THERE is a “very powerful relationship between empathy and proximity” observes award-winning theatre director Simon McBurney in his solo work The Encounter – which was one of the first theatre pieces broadcast online that I engaged with during lockdown.

I was really struck by that line as it captured much of what I relish when attending cultural events. It made me reflect on the power of that visceral experience of getting up close to art in our galleries, theatres, music venues and festivals that we’ve been deprived of during lockdown. It made me think about the umpteen times I’ve left a gig or show feeling moved and changed and sensed that same palpable shift amongst everyone else in an audience.

During these unrehearsed times we are living through, I’ve thought a lot about that relationship between empathy and proximity when I’ve showed up for some of the impressive range of online exhibitions, theatre pieces, dance and cultural debates on offer. Along the way I’ve discovered something I’ve come to call digital warmth: it’s what I feel when an online cultural experience manages to connect and transmit something of that live immersive arts experience to an online audience ... and I’ve been very grateful of it.

Judging by the amazing viewing figures for National Theatre of Scotland’s crisis responsive online Scenes for Survival, which have amassed views of approaching 10 million, I’m not the only person to have tapped into this and to be grateful to arts organisations for digitising the warmth we traditionally get from offline cultural gatherings.

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Pre-Covid, we had become increasingly aware of our core desire for human engagement and authenticity in a time of automisation and digitisation: we were more readily acknowledging those deep connections between culture and social infrastructure. Now, in these days, when our very social fabric has made a move online, artists and arts organisations have been responding creatively to a changing world. Doing their best to reimagine their offer for audiences and working hard to take people with them into new virtual spaces; offering some brilliant artistic content, creating atmosphere, experience and empathy.

We need look no further this month than the collective efforts of Edinburgh’s

summer festivals online programme offers to get a sense of what a “radical reboot” for the wider cultural landscape across Scotland might look like as we get used to doing culture differently, in the face of this adversity.

Of course, opening up to digital possibilities will not replace that real experience of getting up close and spending time with art. But creative practitioners by their very nature are problem solvers and have taken this moment in time to “port” cultural projects online in the hope that this will drive real-life visits in the future to Scotland’s events and venues.

In my role as president of Paisley Art Institute (PAI), I’ve had the privilege to work with a dedicated Exhibitions Committee who embraced the challenge to breathe life into the 132nd edition of the Paisley Art Institute Open Annual exhibition by mounting an online presentation for the first time in our history.

The current restrictions have offered PAI a pivotal opportunity to embrace something of the scale and excitement of presenting one of Scotland’s longest-running annual exhibitions in a gallery setting whilst reimagining what artists and visitors might experience of the PAI Annual in an online environment.

We had an overwhelming response to our open call for submissions from both members of PAI and open entrants who were undeterred by the idea of showing work in a virtual rather than physical setting. Exhibiting artists have come from across Scotland and further afield.

As a result, the 132nd PAI Annual online is currently showing just short of 400 artworks in a series of virtual viewing rooms that invite us to consider themes that have been felt universally in 2020: human connection, our love of nature, the turbulent times we live in, to name but a few. The portraits and figurative pieces in the exhibition in particular resonate with me – so many different faces. We’ve missed faces recently, haven’t we?

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A nice coincidence of mounting this globally accessible exhibition online has been that it presented us too with a unique opportunity to reflect on the cultural heritage of Paisley. In the 1820s the Jacquard loom was being used to propel Paisley as a leading light in Scotland’s textiles industry.

The intricate punch card input method used in this process laid the foundations of computer technology and coding in

particular – the building blocks on which our virtual viewing rooms have been created.

One of the things we discussed a lot when preparing the PAI exhibition was attention and the potential for digital fatigue. We were struck by academic research showing that visitors to galleries spend an average of 27 seconds in front of an artwork and we were interested in the growing phenomenon in exhibition-making in the art of “slow looking”. It is probably early days for too many academic studies to have been completed about how long people spend viewing work in online exhibitions, but you’ve got to imagine that the research is under way.

Before the pandemic, we were fast acknowledging an urgent need to foster our attentional capacities, with so many things competing for our time and constantly living our lives feeling we are on catch up. We’ve become familiar with living in an “attention economy” in which our online habits are being monetised and corporations are treating our attention span as a valuable commodity.

However, now, in this very particular moment, we have a short window of time to reassess and ask where do we put our focus.

At a time when universally our attention is shifting and we move towards collective forms of behaviour and thinking about adapting to this new way of life, I believe the cultural sector is uniquely placed to help us deepen and strengthen our attentional focus.

OUR artists help us to share thinking and build a level of participation, they are using their online cultural programmes to offer us places of encounter that allows for new types of interaction and communication to flow.

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The creative and cultural sectors have been agile in recent months and moved fast to embrace thinking of digital as a social innovation and developing platforms in the digital sphere as new public platforms for engagement with audiences.

It is important too to acknowledge that art in the virtual sphere is not for everyone. In June pioneering Scottish theatre Company Vanishing Point released a statement on its immediate future, stating it would spend all its energy on preparing for live theatre’s return rather than creating online content. For me this is an entirely reasonable position to take ... and a brave one, in a climate when the future of public funding is fragile.

To date, it has been heartening to see the economic recovery plans from the Scottish Government recognise culture as a driver for our nation, by providing welcome investment for cultural institutions and vitally freelancers as part of the recently announced “cultural collective”.

For now, I’ll keep turning up online for those artists and arts organisations that are using their digital platforms to tell the urgent stories of this extraordinary time, who create empathy and togetherness during this time of interconnected crisis. I’ll reflect that embedded in the word “attention” (from the Latin attendere) is the act of waiting, and we’re all being asked to “wait” until this blows over. But saying that, I truly can’t wait until that time when we can experience collective joy and dancing in the street together again.