Sara Diamond
The Banff New Media Institute

The Banff New Media Institute hopes to catalyse collaborative research in new media. "Convergence" describes the evolving interconnectedness and multidisciplinary nature of cultural industries, networks, knowledge domains and media formats. Fundamental to BNMI is the belief that all forms of technology are designed. This includes networks, software, physical tools, and more. The creative sector, including art and cultural industries, has a critical role in developing technologies that work for human good. The process of creating or making is part of what determines the technological outcome. We explore "human-centred interface design", bringing together advanced visualisation research, the development of collaborative tools and environments, and true cross-disciplinary investigation.

The "Banff Method" creates high-energy encounters at the frontier of science, technology, and art. Fast prototyping allows ideas to be tested and workshopped beyond the expected and the usual. The Banff New Media Institute provides an environment for dialogue and networking as well as on-site and on-line exhibition. The contact that participants have outside of formal events is as critical as that within.

People come to BNMI to share what they know and what they don't know, to take risks and work together and to spend intensive time alone as well, resolving creative direction. BNMI brings together artists with technologists and scientists, culture and media workers, researchers and students.

Banff is Canada's first National Park. The Banff Centre sits on Tunnel Mountain (known by aboriginal people of this area as Sleeping Buffalo). The Rockies in this area are at a monumental scale and sit very close to The Banff Centre. Winter exerts itself for six to eight months of the year. The brief spring, summer and fall are filled with beauty and wildlife. There are five tectonic plates that move continually below the surface of the rock, churning up dreams, creating creative insomnia and spilling sulphurous waters down the creek beds. Human stature diminishes before the mountains. BNMI events consciously release our participants at regular intervals, sending them off into mountain hikes, walks, canoe trips and ski trips. No matter how close to the machine you are, it is impossible to ignore biology at Banff. Alcohol has twice the effect, air is thin and requires adaptation and hormones kick in with frightening intensity.

The Banff Centre is an interdisciplinary professional development centre for artists of all disciplines. In Media and Visual Arts alone, there are installation artists, architects, painters, sculptors, ceramicists, fabric artists, writers, sound artists, video art and documentary producers, and new media artists of all sorts. The Centre hosts performing arts such as dance, theatre and opera, music and sound, writing and publishing and aboriginal arts. The emphasis is on the contemporary, drawing from the traditional or historical as needed. The Banff Centre is a national and international institution. This means that the BNMI sits within a rich context of cross-disciplinary practice, one it can draw upon and contribute to. Some of our events have been in collaboration with Music, Sound and Aboriginal Arts, some of our best co-productions with these divisions and Theatre Arts.

Through the amalgam of companies, progressive individuals within these, critical artists, social and cultural theorists, scientists, lawyers, designers, and all manner of appropriate others, Banff has been able to create a space where divisions are dropped, new projects emerge, alliances around existing initiatives get consolidated and unusual networks are developed. Many relationships and projects come out of The Banff New Media Institute. The Banff New Media Institute events focus on the pressing current and emerging issues in practice and research. For this reason, participants come in with significant stakes. Core to success is having a strong but cross-disciplinary focus. For example, in 2002 we held a summit entitled "Intimate Technologies, Dangerous Zones". The following describes the problem that we set for participants. The programme builds on past explorations, but in a way to include new participants and current themes as the goal statement suggests:

BNMI's 2001 Human Generosity Project and Emotional Architectures looked at the potential of collaborative software, P2P, and at how cognition, perception and emotion shape our experience of interfaces. Following up on that work, Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones focuses on the developing invisibility and ubiquity of technology in our lives, and their aesthetic and ethical corollaries. Mobile and wireless technologies seem to be overtaking their laptop and desktop predecessors, and computer creators are now designing wearable, personal technologies that adapt to a variety of personalities and uses, effectively creating new, virtual, social spaces.

Young people have made great use of mobile phones, creating powerful alternate communities and languages. Cheap mobile technology seems to be a model for sustaining the peer-to-peer revolution. The immaterial aura of signal and bandwidth influences the very fabric of our beings, moving us into a realm of constant connectivity - a dangerous, seductive zone - where the frontier between liberty and control, mobility and invasiveness, utility and disjunction, comfort and menace is blurred and leaking.

