Down the Digital Rabbit Hole: Digifest 2003

Once bids and stock options were Canada's main mode of exchange--although the Toronto Stock Exchange has currently moved to a new site--but now Digifest has offered the redesigned trading floor to the world's best minds in interactive digital media. With a theme this year of Electronic Cities, Digifest invited keynote speakers to explore this concept and offered a series of roundtables, demonstrations, and workshops, as well as exhibitions, commissioned interactive 3-D works, and additional off-site activities related to this topic. Poala Poletta, one of the festival's curators, outlined Digifest's two objectives: --to foster a dialogue, in different areas, within the context of the theme of Electronic Cities. --and to gather together prominent members of the digital art and communication community in order to engage them in a creative dialogue. Those goals were attained in so far as each day of Electronic Cities attracted a large and varied audience to its numerous panels and demonstrations. Poletta noted that the attendees ranged from gamers, architects, and designers to policymakers, small to mid-size business owners, electronic entrepreneurs, and city planners. This diversity fulfilled the hopes of Poletta and colleague John Sobel, who both are already in the midst of planning next year's Digifest. Poletta credits the sponsors of the festival, which included banks, consulates, international public relations firms, software firms, colleges, radio stations, film production companies, and governments, both local and national, for providing the financial support that enabled the festival to bring in such a diverse audience. With this support, Digifest was able to generate a of community and sharing, where presenters were able to impart their knowledge and creation of electronic worlds/realities to people who were eager to learn. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] My adventure the digital rabbit hole began with Tim Carter's presentation on the topic of Counter-Strike--a first-person computer game that will eventually have roughly 80,000 people playing worldwide, applying individual strategic and team skills to localize and eliminate terrorists. Counter-Strike creates an electronic community that in some respects mirrors relationships in the non-electronic world. Many social skills are at play in the game, including team-work, humor, a sense of honor, and fair play; unfortunately, cheaters thrive in this environment too. The implications of a game of this sort which is so closely connected with world relations were of primary interest to the audience. An ongoing question for the gamers in particular seemed to be how would I deal with these situations (especially of cheating) in the world? One extreme, though comical, solution that Carter showed to his audience involved a tournament caught on video of a cheater who was physically taken from his seat and tossed outdoors into a parking lot. Even the computer at his station was thrown down onto the cement next to him. In another presentation, Frank Michlick gave a talk accompanied by a short film describing a phenomenon called Demoscene occurring in North America and Europe. He described Demoscene as an underground subculture started in the mid-1980s by groups of computer freaks who would override the copy protection of computer games, then modify these games, and finally play them in front of the company's games. These Cracking Groups, who at first only removed the copyright protection from games and altered them, have now learned to create art that happens inside computer games in real time. Micklick remarked that in Europe, large audiences come together at conventions to vote on which Demoscene artist has created the best time art. The disparate worlds of musicians, programmers, and artists meld into a creative community through these activities. …

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