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Culture Summit Abu Dhabi 2019 addressed the possibilities and challenges of digital technologies in a highly anticipated discussion moderated by Troy Therrien, who five years ago was appointed as the first Curator of Architecture and Digital Initiatives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where he organised its first online exhibition. “In 2014 to 2015, museums were going through what journalism had experienced a decade earlier; they were finally feeling the pressure of \[technological\] disruption,” said Mr Therrien, a former computer engineer-turned-architect and curator. “But now disruption and digital acceleration are no longer dangerous, they’re just a given; it’s the world we live in.” Mr Therrien was joined by a panel of speakers able to comment on the impact of this new digital landscape from a wide range of perspectives: Dr Apinan Poshyananda, Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the Bangkok Art Biennale; pioneering sound and installation artist Emeka Ogboh, who achieved international recognition without the traditional aid of a gallery or art dealer; Takashi Kudo, an artist and communications director with the artist collective teamLab, which launched the world’s first digital art museum, the Mori Building Digital Art Museum in Tokyo in 2018; and Lizzy Jongma, Senior ICT Project Leader at Amsterdam’s NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, an organisation with an impressive collection of 400 digitally searchable archives and 11 million digitised objects. Mr Ogboh’s embrace of virtual reality has been driven, in part, by a desire to provide an afterlife for his large-scale, immersive sound installations beyond the limitations of photography and video. “To me, these are really not adequate enough for the documentation and presentation of my works,” he explained. “How do you present this work to the next curator or collector who wants to experience it? So for me it’s been really important to embrace virtual reality because it’s as close as you can get to experiencing the real thing.” Even though he is based in Berlin and Paris, Mr Ogboh’s embrace of 32