"My future?" William Gibson said. "I hope that in the future, I'll be able to go back to my room, sign on to Sundance.com, and download the movies I missed by speaking at this panel."
Missing out on movies, in fact, seemed to be on everyone's mind at the Sundance panel "The Future of Cyberspace: Utopia or Blade Runner," where several hundred turned out Thursday night to hear Gibson, Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow, and writer Paulina Borsook. Most people left early.
"We came here to hear about the future!" audience member Roger Ebert loudly berated the panelists when they strayed from the thesis.
But Sundance is new to the future, and its new push to get there is getting mixed reviews. In 1995, the festival didn't have an email account. Two years later, it seems determined to establish itself as a showcase for new technologies, putting up three different corporate-sponsored venues for new technologies: the New Media Center, with filmmaking programs from Apple, Avid, Sony, and Adobe; Apple's Cool Technologies room, displaying the latest in layered media; and a screening room specifically for works shot with Sony's DVW-700 digital cameras.
The New Media and Cool Technologies rooms have been largely empty, and the centerpiece of the Sony strategy, the digital sci-fi/horror feature Love God, was received with ambivalence.
"We realize these things take time," said Peter Zan, an Apple marketing consultant running demos of Apple products. "Filmmakers are gradually making the switch from analog to digital, and our job is still educational."
Or, as Adams said during the "Cyberspace" panel: "It seems like people are spending more energy in inventing the tools than in using them creatively."
