The Banff Centre
Media Release

For immediate release
December 6, 2004
Banff New Media Institute technology + culture site transfers to DVD

After three years of breaking new ground in covering art, culture, and technology, the Banff New Media Institute will collect 18 issues of the monthly online publication HorizonZero on DVD. The publication, which showcased the best of digital art and culture in Canada with its innovative web zine format, wraps up its mission with Issue 18: Ghost.

“HorizonZero will soon become a resource to discover, a site of memory and reinterpretation,” says the e-zine’s editor-in-chief and BNMI artistic director Sara Diamond. Following its debut online in August 2002, HorizonZero became an essential resource for a new and fast-forming medium. Fresh, interactive, and full of musings on the future of science, digital media, art, and culture, the publication carved out a new niche in an emerging world.

Among its achievements ―the production of 18 unique thematic issues featuring everything from digital documentary to wearable technology to Aboriginal storytelling in digital media. Explore the back catalogue for exclusive content not found anywhere else: a mini doc of Baghdad stories by Alexandre Trudeau; a survey of emerging Canadian digital music artists by CBC Brave New Waves host and producer Patti Schmidt; an archive of the one-minute web cam cabaret, a performance event produced in collaboration with theatre ensemble One Yellow Rabbit for their annual High Performance Rodeo, and the list goes on. HorizonZero looks at the incredible talent at home in the Canadian landscape of interactive media.

For the final issue, Ghost, HorizonZero digs deep into the concept of decaying digital media, the preservation of obsolete technology, and the problems related to archiving digital media art. Included inside, Wired Magazine columnist and self-described “garage futurist” Bruce Sterling describes his ten-year tenure as keeper of the Dead Media Project, tracking technology through the ages. Journey online through the Museum of Abandoned Things, past the dusty hulks of technology wonders from the distant and not-too-distant past. And Montreal-based new media archivist Alain Depocas looks into “Variable and Unstable” - preserving and documenting our digital art heritage.

With Ghost, HorizonZero makes a transition itself into archive, creating a foundation for future explorations at the crossroads of culture and technology. “HorizonZero is experiencing a phase change,” Diamond says. “From a permeable liquid it is shifting to the solid form of a DVD on the one hand, and to the atmosphere of virtual space on the other. We hope that it will inspire the perpetual motion of cultural knowledge in new media and its related forms for many years to come.”

Catch HorizonZero, Ghost, Issue 18.1, launched November 26. Ghost, Issue 18.2 launches December 17: http://www.horizonzero.ca. The HorizonZero DVD will be launched in 2005 as part of the 10th Anniversary celebration of the Banff New Media Institute.

For more information on the Banff New Media Institute:
http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/

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Media contact: Jill Sawyer, Media & Communications Officer
The Banff Centre • jill\_sawyer@banffcentre.ca • 403.762.6475