About the Banff New Media Institute (BNMI)

BNMI provides research opportunities, summits, resulting research prototype labs, professional development workshops, co-productions, partnerships, project commissions, academic exchanges, and publishing and business incubation.

New media makes up the fabric of daily life and our digital, networked futures. Communications and cultural industries press together. Schools, colleges, and universities in urban and rural settings rely on digital delivery. Several generations see video games as essential to their entertainment. Content, technology, and infrastructure requirements do not match. In the next decades, we can become consumers of culture and tools, or we can become inventors and producers. The Banff New Media Institute (BNMI) is a world-class research and content innovation centre. Fundamental to BNMI is the belief that the creative sector – art and cultural industries – in collaboration with scientists, social scientists, and humanists have a critical role to play in developing technologies and content that work for human betterment. We draw on over fifteen years of new media efforts at The Banff Centre. Working with key partners, BNMI leverages the capacities of networked knowledge and technology. BNMI focuses on the culture of use and participation, enabling the creation of technologies and content.

BNMI is a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural environment with an effective network in Canada and abroad. We have an international and cross-cultural perspective and continue to work to insure participation from Aboriginal creators and scientists as well as those from diverse cultures from within and outside Canada. Participants describe Banff as a "third space," where individuals can relax institutional behaviours, engage in dialogue, and develop and test ideas. The Banff Method, applied in themed international summits and project workshops, combines dialogue, project facilitation, concept synthesis, networking, and documentation to accelerate this process.

New media at The Banff Centre converges art, design, architecture, dance, performance, computer science, engineering, and science research with education, health, cultural industries, social sciences, humanities, and other constantly emerging forms of content. There are clear links between emerging research fields such as nano-technology and the need to apply digital visualization means, haptics, and appropriate interfaces to the representation of knowledge. Researchers require new media to work and communicate with other researchers. This ability to communicate is critical to the concept of "convergence" – the evolving interconnectedness and multidisciplinary nature of cultural industries, networks, knowledge domains, and media formats. BNMI brings together the core of the convergent process.