We will look at wireless mediation in all areas of human life, working towards an anthropology of usage. We will compare differences in infrastructure in North America (LAN, GPS, PA's), the United Kingdom and Europe (WAP, Bluetooth, mobiles, and SMS), and delve on the engineering and computer science challenges of wireless mediation. Artists have taken up the wireless challenge and are inventors, critics and developers in the mobile universe. We will strive to understand how intimate technologies transform our selves and the ways in which we tell stories, relate, play and work, and how to create positive applications and experiences for these ubiquitous networks and technologies.

We provide speakers with a meagre amount of time, usually about twenty minutes, where they can provide the kernel of their ideas or project. Presentation structures vary. The moderator interviews the presenter, at times there are questions that speakers address and at times there is a formal presentation or performance, or an event created with the audience. Panels are created around specific themes and bring together presenters across disciplines, providing a larger thematic context than their individual research or project will allow. The following panel occurred at Intimate Technologies, foregrounding a discussion about social boundaries, surveillance and our contradictory attitude towards these phenomena:

How Intimate Do We Want Our Technologies To Be?

Most of us have experiences with technologies that push our personal boundaries of comfort. We cry, "It's only a machine," but we still want it to do much more than that for which it is designed. This panel considers, what is intimacy? Do we want it? What do we give up for it? Is intimacy the same as 24/7?

Panellists included a communications theorist, a research leader in broadcast, and an artist working with intimacy and mobile devices, as well as a computer scientist, and securities expert. Their range of views and comfort with the direction of technology development varied greatly. The panels always include makers as well as theorists and scientists. In this instance, the group initiated a fruitful debate about the redefinition of privacy that continued through the three-day event.

Intimate Technologies led to several ongoing projects. One of these is an international community cooking collaboration. A second project is a working group on smart textiles, fabrics and wearables. The outcome of these workshops now spans multiple facilities, including George Institute of Technology, Central Saint Martins, Concordia University, MIT and The Banff Centre, as well as individual producers and their companies. The meeting also equipped individuals in their own areas to have a deeper knowledge and contact base.

Role-playing

I play the role of "convener", working with the Banff team consultants as appropriate, sculpting an agenda based on the specific ideas, methodologies, ideologies and practice of the participants. I facilitate most discussions, and try to impose a relatively rigorous time frame on presenters, at times collaborating with domain experts in kicking off the Q and A. My brain bleeds during the events. I really listen. I synthesise the ideas as much as possible through the event and every morning, pointing out connections, debates, directions for further elaboration, and references outside of that presented. If I do not understand a concept, I research it as much as possible before the morning synthesis, because I believe that this role is key to allowing the participants to focus their knowledge. This process attempts to push the proceedings up a notch on a daily basis.

At the end of our research summits, we hold a special day, dedicated to synthesis, project consolidation and emergence, and networking plans. I work with other key presenters to move this day forward towards concrete results that have legs. Reflection occurs on the research day and often, now, in list serves that continue post-partum or through projects that emerge over time. We are now documenting each event and publishing the findings in research periodicals, and on our website, in order to foster this reflection and transformation of knowledge. We have built a group of facilitators who also have strong moderating skills.

At the core of the event is the invitation list. Through our own research, word of mouth and experience, we have uncovered a group of new media leaders who care about the social and cultural contexts of their practice and the larger world that they live in. We travel a great deal, encountering people face to face. We find them through our consulting work and participation in boards of directors and other sectoral activities. Others we find through other programmes at Banff and through individuals and organisations that contact us. We factor new people into the mix on the basis of their knowledge and capacity to contribute. This is a part of the ability to create an amplified context. Participants bring in accrued memories of past debates and processes, applying these to the current moment.

Politics As Well As Philosophy

While the Banff regime could be considered liberal in that it insists on discourse around and through difference, it is anything but that, at its best. It is radical without a specific ideology attached, other than the capability to oscillate between the social, the collective, and the human subject. We have tackled difficult post-humanist subjects, in particular biotechnology, and the philosophy of data. We have fought out issues of bioengineering, ecologies of corporate control and intellectual property versus rights commons, by having the opposing players at the same table in an environment that looks for solutions or change when possible.

Participants at the BNMI can and do ask, "What happens when military technologies brush up against the need for social change, peace and equity? Does collaboration mask fundamental differences built into the social and cultural settings of technologies? Are these factors in fact not greatly distanced from the actuality of making and collaboration, and if not so, how do we take them into account?" Conversely, could discourse, with its material effects, not begin to bridge these differences and if this is not possible, underscore them? Could not an ethical and directed collaborative framework provide an unusual and special location where new forms of knowledge and social responsibility cross? Implicit in the BNMI method has been not only an intensive sharing of concerns and ideas, but beyond this, a careful choice of participants and sponsors.

