ABOUT d.ARTS.i

d.ARTS.i (the digital ARTS institute) was founded in the year 2000 as a loose collective of digital artists and performers. It was the evolution of a project in 1996 called "Film is Dead" which was a traveling digital movie festival comprising works by about a dozen young artists in Southern California.

d.ARTS.i sought to create a space for digital artists to collaborate and display their work, both in a physical as well as virtual space. From 2001 to 2002, with a grant from Apple Computers, the Digital Arts Institute operated a computer design lab in Pasadena, California. The lab served as a studio and collaboration space for digital artists, as well as for teaching workshops on visual design and motion.

d.ARTS.i now pursues it's goals by sponsoring projects that are site-specific, in either a physical or virtual sense, while being highly mobile and free from physical limitations. d.ARTS.i maintains it's own decentralized, fragmented, interconnected network of mobile nomadic media labs. One consists of nothing more than a powerbook and satellite phone in a backpack at the peak of Machu Pichu. Anonther consists of a bank of nonlinear video editing workstations and hi-def cameras installed in the back of a hydrogen fuel cell-powered 1980 Toyota Land Cruiser that wanders the tundra of northern Canada. Yet another consists of a collection of circuit-bent cellphone musical instruments wired up to a solar-powered iMac in the back of a bicycle rickshaw in Bangalore.

This is the millennium of seamless integration between low-tech and hi-tech, between first world and third world. This is the millennium of Wall Street stockbrokers riding donkeys to work because of oil shortages. This is the millennium of bushmen in the Kalahari using iPods to preserve their language. This is the millennium of broadband in Antarctica, and subsistence farming in Manhatten. The revolution will be podcast in a refugee camp near you.

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