2026-05-10 –, Grégr Stage
Museums hold civilisation’s memory. Technology promises to unlock it. But the conversation between curators and technologists has long been a dialogue of mutual suspicion — one side protective of depth and context, the other impatient for scale and reach.
This session cuts through the noise to ask what a genuinely productive partnership between heritage institutions and the technology world actually looks like: not digitisation for its own sake, not spectacle masquerading as access, but something that makes collections more alive, more legible, and more durably preserved. Drawing on the experience of the Museum of Prague, Ivo Macek explores the real friction points, the unexpected opportunities, and the conditions under which the two sides of the coin can, finally, work together.
Ivo Macek is a geologist, manager, and Director of the Museum of Prague. He spent over a decade at the National Museum, including seven years as director of the largest natural history museum in the Czech Republic, overseeing 84 staff and 15 million collection items. He led the National Museum’s flagship exposition project — Wonders of Evolution and Windows into Prehistory — and served as projec