Cutting across the stated ideologies of companies and individuals are the realities of how they work within their own world and what they bring to the special environment of BNMI. BNMI has declared a third space, outside of the art world, outside of the corporation, outside of the traditional research lab, and within the framework of immersive experience and nature, that allows a different quality of discourses and strategy to emerge.

Fundamental to the attitude of BNMI is a sense of generosity. We ask that people consider each other's positions, that they live side by side over the days of the summit or workshop and that they work to keep the debates and discussions moving forward. To start this process off, a typical summit begins with an evening of introductions, which are characterised by being game or play life. Individuals are asked to reveal their identities through interviews, games and creating slogans with words taken from the group biographies and subject prÈcis. Slogans can be reviewed at the end of the session as well as statements that are revealed through the workshop as effective banner ads or ideological and teleological signs.

Led by Susan Kennard, who in turn reports to me, the BNMI team are genuinely interested and engaged in the questions that the BNMI approaches. Susan has a wide grasp of the international scene and has her own areas of expertise, in particular, streamed media and data archiving. We enjoy collaboration, deciding what the points of focus should be for the coming year. Susan makes the large co-production partnerships run on time and helps to plan and implement partnerships. Staff are able to work with high-demand individuals and spread the resources around to take care of all of the participants.

History Two:

The Banff New Media Institute began with a conversation on a bus that was headed towards the notorious BBQ of the Banff Television Festival, in 1994. Steven DeNure, the then senior vice-president and creative director of Alliance Media (the largest Canadian production and distribution company at that time), was interested in the potential of new media in both broadcast and other contexts. We were standing, rocking back and forth, as the bus wove through the mountains. I had already begun to programme all of the new media components of the Banff Television Festival, and do to this day. I had begun a discussion with him about my efforts to link the new media research environment of the Banff Centre, with its focus on virtual reality and high-end speculative research, with broadcast and artists' projects that used off-the-shelf tools.

This discussion began at the very moment that the world-wide web was about to come into existence, from the seeds of the visual Internet, and at a time when there was tremendous wealth being generated by the software sector. Computer games produced millions of dollars and companies like Voyageur and Broderbund were viable. Steven and I concocted a new project, to bring together the leading writers, directors and producers of television and feature films in Canada and expose them to researchers in interactive television, in virtual reality and interactive fiction. I found some money through our research dollars at Banff and Steven drew on the resources of Alliance.

This initiative was possible because The Banff Centre, under the leadership of Michael Century and Douglas MacLeod had built a world-renowned artists' project in the field of virtual reality. This venture built on a series of intensive cross-disciplinary residencies, such as the Bioapparatus. It created an uncomfortable but valuable friction between independent artists, researchers in the domain of technologies and theorists. Artists in the Art and Virtual Environment programme laboured side by side with computer scientists, electronic music composers, and graphic artists. They created eight virtual worlds or prototypes. Banff had cultural research dollars to build on these successes. During 1994 and 1995, I initiated a series of think tanks on authoring tools, Aboriginal access to the Internet. Banff held an intensive brainstorm on one of the VR projects, Placeholder, led by Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland, in partnership with Interval Research. This workshop extracted lessons from the project and planned its next stage of development.

The first Interactive Screen was uncomfortable, but exciting, with leading screen writers, directors, producers and artists meeting up with the leaders of early interactive television trials, VR scientists, software creators and others. As the years moved on, this mix became more comfortable with one another, and our ability to help them to talk through workshops, brain storming and making things improved.

Interactive Screen

Interactive Screen is an international project development laboratory and networking opportunity for new media content creators, technologists, convergent industries, researchers and companies. Led by an international faculty, IS combines formal and informal exchanges, a sense of play and intensive work to explore the process of conceptualising, writing, directing, planning and financing ideas and projects in interactive content and software. The goal is to stimulate the creation of emotionally powerful, creatively inspired, and economically viable interactive content and software.

