Page 87 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

This fruitful eld has also begun to yield results and currently o ers a broad variety of subjects and genres.18The arrival of the Internet and the adoption of new consumption habits have spawned the appearance of hitherto unseen formats and creative elds.A separate mention should be given to programmes made by YouTubers,19 an Internet phenomenon that is still ooring conventional advertisers, though the services of these new actors are increasingly in demand on account of the number of views they get. At the same time, these new in uencers are progressively turning professional, taking increasing care over their productions.Coupled with web series we have another type of format: ‘mobile lms’, a new reincarnation of short lms, now in online micro-story form. Applications like Vine (originally designed to be used and enjoyed by a teenage audience) have caused a few digital advertising campaigns to go viral.20But what is truly revolutionary is the possibility of establishing interactive elements embedded in the image, which has been greeted with enthusiasm in the eld of journalism and documentaries. Webdocs have become one of the most interesting formats on account of the quality and quantity of their products. A few daily newspapers, such as The Guardian or Le Monde, commonly use them, and institutions like ARTE21 and NFBC22 are going in for thema big way.In this respect, the best reference to how the Internet has in uenced style and storytelling possibilities is perhaps a presentation23 given by Eva Domínguez, a pioneering specialistin these matters. It combines the concept of interactivity with that of planning to o er a surprising look at the future of digital audiovisual.Once again we’re treading frontier territory that is always ambiguous and full of hybrids. The digitisation of the world is pushing us towards a mixture of media, supports, formats ... in which the content is adapted to the circumstances in which it is consumed. There is thus a developing branch of videogames that are increasingly focused on storytelling and bear a resemblance to lms, just as ebooks are aware of what their true nature is. Because, basically, if the medium permits, we end up doing it.And this is what is happening: so whynot combine in a single product a book, a movie, music, games and hyperlinks to other websites? As I’ve stated, various professions and artistic disciplines are pooling their talents in this respect, while new ones are emerging in response to the need to organise this information into a coherent whole.So... What will happen to pre-existing formats that are inseparably tied to the medium in which they emerged? Well, they will preserve someof their basic characteristics, only adapted to digital spaces, whereas other features that had hitherto distinguished them will simply disappear because they’ve become obsolete or insigni cant or because their role and function have been taken over by a new player. (An obvious case is journalism: nowadays anyone can be a reporter if they’re in the right place and have a smartphone at hand: just one click and the photo can be shared on Instagram or any other platform. This does not, however, invalidate journalists, as we still need someone to sort and interpret the information, making sense of it).If we ask the right questions and remain attentive and unprejudiced to the phenomena that arise, we will nd that the audiovisual world has countless ideas that are already pointing to possible paths of development.It seems logical to think that movies will hold their own in the digital audiovisual spectrum, albeit with variations with respect to theirinAC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 201687Smart Culture: Impact of the Internet on Artistic Creation