Digiversal Appeal

Dublin's Darklight International Film Festival has always been ahead of the posse. It is now an essential annual bash. John Thomson, this year's visiting artist, celebrates digital art and film-making with Derek O'Connor

THE really great arts festivals tend to become a victim of their own success; they begin as under-subsidised labours of love, acquire kudos and - rather crucially - proper funding, then slowly but surely become passionless shadows of their former selves. Then there are the events that choose to keep it real; case in point, the Darklight International Film Festival, the essential annual bash that celebrates digital art and film-making in all its wild and woolly forms.

Under the tenacious directorship of the inimitable Nicky Gogan, who's been with Darklight since its inception back in the nascent days of Ireland's dot.com boom, the event has adeptly negotiated the vicissitudes of the new mediaverse to become to become one of the key events on the Irish arts calendar.

Whereas an event dealing with digital film-making might have still seemed rather forward thinking back in 1999, these days Darklight finds itself smack in the fast lane; apart from the festival itself, Gogan and her crew recently created the Wildlight Channel, showcasing a selection of new Irish short films, for Nokia mobile phones, and a Darklight programme continues to tour the globe. Digital film-making isn't the future any more, after all - in case you hadn't noticed, it's happening right now.

The 'visiting artist' at Darklight 2006 is renowned curator John Thomson, the man behind the UK's seminal Pandemonium Festival, and a bit of a legend. These days, Thompson is based in New York, where he's director of distribution at Electronic Arts Intermix, one of the world's foremost resources for video art and interactive media.

"It's an incredibly promiscuous form," he says. "And it still can't be defined that easily. Things have really changed in recent years. People were shocked the first time a video got nominated for the Turner Prize; now, they don't blink an eyelid. The whole idea of the video artist has transformed, it's not a specialist medium any more - now video is just another tool people use."

Thomson has often been cited as one of the innovators who legitimised the form - his Pandemonium event, which placed video art at the heart of the YBA (Young British Artists) movement of the 1990s, was one of the inspirations for the original Darklight event.

"I like to think we curators had a little to do with the legitimisation of electronic and digital media," he says. "When someone like Nam June Paik had a retrospective at The Guggenheim in New York in 2000, hundreds of thousands of people saw that show, it broke records, and paved the way for the large-scale video shows we're seeing now. [Thomson will present a tribute to Paik, who passed away last month, at Darklight '06]. Then there are dedicated festivals like Darklight, which show challenging work to a young, enthusiastic audience - it all works towards people embracing the medium."

After a couple of years operating from Dublin's Digital Hub district around St James' Gate, Darklight 2007 represents a homecoming of sorts, as the festival returns to Temple Bar, where it all began back in those forlorn pre-Celtic Tiger days. The majority of this year's events take place at the Irish Film Institute and just across the road at the Film Base building.

"The technology is so much more available now," says Thomson. "Anybody can buy a laptop, and they can make video work. Where the technology is going, people will follow. It's a truly democratic art form. There's a new generation now, too, artists like Corey Archangel and Takeshi Murata, who have a completely different take on video, they're really informed by the internet, the visual promiscuousness of the web; there's an element of critique there, too, exploring what the net is doing to us all, how it's affecting all our lives. The work is all the more exciting for that - in a way, it's a new form of conceptual art."

Thomson's key Darklight presentation aims to explore further the notion of appropriation in video art. "It's not a new idea, by any means - I'm going to explore the history a little, especially in terms of video. These days, there's so much what we used to call 'visual appropriation' out there we're almost at a place beyond that expression. We're all sampling and downloading, we're all appropriating work in some way or another, it's a part of daily life."

For further information on Electric Arts Intermix, see www.eai.org.