The first part of the workshop is the three-day symposium, Producing New Media: Money and Law. Participants develop financing and legal strategies for new media creative, software, technology development production, distribution and broadcasting. It provides counselling, networking contacts, leverage, and ongoing support relationships. It also explores all of the legal questions and strategic debates around new media, from IP lockdowns to open source. It is a location where major policy directions are debated and consolidated.

The project development component of IS exists so that those with projects can really take them to the next phase. Many development award winners attend from Canadian and international competitions, as do our co-production partners at Banff. We help people design from the point of view of the participant experience. New projects that develop during IS are also workshopped. We have legal and financing advisors as well as creative faculty on hand. We use play-based and participatory methods to develop projects. In 2002, for example, three faculty members led participants through a workshop where the project itself had to be given a character and fictional voice, in dialogue with a user, who also had an identity and character to play. This process really reinforced the ways that we need to imagine participant experience as part of the design process. This pressure can be onerous and this method made it playful and rich. We open our design labs to enable fast prototyping of project ideas on the spot.

One of the highlights of the event is the peer-to-peer counselling network. Sign-up sheets and generous scheduling enable peers to meet with each other and share a range of skills. The second key feature of IS is facilitated brainstorms, where faculty group participants around a project lead the group through a design discussion. The lead artist is not compelled to accept the ideas, but they often do. Towards the end of the workshop, project ideas are pitched and there is high-level feedback about content and financing.

The Aboriginal Contribution

The BNMI has tried to acknowledge cultural difference and gender equity in a set of industries that are dominated by white men. Aboriginal new media makers, artists, writers, composers, artists have contributed since the early days. February 19-22, 1997, saw the beginning of Aboriginal Electronic Publishing, an event led by aboriginal artists such as Jason Lewis, Melanie Printup Hoe and Sheryl Kootenhayoo. Subsequent workshops on streaming kicked off major computer-based radio projects (AIRS) in aboriginal communities in Canada and the USA. Aboriginal theorists, producers, storytellers and artists have also been crucial to the research side of Banff New Media Institute. Synch or Stream in 1999 focused on "the accelerated phenomenon of streamed media" and considered technical and policy issues as well as practical issues of practice. It had strong aboriginal representation as well as net radio presence and was co-developed with Radio 90 and irational.org.

Emotional Computing in 2000 states that "performing arts provide an invaluable resource with which to examine next generation new media. They combine physical discipline with improvisation, narrative and provoke emotional experience for the participant. The human body reminds us of our humanity and vulnerability." The summit explored networked new media performance and the use of intelligent stages, costumes, and props. It included a significant number of aboriginal artists who contributed ideas about story-telling, narrative structure and practices, as well as the use of ritual and hierarchies of learning in deepening cultural experiences, a discussion that was relevant in relation to designing levels of experiences.

In Human Voice/Computer Vox, "the creative use of computers has its deepest origins in vocal computation, in the works of composers, radio hackers and computer programmers." The event celebrated the concept of voice and drew together the old guard of computer music, with voice recognition designers and artists and aboriginal traditional singers, music-makers and storytellers. Highlights of the event included a voice workshop led by international voice trainer Richard Armstrong and a story circle led by Louise Profit-Leblanc.

BNMI holds several workshops specifically for women. These include the Corus New Media Accelerator, an event for women in the communications and broadcast industries that provides them with skills to lead in creative new media. Women in the Director's Chair is renowned for its training of women feature film and television directors. It attracts women in new media who want to move to linear media.

History Three

In 1996, the Multimedia Institute began with a series of workshops and industry events. The Interactive Screen of 1996 was an event that was truly international and occurred during the halcyon days of RealWorld, UK. It drew Neil Seiling, the much-respected EP of Alive Television, and a new media consultant and Justine Bizzochi as faculty. We kicked off by debating Tamara, a multi-stranded narrative play with game development possibilities. Wym Leler had returned to be a part of the mix at Banff, after working with Banff during the VR days. "Jack", an authoring tool in Java, drew on Banff's historic interest and knowledge about authoring tools for artists, Joshua Portway's knowledge of MTropolis and his ideas about software and Wym's programming expertise. We brainstormed the project at a breakfast meeting at Banff.

MVA supported a short development phase for this project and the prototype of The Secret, a collaboration led by Douglas Cooper, which would be built with the new tool. The Secret came close to being made, but was before the time of multiplayer games on the Internet. The Java software experiment, however, renamed as "Spin", moved to a business-to-business application on the server side and would go on to earn millions of dollars for Wym, who eventually retired from its profits.

