Building on the model we used for a seminar on the 24 Hour City in March 1993, the idea is to bring together a wide range of agencies and individuals, primarily from within Manchester as regional centre, who may not have had the opportunity to meet and discuss their various projects, involvements and concerns. It will be a seminar format rather than a conference as the intention is to facilitate a round table exchange of knowledge and experience. As such we envisage the seminars to be all plenary and limited to around 30-40 invited participants. The seminars will be free of charge.

The two later seminars, envisaged for November, will be around: SMEs and the role of ICT and; innovation, creativity and economic development in the context of ICT.

This first seminar is concerned with the growing interconnections between technology and culture and will coincide with The Boddingtons Manchester Festival of Arts and Television and will form part of the Digital Underground strand. It is closely linked to the i0 project, a multimedia performance organised by Dijihad in the British Council Building.

Off-Line/ On-Line/ In-Line ?

In the last two or three years there has been a rising number of claims regarding the impact of new information & communication technologies (ICT) on economic development, the future of the city and democratic access, alongside a recent explosion of interest in their impact on arts and culture, especially in connection with growth of the Internet and multimedia applications. Local authorities, development agencies, universities and colleges, arts agencies, SMEs and individuals have responded to these developments in a variety a ways - ranging from infrastructural work with major corporations to ad hoc events organised by arts groups with no obvious art form label (or source of funding!).

Indeed, whilst the long term links between economic development and cultural policy have been on the agenda at least since the arts and urban regeneration debates of the mid 1980s, the development of new technologies have added another dimension to this. Multimedia production and distribution, cultural industries development, tourism, the 24 Hour City have now to be addressed in terms of on-line information, CD-Rom and CD-I, digitalised cultural goods, broadband distribution, web pages etc.

In the meantime new cultural industries are emerging in the interstices of the economic development, communications and cultural policy infrastructures. Telematics is not just a new medium of transmission but gives rise to new forms of the production and transmission of meaning - new symbolic goods. It is when a medium becomes the locus of the production of new meaning that technics becomes culture. The culture of usage of new technologies is certainly changing, giving rise to concerns about access, training and democracy; but the whole field of application development also seems to be in flux.

Innovation and creativity in communication and information technologies are no longer restricted to science parks and computing departments. New technologies have been used by artists and by a whole range of groups and individuals involved in popular culture - in the music industry, raves, clubs, cyber cafes and the associated publishing paraphernalia. As Steve Walker of CER wrote in his Telematics strategy document for Hulme: 'Some commentators argue that the breakthrough in the development of broadband applications will come from applications developed by 'a new breed of high tech bohemians - call them techno-bohos - who combine computer skills with story telling and/ or artistic flair' (The Economist)'. If this is anywhere near the mark what are the implications for a city like Manchester? This question is even more pointed if we accept Jim McClellan's argument in The Observer that cyber culture in Britain is linked more to music subcultures than it is to US New Age sensibility, 'a punky rejection of the feel-good techno-fantasies promoted by zippies and Californian gurus... Crucial is the feeling that in British cyberculture music is more influential than the Net'.

For some all this is a cultural and technological event on a par with the Gutenberg revolution. For others hype, fad, red herring. Some are playing wait and see. However, it is clear that in Manchester there has been a proliferation of ideas and initiatives, bids, proposals and concrete developments that have drawn in a wide spectrum of agencies. We have multimedia centres, virtual Manchesters, cyber cafes, intelligent quarters, digital undergrounds, interactive cities, cable rings, electronic village halls, on-line tourist info, hybrid arts happenings, performances....