Held in conjunction with the fourth Dublin Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF 4'05), the Darklight Symposium offered a variety of informative panel discussions – which ranged from the blue-skies to the more practical – and some interesting questions thrown into the mix from the floor. At the scary end of the blue-skies spectrum was Barry Vercoe (from MIT's Media Lab), discussing new software that can automatically score a film by listening to dialogue and background noises and automatically generating a score to wallpaper your pictures. With animation-engines drawn from the world of gaming making actors redundant and scripts being written by computer programmes, it can't be long now before no humans will be working in the film industry and everything will be done by computer.

A less scary aspect of Vercoe's brave new world is the concept of Cultural Community Metadata. Consumers are increasingly 'discovering' new ideas and content via the net, though a variety of blogs, discussion boards, and traditional websites. Cool friends and entertainment supplements are being replaced by the web. But while traditional search engines – even the world's favourite corporate monolith, Google) – are good at telling you where to find things you're looking for, but are less adept at recommending content to you on the basis of if-you-liked-that-you-might-like-this. Amazon can be good at this once something has already attained an audience, but is less good at pointing you at the next new thing in advance.

In this regard, Technorati has leapt about the folksomony bandwagon, but this has the drawback of being reliant upon the honesty of content providers, who have to tag their content in the first place. Cultural Community Metadata is a move toward a more semantic web, one which is capable of looking not just at individual words and phrases, but also the context in which they are delivered. Using this technology, search engines will be able to return results more loosely – yet at the same time more accurately – aligned to your areas of interest. In the wired world, word-of-mouth buzz for your product will be increasingly important, and the winners in this game will be the people who understand this and are capable of creating that buzz for you.

As well as the issues of how the distribution of music and films is evolving, the Symposium also addressed the changes in where films are actually being screened – and, consequently, how they are being made and funded. Lisa Roberts, of the Pocket Shorts initiative spoke on the challenges involved in making content specifically for smaller, mobile devices (phones and the new video iPod). On these, much can be lost in the translation of ideas to what is, in effect, an inferior technology. This is one of the more intriguing aspects of the digital revolution – technology is both marching forward into a world of cinema-sized TVs in the home, while at the same time marching backwards to a screen in your pocket that's even smaller than many of the first TVs made.

One way for filmmakers to rise to this challenge is to actually make films using nothing more than a high-end camera-phone, which is precisely what the Pocket Shorts initiative challenges them to do. Not only was this method of production good enough for The Presidents of the United States of America (whose video for Some Postman was shot entirely using camera phones) but there are also a rising number of film festivals dedicated to mobile-produced films.

Meave Connolly, of the Dún Laoghaire based Institute of Art, Design and Technology, addressed one of the funding opportunities opened up by the digital revolution. She spoke on the subject of Video Art, which is distinct from Art House Cinema in that, while many of the films bear more than a passing resemblance to 'proper' films, they are made to be shown in galleries. Accordingly, they are being funded in an entirely different manner to films made for TV and cinema. That there actually appears to be more funding opportunities within the arts community for Video Art than there are within the film industry for TV and cinema programming is an issue which ought to pique the interest of many filmmakers.

Connolly and Roberts were speaking as part of a panel chaired by Rod Stoneman (formerly of the Irish Film Board and Channel 4, currently with Galway's Huston School of Film & Digital Media). This panel dealt with the topic of Audiences and Interfaces, dwelling on issues relating to the atomisation of traditional media outlets and how – or whether – they can survive in a wired world in which appointment to view programming has been replaced by the time-shifting allowed by PVRs and BitTorrent. While opinions were mixed as to whether TV as we know it can adapt to this change or will face a dystopian future, there did seem to be general agreement that the advertisers – who, ultimately, fund much of the programming we currently consume – have no allegiance to any particular distribution medium and will instead follow the audience. Again though, the question of how independent producers can expect to tap into funding within this new environment was – for the most part – left unanswered.

This issue of funding was probably the most intriguing aspect of the day's various panels. As well as challenging traditional methods of production and distribution, the changes in our digital world are increasingly impacting on issues of remuneration for artistic endeavours. Benjamin Mako Hill, from Media Lab's ePublishing group, best represented the problems faced by content creators in the new digital world, with a radicalist's call for the abolition of copyright and the free-flow of content around the web. How, in this free-for-all environment, the content creator is supposed to be compensated for the effort put into the creation process itself was a question time and again posed by members of the audience.

Solutions offered by the panellists ranged from sponsorship (something Peter Bazelgette is calling on TV regulators in the UK to allow more of, but which is also a return to the roots of US TV and still in vogue in the world of radio) to altruistic patronage of the arts. Again, this is the odd thing with our digital future. In many ways, it will still resemble our pre-digital past. Whether such solutions will be sufficient to fund your dreams of a poolside mansion in Beverly Hills, or even on Killiney Hill – let alone fund your next film – we don't yet know. But in the 'new paradigm' this is one of the biggest challenges faced by content creators. Solve that one and you too could join the new generation of e-entrepreneurs and take full advantage of all that the digital age has to offer.

Feargal McKay