DW Launches the Interactive Media Festival
A fertile environment for new art forms
Everybody’s talking about it, investing in it, and wanting to do it. Interactive media is the hottest buzzword in Hollywood, despite the fact that no one knows what it is.
Defining the form.>> On Wednesday evening of Digital World, a giant step forward was taken to help define the new interactive art form. Seybold Seminars, Cunningham Communication, Motorola and The American Film Institute announced the official launch of the Interactive Media Festival, an international competition to encourage more development of interactive media and art.
The festival is a joint venture of Cunningham and Seybold, sponsored by Motorola and produced in association with The American Film Institute. Winners will be announced in Los Angeles in May 1994, in conjunction with Digital World ‘94. All proceeds of the festival will benefit the AFI.
MOVING AWAY FROM CATEGORIES TO JUDGE THE TOTAL EXPERIENCE
Seybold and Cunningham have been working together on the festival for more than a year. The concept behind the Interactive Media Festival is based on the Cannes Film Festival model as opposed to the Academy Awards, which splits entries into rather precise categories.
Since so little is quantified about new media, Interactive Media Festival entrants will be judged on criteria rather than categories. These criteria include level of interactivity, informational value, entertainment value, aesthetic quality and design. Intended to create an open approach to the judging process, the works will be judged not on a best-of-class basis, but by their success in meeting certain overall goals. All entries must be nominated by a jury of 60 to 75 individuals, who will be announced later this summer.
Though there will be no categories, Lisa Goldman, director of the festival, says that judges will be looking at applications of interactive media ranging from industrial training to theme park attractions.
Live at the Pantages.>> The festival itself will culminate with an evening of live, interactive performance at Pantages Theater in Los Angeles on May 5, 1994. The program will include glimpses of the winning entries, celebrity performances and presentation of awards.
A gallery of the top entries will be shown at the Los Angeles Convention Center, concurrent with next year’s Digital World, May 4–6. The gallery will be open to the public.
MOTOROLA AS SPONSOR? NO, NOT STRANGE AT ALL
Motorola is the primary sponsor of the Interactive Media Festival. Although supporting the arts in such a direct way may seem odd for a company that sells hardware and communications technologies, Motorola sees its participation as a step toward the future. (Additional sponsors are expected to be announced later this year.)
Get next event.>> “We never talk about sitting where we are now,” said Chris Galvin, senior executive VP and assistant chief operating officer of Motorola. “We’re always interested in going to the next event.”
Galvin said that Motorola believes interactive technologies are the “next event” that will drive the creation of a new industry. “Putting technology in the hands of creative people is part of the discovery process to create a new industry,” said Galvin of Motorola’s support for the festival. “It’s a part of research.”
Innovation a family tradition.>> There are not many technology companies today that have been around long enough, or are still family owned, to hear top executives talk about doing business the way Grandpa did.
But Galvin made an eloquent case that the fundamental strategy of Motorola even today comes from watching his grandfather continually identify new technology platforms, then build derivatives of them. For example, he said, the company’s digital signal processor (DSP) business, which is at the core of much of new media technology today, is a derivative of the company’s high-end microprocessor business.
The same strategy moved Motorola out of radios and into the component business several decades ago, and should yield some fascinating results in Los Angeles next year.
Amy Johns, Denise Caruso