Conference Report
Introduction
From 19th to 21st September 2023 the Interdisciplinary Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IZMF) and the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (IMAREAL) at the University of Salzburg held the first conference dedicated to VIRMA. It was organized by the network members Christina Antenhofer, Elisabeth Gruber, and Alexander Zerfaß and aimed to understand the “Entanglements of Material and Virtual Worlds in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture.”
Elisabeth Gruber outlined in her introduction the framework for further discussions, taken from the network’s mission statement which formed the basis for the call for papers of the conference: Materiality and virtuality do not form an irreconcilable binary opposition. Rather is it their productive interaction that produces the texture of meanings from which ‘realities’ are made. Based on the assumption that people generate culture in ever new processes of negotiation in the interplay of virtuality and materiality, the contributions to the conference explored how people generate virtuality, and how far they need sensual points of reference and a connection in and with the material world. In this context, the speakers also reflected on the potential associated with the virtualization of research data and the various stages of modeling and analysis, in particular the challenges associated with the digital transformation of material objects.