In the age of climate crisis and AI, what happens to cultural heritage? The diagnosis is grave: Cultural heritage is under acute threat from the climate crisis, with irreplaceable losses already occurring. “While most research teams focus on the current situation, we work with climate models and are the first team of experts to attempt to look into the future,” says Johanna Leissner, coordinator of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft’s Cultural Heritage Research Alliance.
At the same time, the current wave of digitisation and automation has produced a crisis in which human creativity is systematically devalued, cultural heritage and creative works are inadequately attributed or exploited and artists and audiences are excluded from advanced technological development processes. AI technologies are not only re-colonising cultural heritages and threatening minoritised languages and endangered conceptual worlds. AI is rapidly redefining traditional roles of artists and audiences reducing both to technological objects.
Johanna Leissner is trained as chemist and material scientist. She has been working and managing cultural heritage research for over 20 years
Sabrina Rota is an economist, expert and networker in the field of cultural heritage
Stella Diakou is a researcher at T6 Ecosystems and works on impact assessment