Before that, however there was a very important and very moving intermission with a joint presentation by two artists, one from Israel and one from Palestine.

Impact of technology on the development of culture

This reporting in itself, the publication of the conference result on the Web and the print-on-demand book, which took 6 hours from proofreading to final book for distribution, could be seen as part of this impact. This on-line magazine would never have been possible three years ago.

Much interest was focused on the new technology, print-on-demand and the new opportunities this offers writers, not the least those from minority groups. In his paper to the conference, Peter Curman has enthusiastically praised the new technology and this enthusiasm was also widespread at the conference.

Sara Hultman, working on a Swedish print on demand project called Podium, described how they worked.

Sweden is one of the countries where the use of Web and Internet is really wide spread, and the technical conditions might not be the same in all other countries. One example however, on how technology could be used, not only in the development of culture, but also in creating at atmosphere for dialogue is Cyprus, where the magazine Hades now is going on-line.

A list of those who participated in the debate is shown when you click here.

The celebrity of the day was Marita Ulvskog, Swedish minister of Culture. In her speech to the conference, she talked about the economical conditions for artists and the Swedish government's views on this issue.

Marita Ulvskog did not bring any new promises and the reactions to her speech were somehow mixed.

Another person who spoke about the role of the artist was the Swedish film maker Johan Donner who is very critical of the Swedish government.

You can also read about the impression she made on the Italian journalist Domenico Conti.

The economical status of the artist

This theme was of course vital to many of the participants. The debate was interesting, with some participants calling the artist to be more realistic: it cannot be a human right to be an artist, argued Bente Christensen from Norway. Her speech.

Participants from former communist countries spoke about their experiences of a system where, as an artist, you had everything you needed as long as you stuck to the party line and behaved acordingly. This is excellently described in the papers by Vytautas Martinkus (Lithuania) and Alexander Shurbanov (Bulgaria).

On Greenland, the artist is not always seen as someone of great importance for the society, but rather as a creator of something curious strange and obscure, said Karl Elias Olson.

But how do you really define an artist? We asked the participants of the conference and came up with a number of answers.