Page 97 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

Meanwhile, festivals, as well as starting to adapt to this shift in focus that the elds of creation are experiencing, are nding that their ownrole can go some of the way towards meeting audiences’ new requirements: o ering attendees comprehensive experiences of exploring open ideas rather than a closed category and spaces that involve greater action (so that they come away with a thought or new ideas rather than just passive memories) and a fair or large amount of participation.Boundaries are either merging or fading: artand creativity, popular and alternative and academic, plastic and ephemeral, audience and creator... New technologies are continuing to spur many of these changes as well as being excellent means of creation and distribution with unde ned scope. In some of the festivals wewill be examining here, the boundaries between disciplines as well as between structures and types of event are becoming blurred.The Focus will begin by taking a look at festivals whose operation is based on new media or whose structure has been marked by the engines of change of Digital Society. Because festivals are hubs of experimentation and innovation that ultimately have an impact on attendees and participants and on the current understanding of these forms of culture.1.1. New media festivalsThe new media deserve spaces where theycan be showcased and shared and can provide opportunities for interaction between the creators, audiences and agents involved. As the range of new creative ground broadens and the digital arts become more popular, festivals are progressively emerging as a re ection of this new scene.Longstanding festivals are increasingly welcoming works and artists committed to the use of new technologies in order to o era speci c staging or a di erent or broader sensorial experience, or to employ more e ective tools for de ning or extending the narrative partly through osmosis (in other words, because more and more artists, both new and accomplished, are operating in this eld), though we also nd cases of festivals that have emerged speci cally to showcase new disciplines and particular media.The Geneva Mapping Festival started outin 2005 and is held every year around May. It brings together a great many international artists and creators from the audiovisual, video jockeying (VJs) and mapping elds (an audiovisual technique that consists in projecting customised moving images, previously mapped or scanned, onto a three-dimensional surface such as the façade of a heritage building, so that imageand surface blend to create a new dynamic experience).This festival has sections that are held in xed installations during the time it runs, and also programmes events where these arts converge, for example featuring music (electronic music concerts but we also nd a few with art music), dance, performance and cinema.There is a festival of this kind in Spain: FIMG (Girona International Mapping Festival),which, as well as featuring installations and performances, interestingly appeals to a wider audience, with a focus on local schools and competitions for amateurs. A conference held during the festival brings together professionals and creators from the mapping and new audiovisual sectors as well as agents whoare already using this technology (education, heritage, advertising...).On the subject of new media and digital art, we cannot fail to mention the transmediale festival for art and digital culture in Berlin. This festival, which emerged as a spino of the Berlinale lm festival in 1988 and was originally called VideoFilmFest, has evolved over more than 20AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 201697Focus: Use of New Digital Technologies at Cultural Festivals