Bitscape formed the major focus of my 12 month EPIC (Emerging Producers in the Community) internship at the Next Wave Festival, one of nine internships funded nationally between 2004 and 2006. EPIC is an Australia Council initiative co-funded by the late New Media Arts and Community Cultural Development Boards. The project’s premise was to promote new media art-making as a tool to empower young people from regional areas of Australia.

Bitscape kicked off in the Macedon Ranges, travelled to Moe and Morwell in the Latrobe Valley, and then on to Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. The workshops explored animation, blogging, digital audio, digital video, stencilling and image making. The young people explored notions of place and identity and some chose to tackle the Next Wave Festival theme, Empire Games.

The groups produced beautiful and exciting work for a varity of different outcomes. In the Latrobe Valley, artworks created by Koorie students of the Woolum Bellum Campus were digitised for a large-scale slide projection on to the TRUenergy power station in Yallourn North; in Wagga Wagga, digital images created by local young people were projected on to the iconic Civic Theatre; and in the Macedon Ranges, animations, video and photography were projected on to scrims as part of a live theatre performance.

The local components of Bitscape came together at the Experimedia exhibition space at the State Library of Victoria, documenting the outcomes and displaying the online component of the project as part of Festival Melbourne2006, the Youth Program of the Cultural Festival of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games.

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