1996 was a benchmark year. Microsoft Networks were looking for content, high-end producers attended Banff in droves and ambitious discussions reigned without much reining in.

By 1997, several key practices of the Banff New Media Institute were in place:

1) Summits or think tanks that brought together cross-disciplinary knowledge to imagine next-generation tools and content

2) Interactive Screen, the yearly cross-disciplinary project laboratory that continues and has been cloned all over the world. Other workshops now include Women in the Directors' Chair, Corus New Media Accelerator, Writing for Interactive Media and others determined annually.

3) Small, dedicated project workshops, capable of brainstorming emerging research and creative projects. These were similar to the Placeholder workshop and continue to occur outside of larger workshops. For example, we recently worked with Blast Theory, UK to develop their next performance and wireless project Can You See Me Now, and held a groundbreaking brainstorm with the CBC, Digital Renaissance and RealWorld in 1997.

4) Research and development co-production practice with partners from the public and private sector, researchers or individual producers.

The Summer Summit at The Summit - Utopian Ambition

The clear aqua waters of Lake Minnewanka are as deep as the mountains that peak above it. The Summer Summit at the Summit rose like the Lady of the Lake from its frigid waters. I had challenged Mike Coulson, Josh Portway and Douglas Cooper to immerse ourselves and we did. With sudden clarity we schemed the first BNMI super-summit. It would be co-created by The Banff Multimedia Institute and RealWorld, UK, and it would gather our top lists of creative and business talent from across the various new media sectors. The invitation list was handpicked and included games designers, corporate leaders, new media designers and artists, designers of objects, animation companies, researchers from NASA and computing science universities, technology inventors, musicians, museum curators, movie stars and directors and research centres. Interval Research had a big presence. Durrell Bishop, a brilliant interactive object maker, brushed shoulders with Geena Davis, interested in making "The Diamond Age" by Neil Stevenson as an interactive product. It was hot and cool.

There were two basic agendas to this event. The first was to promote the creation of high quality, emotionally engaging new media work. The second was to break the economic logjam. We wanted to challenge small creative companies to make global strategic alliances and provoke larger companies to provide adequate support for smaller, research-or creative-based endeavours. We made conscious references to the feeder chain in designating fish school identities to participants. The summit tried to define a new media industry as a series of layers, with many leaks within the structure. Existing media models clearly failed the sector, either as a critical grammar or production model, although repurposing was possible in some fields.

Conflicts and structures needed attention in order to mature practices and invent economic models. The analysis of the event states: "In order for the industry to come into existence there is a need to move from a technology-push to a requirements-pull mode of operation." The summit acknowledged: "Interaction changes the nature of the medium radically. It redefines authorship and potentially places more responsibility on the audience/user. The ability to create in this environment has to place some responsibility on the audience/user. The audience/user and what they want, or value, from interaction remains a considerable enigma... Good content is not yet well-defined because there is no established critical framework which can handle the transitory nature of interaction."

We also hoped to explore the ways that technology and the IT industries could collaborate better with the creative sector in fields such as R&D, artists working with companies, and information exchange. We intended to create policies to effect the emergence of a diversified industry and revive a culture centric research agenda. The final wish is only now, in this century, coming into fruition.

As part of The Summit, we created a series of interactive experiences, in order to walk the talk that we were constructing. One tool was a website - with amusing false historical, social announcement and tourist banners about Banff, fish schools where people could join based on their affinities, matchmaking surveys for secret societies, a fight challenge area where people could choose their weapons or have them dictated, a threaded biographical and image bulletin board, with different levels of security. The scale of The Summit was monumental, with people making incredible relationships, fights and arguments breaking out, hikes and other forms of fun as part of the structure, which itself disintegrated partway through the intensity of the people and multiple wishlists of outcomes.

The findings from The Summit were published in a report entitled "Out From the Summit, the Summit Summary" by Anthony Harckham. He notes that one slogan of the event was: "Technology is a good servant, but at present is a bad master." As well, there was an overwhelming desire expressed, even by the business sector to make art and creativity dominant within these immature emerging industries. Groups talked at length about game forms and new strategies for diversifying that industry; narrative and interactive media, its limits and potentials; physical design, including smart objects and spaces; ubiquitous computing; humour; the grammar of space; and other emergent practices. Tools were analysed for their capacity to serve creative practice and new initiatives in authoring reviewed. The intensity of mediated experience suggested to many at the event that they and others desired "direct face-to-face cultural and social experiences. Installations with a strong physical component and performance-based interactivity were compelling to all."

