Creativity in Content Design

The creative process for new media artists - that is artists and researchers ('art practitioners') working in digital and other new media - is a delightful blend of craft, software-design, hypothesis-making, inspiration, experiment or rapid prototyping, and perseverence. The availability of the computer to simulate all other media, to develop prototypes, to collaborate with others, to publish and to narrowcast results to a wider community, has of course given contemporary 'new media' the fluxion or glue necessary to realise the dreams and aspirations and thought-experiments of the great Modernist innovators of the early 20th and late 19th century. With code we can package media together into hand-crafted works that have their own algorithmic envelope - the code that links to the platform or player we are designing for, or we can create to broader international standards that 'play' in the context of television sets.

Code is at the core root of all digital media. DIGITAL MEDIA IS CODE. Video is MPEG-2, or 4, or H264, or AVS, or ASF, Sound is MP-3, AIFF, SND, WAV, RIFF, Stills are JPEG, PICT, TIFF, or BMPs, graphics are PDF, AI, INDD, EPS, etc, and every other media-type has its file format. Code is authored into an APP or other user-ready package by means of an authoring program (such as FLASH, DIRECTOR, OR MAX MSP, an editing program such as AFTER EFFECTS, PREMIERE, or FINAL CUT, a development kit (ADK or SDK), or by writing raw code (C++, XCODE, JAVA etc) in a COMPILER.

The elasticity and flexibility of code means that all media can be mixed and matched, extended or enhanced, made particulate or synaesthetically immersive, monomedia or multimedia, at will. New narratives can be explored, transmedia narratives developed, simultaneous experiences scripted and sculpted as if code was indeed the mysterious gluon the Modernists were waiting to discover.

Hardware is important too. Even when we can eventually jack-in directly to our central nervous system - that miracle of electro-chemical code and interconnected neuronal memories - we'll still need a wire or patch or transponder or WIFI implant...And until then we’ll need screens, monocular, stereo and big projected screens, wristwatch TVs, pods and pads, paint-on, spray-on and wearable screens, speakers and vibrating membranes.

The creative process now puts tangible magic into the hands of artists and developers. We can mix and match media and magic, people and performance, location and position...

But content design - the art of film-making, drama, storytelling and writing, drawing, illustrating and animating, graphics and photography, acting and dancing and performing - all these human skills and talents are forefronted in the creative process of modern media-making.

The experiments we are looking for in our experimental film festival and collquium are experiments which explore this creative process. We want works that aim to blend code and content, media and machine, logic and intuition, performance and programming, narrative and nuance, sequence and iconographics, instantaneity, realtime and contemplative. Experiments in the Art of New Media, no less. Art is not Art unless its experimental!

Inspirations for Visioneca

Visioneca is inspired by the kind of intense creative innovation - in technology,  form and content - that took place leading up to and during the the birth of Cinematography in the period 1880 - 1915. We are also inspired by the experimental films of the Modernist avant garde, the American and European counter culture of the 1940s-1970s, and the work of new media artists and cybernetic artists from the 1970s onwards. Visioneca aspires to feature work that explores new methods of content delivery, new user/audience experiences, immersive and synaesthetic experiences, interactive and responsive installations, web-based work and other instances of innovation that centre upon the moving image.


We believe that the current experimentation in media form and content will result in a developing inclusive media (like the mass media, available to lots of people) that is global, local, mobile, semantically aware, smart and that is also an 'omnimedium', containing or pointing to all of our accumulated culture. This new media space will be inclusive and social, it will be the global school-room, university and realtime experimental laboratory for those learning how to make the world work for all of us.