The concept of biological ecosystems works as a metaphor for many complex systems, and is used and extended in this study to represent the relationships within social, cultural and artistic systems between the agents involved in the creation, research, exhibition, enjoyment, experimentation, education and socio-economic integration of digital media art, paying attention to creative, organisational and participatory aspects.
For this work, a path of research and reflection was followed, through the author's direct experience but always supported by the experience of others, in their accounts and reflections, in the ecosystems materialised in digital media art festivals, held mainly in Portugal, and also through an analysis of contemporary thought that dissects the mechanisms of control, aggregation, separation and empowerment relevant to digital media art ecosystems.
This path aims to produce a current, analytical account, certainly subjective – since it is based on personal experience and interpretive analysis – but one whose intention is to unveil invisible yet important, current and active mechanisms that affect the relationships between the various agents of the ecosystem and their relationship with the current socio-economic paradigms characteristic of the active generations, permanently connected to ubiquitous digital networks: the experience economy and the attention economy.
At a time when the centre of the ecosystem has been taken over by the creative economy and its agents – industry, companies, cultural and leisure venues and even the Academy – and as artistic creation and production are commodified, those paradigms are also linked to the growth and popularisation of hacktivism and artivism, which put artists and their works back at the centre of the ecosystem, strengthening their ties to the whole surrounding environment, both through the interventions they undertake and through the questions they raise.
While some of these mechanisms may already be well known in isolation, their interdependence and interrelation had not been presented until now, and producing new meaning from blocks of prior knowledge is one of the major aims of any research.