The discussion of tools both echoed the past and set new directions for research. Artists wanted "autopoetic systems", which allow the artist to control creation all the way to delivery. Others spoke of the value of engineering/artistic collaborations and the resulting translation from and to tools. "If the computer is visible, it is a failure of the design." The economic forms of the industries that made up multimedia were examined and the capacity to regulate the web debated at length. The need for networked, collaborative creation and distribution economies was a constant theme. Control over infrastructure development, research funding for collaboration between sectors, new flattened forms of distribution and investment, peer-to-peer types of exchange environments for creativity and product dispersal, the dominance of content and audience needs over tools, and the development of strong niche markets, were all conclusions from the event.

The Summit proved that a mix of experiential learning and high-level dialogue brought out new discoveries. It created an ongoing network of thinkers and creators. It shook up key individuals within locations of power who took individual action to realise some of the goals of the event. It set the framework for the ongoing series of summits that would characterise the BNMI. It authorised ongoing work in tool creation and content that would eventually provide models for new practices. It was fun. It set Banff on the international new media map.

Major findings were prescient in underscoring the fragility of new media industries, the danger of the technology drive, the weakness of dotcoms and the challenges in place to produce compelling content. Out of the event, there were points of deep curiosity, which followed on some of the long-term interests of Banff. Architecture, visualisation, ubiquity and computing, tangible interfaces, deep content for the web, issues of play-based structures, reconstructing gaming and equity all ran throughout. With some exceptions (Growing Things, Living Architecture and Bridges Two, which clamber up close to one hundred), we now chose to hold events in the thirty to fifty ranges.

Immediately following the Summit, BNMI organised a series of smaller gatherings that drilled down into the key themes of the Summit. These included Big Game Hunters, created in collaboration with Joshua Portway of RealWorld, "exploring the creative side of computer games, emerging a critical dialogue on games and rethinking the economic model of gaming". This was a remarkable event that focused on finding a grammar for games well before this was a popular endeavour, and inspired Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen's clever RePlay on-line conference, event and book. It brought out top theorists; all the games review magazines' editors (Edge, Computer Gaming, etc.), J.C. Hertz, social theorists and technologists as well as games publishers and designers. It was small but extremely heavyweight, the exact ideal of a summit. Out of the Box explored creative and related technical challenges in taking computing out of the box and into architecture, installation and ubiquitous objects. Avatar, Avatar was a cross-cultural think tank between artists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, 3D world builders and games designers, examining the concept of the avatar and their relationship to virtual communities. Emotional Architectures explored cognitive science, psychology, the theatre of interaction, physical and data architectures.

There are a series of themes that permeate the summits of The Banff Multimedia Institute and then the New Media Institute. Several of these continue through from the early New Media Research initiatives that were part of the activities in the early 1990s. Early on was the strong emphasis on virtual reality, the beginning of an exploration of authoring tools, computer music and surround sound and aboriginal culture in new media. The Art in Virtual Environments project showed strong public interest in spectacle, immersion and in rich networked on line experiences. It also indicated the lack of authoring tools for artists that enabled them to work in rich ways without intensive programming.

As the BNMI emerges, a wider group of themes reoccur through summits and workshops. These are authoring systems; collaborative processes and tools, including in the creation process and in the experience and learning processes; 3D experience--virtual reality and ubiquity, networked 3D and immersive sound, emotional computing, online virtual worlds; biotechnology and materiality; convergence, including television and new media, games and other cultural forms; sound and interactive media; aboriginal new media culture. This forms the basis of our current research directions.

Tools

The early BNMI workshops explored new software tools. Our strong interest in artist driven authoring and interactive technologies is apparent in these choices. Java was not yet the standard that it is to day; hence, we held a very popular workshop in Java authoring. The genius of Hamish Forsyth, a developer who created a number of alternatives to Director, was also apparent. We taught and were developers for MTropolis. Hamish Forsyth poignantly states that he dreams of creating an environment where artists of different kinds and designers, directors could work with each other without heavy programming, to take programming out of the design picture.

