distribution of immersive productions (Nieuwe Instituut n.d.). 
In addition, the CIIIC program was launched earlier this year to support the knowledge, application and valorization of immersive experiences. A total of € 2025 million will be made available for this program between 2030 and XNUMX from the National Growth Fund. 275 million released to put the immersive field in the Netherlands on the map as a leader. 

The applicability of digital techniques varies per domain. In the performing arts, for example, the physical, live experience is of great importance. The energy of a hall, the interaction with the artist, the music you hear and feel. That does not alter the fact that in the performing arts too, the digital experience increasingly complements and enriches the physical experience. 
This is how digital technologies offer new possibilities for performances in the field of image, light, sound and special effects (SBB 2023). Digital transformation also offers opportunities around productions, for example via an app that offers extra information during a performance, or for educational programs. The digitization of ticket systems also offers many possibilities and insights in the field of audience data. For example, DIP creates a link between ticket sales systems, making it possible to sell on a large scale audience data and analyze sales data (DIP zj).

The rapid development of digital technologies also plays an important role in other domains. Within design we see more and more emphasis on data-driven, digital work co-creation platforms en circular design chains. For designers, architects in particular, digital technologies offer new opportunities for collaboration, so-called problem solving wicked problems and contributing to social issues. For example, by means of BIM: digital design models in which collaboration from different disciplines can take place at an early stage and communication can take place with partners in the construction chain. Other possibilities are to bring a design to life using XR or to monitor and optimize the use of a building using sensors (Rutten 2021). 
There are also many innovative, tech-savvy (social) design projects in which digitalization or digital innovation plays a specific role in those collaborations, as visible in the Dutch designers Yearbook '24-'25 (Santen et al. 2024).

Artificial intelligence
The theme of AI has found its way into our daily lives and AI is also much discussed in the cultural sector. Although artificial intelligence has long been embedded in our lives – think of recommendations for the next series, custom playlists or a virtual assistant on your phone – with the introduction of generative AI such as ChatGTP and Midjourney, artificial intelligence not only became accessible to a wide audience, but its application possibilities also became considerably broader. This rapid development of digital technologies raises many questions and uncertainties. 

AI can be valuable to the cultural sector, for example for the audience experience, as a tool for creators or for optimizing work processes (DEN 2023). But what does artificial intelligence do with concepts such as originality and creativity? Who owns the copyright when the creator uses these tools to create? And what does this mean for creators whose work is used by AI to generate new ideas? The big question also remains how to earn money from these and other online expressions.  

In the cultural sector, the discussion about the opportunities and risks of AI is becoming increasingly extensive. For example, authors are asking themselves whether AI is a threat or a useful tool (Auteursbond 2024a) and the Auteursbond warns against the use of AI for English-language translations (2024b). Literary translators see AI as a useful tool, for example to quickly go through sources or collect synonyms, but call literary translation a human, creative process that you cannot or should not want a machine to do (Andel 2025). In addition, the growing general applications of AI raise the question of how AI-generated art relates to the artistic creativity of human creators across the sector (Arriagada 2023).

In 2024, DEN conducted a study into the impact of AI on the cultural sector in the Netherlands. This revealed that attitudes towards AI predominantly positive and that (generative) AI is applied in various areas. At the same time, organizations are looking for a responsible use of AI: how can they create the preconditions that guarantee a conscious and sustainable use of AI? The research confirms that the impact of AI on the cultural sector is difficult to predict, but that an important task lies in thinking about challenges in which AI can support the sector (Kuiper et al. 2024).

Archiving

Cultural creators and institutions often focus on creating new productions, but attention to archiving is also important. Digitisation and digitalisation offer many possibilities for archives.  

In the domain Heritage are already several examples of this. Digitization helps to preserve heritage for the future, but above all it ensures that heritage collections can be linked together, that they become more accessible, and that they enable users to tell new, more diverse and richer stories about heritage (Digital Heritage Network 2024). From the National Digital Heritage Strategy - implemented by the Digital Heritage Network (NDE) – the heritage sector is therefore working on connecting heritage collections from the perspective of users, to make heritage easier to find and to increase its use. The four principles are: responding to (re)use, decentralised approach, emphasis on own role, and agreements are leading. 

Another way to gain insight into the size of publicly accessible digital heritage is to look at a few large platforms where different digital collections come together. So its through CollectieNederland.nl in 2024, more than 7,1 million objects from the collections of some 200 museums and other cultural institutions will be searchable. Via Europeana In addition, more than 53 million digital objects from across Europe will be made available, of which more than 2024 million came from 9,8 Dutch institutions in July 103 (Europeana Foundation 2024). 

Major steps are also being taken in digitizing the performing arts past. For example, Holland Festival television fragments from the past 77 years have been digitized. Podiumkunst.net is currently working on connecting various performing arts collections, so that they can all ultimately be searched from one central platform. In addition, Podiumkunst.net works in various ways to promote expertise and stimulate creative reuse of digitized material, in order to help the performing arts sector in the digital transformation. The main bottlenecks that hinder organizations in this are a lack of time (61,0 percent of respondents), priority (51,2 percent) and resources (29,3 percent) (Podiumkunst.net 2022).

Also within the domain Architecture digital transformation plays a major role in archiving. For example, Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam is working on digitizing the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning. This was given a boost from 2019 through the program Architecture Closer, which focuses on increasing the visibility and accessibility of the architectural collection. Digitization and making the digital collection accessible are important parts of this. 

The same goes for the domain AudiovisualIn a 2023 survey, the digitisation rate of audiovisual material between 2017 and 2022. 28 percent of respondents – including Beeld en Geluid and the Eye Filmmuseum, but also government archives and broadcasters – indicated in 2022 that they had digitized more than half of the analogue audiovisual material. The digitization rate is particularly high among broadcasters; 62 percent had digitized more than half of the analogue audiovisual material. Respondents representing archives also generally mention a high digitization rate: 57 percent of them had digitized more than half of the analogue audiovisual material (Rens et al. 2023). 

Within the domain Games , digitalization offers the opportunity to preserve old games – often stored on physical media with a limited lifespan – and keep them playable for future generations. At the same time, modern games have also acquired characteristics as a result of the digital transformation that can complicate archiving, such as the fact that they can constantly change through updates, sometimes only work when connected to certain online services, or are only offered in digital stores from which they can disappear from one day to the next.