Page 96 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

961. NEW TECHNOLOGIES AS CONTENTThe past years have witnessed an explosion of new types of festivals, whereas the arts have been experimenting with new media and new tools for decades. For example, the performing arts have seen the emergence of new disciplines such as artistic mapping applications developed from audiovisual experimentation and the analysis of surfaces.Music, literature, theatre and dance festivals structured around disseminating and promoting a branch or discipline of the arts currently coexist with new approaches to the exhibition of content and to the very concept of festivals, as is also occurring in other elds.We are nding that more and more festivalsare being devoted exclusively to new media, be they emerging trends in electronic music and the audiovisual sector (which are increasingly linked as a joint experience), new audiovisual formats such as web series, or transmedia storytelling and festivals that are embracing new proposals within their thematic scope in whichnew technology plays a role of some kind in the process or staging.Furthermore, some festivals are experimenting, so to speak, with hybridisation. Hybridisation, fusion and remix are dynamics that are almost synonymous with the current times – festivals that are neither music, nor literature nor lm but all three at once and go further, aspiring moreto exhibit ideas, convey a message or promote creativity than to showcase a formal discipline or genre.This change is more than an adaptationwith respect to the same hybridisation thatis being glimpsed in the arts. Creators are becoming increasingly loath to nd themselves pigeonholed in a formal discipline and the new media are a good example of how the written, the visual and the interactive can be part ofthe same (inter)text. We are also witnessing experimentation with techniques, materials and formats to devise new forms of expression.1. NEW TECHNOLOGIES AS CONTENTFocus: Use of New Digital Technologies at Cultural Festivals