MTropolis was "a tool that enables complex interactive product design for entertainment and educational markets [and] allows the repurposing of objects in its database - early object orientation...ideal for computer users and programmers". MTropolis was unable to market itself against the monolith of Director and eventually faded away. Forsyth also created Neureus, a publishing system that allowed users to "collaboratively create complex multimedia applications simultaneously, over networked systems, with producers, artists and other contributors". This tool was a forerunner of networked collaborative software, created in an avant-garde move. It did not succeed in the market, but was a forerunner to the concept and current practice of online collaborative creation.

The theme of advanced visualisation and tangible interfaces is also apparent in the training programme, with workshops on "the Third Dimension, VRML and the WWW" and one on haptic interfaces, "SensAble" software, and interfaces that link the body (hand) of the computer user through virtual touch with 3D image displays on the screen. "Will the sense of touch make computer-aided design and modelling a compelling artistic experience?" This workshop brought together sculptors, painters, clay artists, computer animators and technology developers. It was remarkable to see the exchange between those comfortable with tactile ways of making and designers in 3D. Several of the sculptors now work consistently with 3D modelling technologies.

Tool development is now an active part of our research programme in advanced visualisation and collaborative systems. Our Horizon Zero web publishing project will create databases.

Working With Scientists

Digital Burgess, co-created with the Contact Consortium, was an important event. It set the framework for Avatar, Avatar and Growing Things. It proved that it was possible to bring together hard scientists, social theorists and humanists, artists and computer scientists who were posed a series of difficult questions to address, provided with an unusual methodology to do this (a hike, a website). The event asked the question: "Is life about to cross the atomic/digital barrier and express itself in the virtual spaces of the earth's computer networks?" What can the Burgess Shale teach us about the "digital Cambrian explosion"?

In attendance were Dr Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, the creator of L-systems, a realistic plant modelling system; Tom Ray, the biologist and rain forest conservationist who created Network Tierra, an on-line ecosystem; Steve Grand, who created "Creatures"; Bruce Damer of the Contact Consortium, involved in life in digital space, and a raft of geologists, biologists, museologists and artists drawn to actually hiking and spending time in the pre-Cambrian fossil bed, the Burgess Shale, or who had created artworks in and around that environment, and Teri Rueb, an artist who created a sound memorial walk using GPS tracking systems in the Burgess trail area.

This event also augmented the corporate base for BNMI, with Sun, Silicon Graphics and the Yoho Burgess Shale Foundation providing resources for an event that was not immediately instrumental, but in fact basic research-oriented. Since Digital Burgess, BNMI has developed an effective balance of research scientists, computer scientists, artists, corporations and cultural theorists, with the recent integration of larger numbers of social scientists. We are particularly interested in engaging these disciplines in the creation of projects as well as the discussion about projects. For example, Growing Things was a remarkable event that included researchers in the fields of genetic engineering, with ecologists, artists, sociologists and split smartly down the spectrum of opinion on bioengineering. All of our programmes in 2002 have a strong mix of research scientists, engineers and cultural sector representation. This cultural mÈlange may be one of the biggest achievements of the BNMI.

Money

The BNMI was financially self-starting - looking outwards, not inwards to The Banff Centre, for financial support. Its current support structure combines public research funding, production funding, training and professional development funds, private sector donations and partnerships, and in kind donations from large and small companies as well as universities and other institutions.

Co-Production

The co-production programme of Media and Visual Arts is now an integral part of the Banff New Media Institute and has been responsible for significant works by artists, such as Talk Nice by Elizabeth VanderZaag, (n)Chant by David Rokeby (which won the Governor General's Award 2002 and the Ars Electronica Golden Nica, 2002), Trajets by Gretchen Schiller and Susan Kozel, the Cyber PowWows by Skawennati Fragnitto and partners, and many others. We have also produced the Deep Web research project, exploring 3D and audio on the WWW (1990s) and the Human Centred Interface Project, with its focus on networked immersion and tangible interfaces.

The Banff Centre team is uniquely situated as match-makers. We raise funds to match artists' budgets, or provide in kind support. Projects are commissioned or accepted based on application. We also include research joint ventures as part of our mix. We currently have on-site laboratories for University of Calgary and University of Alberta researchers and students and welcome researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology, University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Hexagram, V2 and the ENCART group in Europe and a number of Brazilian and Mexican institutions, on a regular basis.

