Large Scope
The Festival was one of the largest held at  Chiang Mai University. There were 3 simultaneous exhibtions over a 12 day period, 6 large screen video projections (over 3X4 meters), 6 large screen televisions and some 40 computers networked to each other and to the Internet.  In addition there were  daily 1-2 hour screenings of selected video art at the CMU theater. Over 200 individual works were selected from over 500 submissions from artists representing all continents. 

Works were accepted from 150 artists and 12 visiting artists who were funded to travel from Europe and Australia to give over 20 workshops to some 150 attendees.  Most of the exhibits  were accessable via the local network and the Internet. 

Over 4000 visitors attended the Festival and the Festival's website attracted over 100,000 visits worldwide. 

The Festival was organized by ICECA (Thailand), MBC (Germany), Audiovisions (Austria). Funding was provided by several European and  local institutions. 

Achievements and discoveries
Thailand is now on the global new media map.  Over 50,000 artists and others who are active in new media now think of Thailand as a new destination for media art. Search engines on the Internet now regularly include the Thailand's First Media Art Festival in searches for new media in Thailand.

There were also several lessons learned from this festival.Thais embraced this new art medium along with more familiar traditional forms, and see no need to impose boundaries on notions of art, be it  modern, traditional, mixed media, and performing arts. These new bounderies of new media generates curiousity rather than skepticism. 

The final days of the Festival were held during Songkran holidays, a time when Thais let go during the hottest time with  splashing water activities. Concurrently there was a local Arts and Crafts festival at the University which attracted  more visitors to the Media Festival.  Thais saw the New Media Festival  as a an extension of the Arts and Craft Festival, which offered  local food, clothing and art stalls to the thousands of Thai's who gathered for these two weeks of Songkran festivities.  It was not unusual for a visitor to spend hours browsing exhibit after exhibit on some of the computers and then join others for more traditional Songkran fun. See what Thais said in the Festival guestbook. 

We also found that new media art attracted entire families with different generations gravitating to the various exhibits. In part, this reflects the variety of art in the Festival. It also shows the appeal of art to Thais of all ages. Even English directions and menues did not present an obstacle to our enthusiastic audience. Workshops, too, were well attended, even though some 75% of the course material was in English.

The Future
This initial exposure to new media will draw many visitors for future events and workshops.  Other events include a group of 3 artists from Belgium giving  2 weeks of intense workshops on video art. In addition, the CMU Faculty of Architecture now plans to install a new media library based on the exhibits of the festival, and provide media art, 3D graphics and animation courses in addition to its computer courses.

CMU Museum has already requested ICECA to begin early planning for a second Festival next year (2004). Based on the interest of Thai students and artists in this Festival, we expect considerably more local contributions to the second Festival.

The contacts we made with many sponsors through this Festival will bear fruit for some time to come.