Digital Revolution: More Power, or More Powerless? The New Generation Arts Festival

The Digital Revolution: More Power, or More Powerless? - will be the question posed at The Big Debate at the Birmingham ICC, part of the New Generation Arts Festival (organised by Birmingham City University). A panel of distinguished media experts, leading social commentators and a live audience will explore the explosions in social networking, exciting virtual worlds, online gaming and the dot.com boom, and consider their combined implications for the future of the arts.

Chairing the debate will be Rory Cellan-Jones, Technology Correspondent for BBC News, who has covered everything from the emergence of search engine Google and the dot-com crash, to the growth of online shopping. Other experts joining him on the panel will be Anthony Rose, Head of Digital Media Technology at the BBC and head of the BBC’s new iPlayer project, Chris Cooke, MD of UnLimited Media and Editor of its two main media platforms - the music industry’s insider update CMU Daily, and ThreeWeeks, the vibrant digital report from the Edinburgh and Brighton festivals, as well as Doug Williams, Technology Director for BT.

The abiding theme and title of this year’s NGA festival is ‘Digital Utopia?’, deliberately being posed as a question and not a statement. Digital technology has completely changed the way we live, work and interact. With its inherent ease of access have come blights on our society including computer hacking, cyber crime, online addictions to gambling and fears about online privacy. We’re constantly bombarded with mixed messages about whether technology will prove to be society’s saviour, or instigate the beginning of the end for us.

What then are we to make of this confusion, and this apparent ambiguity between the positive and negative influences of new technology, and what effect will it have on creativity? This is a key topic area at The Big Debate. As the technology evolves, NGA Festival artistic director Robin Dobson believes artists will be crucial to obtaining maximum benefits:

‘Artists are essential in interpreting and understanding how we relate to each in the physical world, to our technology and to each other in cyberspace.’

The accessibility of new technology and how it is already affecting creativity is an important thread of the debate, and ties in with themes explored elsewhere at the Festival. For example, Susan McNally’s The Workmanship of Certainty jewellery exhibition looks at how new Rapid Prototyping technology allows formerly one-off jewellery pieces to now be mass-produced - a controversial area for those working in the craft industries. Whether digital technology generates connectivity at the expense of content, and tends towards sheer quantity rather than quality will be one of the questions thrown up by Birmingham City University’s hugely-ambitious event, and an important area of discussion at The Big Debate.

NGA Festival events like the One Day Comic, a comic created, designed, written, drawn and published in one day, with the public invited to continue adding to the comic online, and an interactive story-writing project titled Billboards: Online Narratives help imagine how what the future might hold for creativity, reaching out to everyday people as well as established artists and authors – digital democracy in action. The effect this might have on the established worlds of radio and TV will be explored at the Debate, as well as asking if anyone could be left behind by the ‘Digital Utopia’.

The Big Debate forms part of the New Generation Arts festival. Already renowned as the vanguard of creative content, the New Generation Arts Festival (NGA) champions the independent cause of showcasing the brightest emerging graduate talent in the arts world today. Previously supported by a host of celebrities including model Erin O’Connor, social commentator Germaine Greer, comedian Frank Skinner, artist Anthony Gormley and author Philip Pullman, this year the New Generation Arts Festival, organised by Birmingham City University, celebrates youth, diversity and the rise of digital culture.

The Big Debate is sponsored by NEC Group and Birmingham Post. Its aim is to encourage debate on key cultural topics of national significance that have regional resonance with the regions population, businesses and opinion formers.

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