History Four:

When I was younger, I had an idea of wanting to be a mid-wife. My best friend was named Emily. She was seventeen and pregnant. Her boyfriend was also very young. I had been out of school for two years. When the call came that she was in labour, I rushed out of the office where I worked and arrived at her apartment breathless. We had been practising for this moment, reading about breathing, walking through the stages of transition and the actual birth. I set her up in her bedroom and sent her boyfriend off to boil water after he fainted several times. I locked her mother out of the bedroom after she told Emily that it was indecent to crouch while in labour.

We breathed together through the contractions, as these sped up. The baby was moving very fast towards open air. Dr John, the home birth practitioner in Toronto at the time, was very late. Emily finally turned to me and said, "The baby is crowning." I knew she was well through transition; she had been unbelievably bitchy and was now saintly as she managed pain. I looked at her, looked between her legs and indeed the very top of Dylan's head was there, pushing gently against the inside of her labia. I paled and called her boyfriend; the time for the boiled water and sterile scissors had indeed arrived. I had a baby flannel ready. I held her as she carefully breathed and pushed, breathed and pushed. The baby slid out into the flannel, attached to the umbilical cord. I shook. The baby was pink, a normal colour and breathing. I placed him on her breast; tears rolled down all three of our cheeks, her mother came into the room and almost fainted. The doorbell rang; the doctor entered and complimented all of us on our success.

At points, I feel much the same way about the emergence of the BNMI. It was a dangerous and DIY birth where the baby lived to tell the tale. It came from the evident need to try to build a third economy and a third space, one that could bring together the best of collaboration and collectivity. It came from the need for social responsibility, cultural context and diversity in the face of the money bliss and narcissism of the 1990s. It came from the need to unsettle the established and conservative broadcast industries and the equally conservative, yet new, games and technologies sectors. It came from the need for access and it came from curiosity, a pure love of discourse and what can be made material from it. It came from the need to butt art up against industry and see what could occur. This learning experience is elitist in a most generous sense; it is centred on individuals who have positions of relative power, although there is always space for students and newer practitioners and a key position for mentorship. Holding power one day in the new media industry does not guarantee it for the next.

The development and success of the events at Banff require a blend of methodologies and an ability to retain, synthesise and shape the flow of knowledge. The skill is less in invention of new things and much more in the capacity to synthesise areas of knowledge, finding a new ground and an ability to state emerging ideas clearly and to reference them heavily. This method combines Eisenstein and Vertov's montage techniques, which rely on the power of condensation, with the frottage and layering of collage. Surrealist writing techniques are also helpful when language is blocked or oblique. Creating the events at The Banff New Media Institute is a lot like being a chef. You wake up dreaming of the ways that discrete ingredients are able to combine, go out to find these, and make a combination that is unique. Ideas and conceptual frameworks pile up on top of each other. You have to sort and reblend these to create coherent flavours.

A description of methodology is of value because it can then be generalised, used for planning and extrapolated. However, it is dangerous to reverse engineer a process that combines the conscious and unconscious tensions of exploration, play, humour and serious inquiry into a pat system. The BNMI form is one of instrumental pragmatism. It is also a form of magic. It is somewhere between the familiar and the unknown. It is idiosyncratic, specific to the location and its exigencies and to a history and way of being that combines the studied and the spontaneous. In expanding the BNMI, we have to guard against adopting formulae as opposed to structures; we have to be able to respond to the spontaneous and the possibility.

What makes the BNMI work in part is its lack of rigid framework combined with a highly curated context. Imagine this. In serious-sounding seminars, like Educational New Media, we brought together artists, educational technologists, games designers, educational theorists and computer scientists to look at the future of education in the new media and online worlds. How do people learn? Has this changed from how we understood learning in the past? What are new models? The attendees included a leading figure in the Conservative Alberta government, who had led the adoption of technology in the classroom, who sat next to a leading lesbian social theorist. These two political opposites had bonded their souls by the end of the session, even after huge debates about whether female children faced barriers when trying to learn computers. They stayed in dialogue after the event.

Not surprisingly, one of the living legacies of The Banff New Media Institute is the network that continues outside of The Banff Centre and that returns to us, both physically and in its reference of others to us, with great loyalty. We thank it daily. Our future challenge is to keep the power of contingency that is The Banff Method as we grow.

- continue to CH 9 - The Finished Middle: A Hot Wired Live Art Conversation about collaboration, prototypes, tools as art and rules for engagement

- return to the table of contents