What's the OBSERVATORY of CULTURE and COMMUNICATION?
The OBSERVATORY seeks to act as a centre of study, debate and proposals over current developments in culture and communication and the public policies concerning these two fields. The OBSERVATORY endeavours to make its hallmark an independent, analytical, critical standpoint which is open to innovative approaches.
The OBSERVATORY aims to be a place of systematic reflection and exchange among different agents –academic and private researchers, creative artists and public and private managers of cultural activity –for the common purpose of promoting the development of culture, its diversity, its sustainability and citizens’ access to its rewards. This requires seeking to strike the right structural balances between public activity and the market, among state and associative management and management by the Third Sector, between large groups and SMEs.
The Observatory also seeks to examine new phenomena and trends in the field of “unofficial culture” or “emerging culture”, that is to say that which is created on the fringes of traditional official and market circuits.
Technological innovation is giving rise to freshly-conceived, emerging manifestations which involve significant transformations in the phases of conception, distribution and consumption of cultural expressions. Thus new products/services are taking shape which in many cases open fresh spaces of cultural practices. A younger generation familiar with modern technology has been formed and their methods of access and participation are constantly being redefined – alternative circuits, ubiquity, disintermediation and new intermediaries, etc. Thus photographic, audiovisual, phonographic and multimedia content find in the new digital networks a natural channel for reaching new audiences. Similarly, practices of cultural consumption undergo a transformation in this new environment.
The approach of the OBSERVATORY is particularly focused on the medium term, endeavouring to formulate specific scenarios which enable a planned response for meeting the main challenges of the future in this field. Another of its missions is to foster debate among agents in the sector to facilitate a practical awareness of the direction of the major changes in the future and their accompanying challenges.
In order to perform its mission the OBSERVATORY has a network of contributors made up of specialist academics which builds bridges for joint action with artists, managers and agents of culture and of the culture industries. And since the OBSERVATORY has a very strong orientation toward Ibero-American issues and, above all, to the projection of Spanish culture in that area, with particular emphasis on joint production and cooperation, close ties with research groups in Portugal and Latin America have been considered key to the work to be done.
In keeping with the Fundación Alternativas philosophy, the OBSERVATORY seeks to be an open forum of study and discussion for academia, creative people, artists, cultural managers and businessmen and citizens in general, setting its sights on progressive democratization via the access and participation of all social sectors of the fields of communication and culture.