regional projects, including the digital art project Bitscape. Artist Pip Shea worked with youth from Morwell, Moe, Wagga Wagga and the Macedon Ranges to create audio-visual works which were displayed as large-scale projections on a 90-metre high cooling tower. 2004 Next Wave Festival – Unpopular Culture Theme for the 2004 Festival was 'Unpopular Culture' and was designed to encourage a range of responses to current-day issues and youth culture. Artistic Director Marcus Westbury, who was in the demographic of festival artists, embraced Melbourne's inner-city laneways, old Dojos and empty buildings. Highlights included the Festival Club, which presented the first ever Freeplay conference, the Containers at Federation Square program, and Colliding Worlds – a major regional program. In all 600 artists participated in 90 projects that attracted massive audiences and inspired a new generation of young Next Wave participants. 2002 Next Wave Festival – Free at Last Under the direction of Steven Richardson as Executive Producer/CEO and David Young as Festival Director, the 2002 Next Wave Festival was most notable for offering an entirely free program. With the tag line 'Free at Last', the festival delivered a cultural rodeo of art, pop culture, new media, social action, environmental concerns, healthy dissent and extreme sport. The most colossal example of this was the Colony Project, during which acrobatic angels lived in the spire of the Victorian Arts Centre. The Festival also featured the on-line Megabite project, showcasing short works of digital animation. 2000 Next Wave Festival – Wide Awake – Dreaming at Twilight To usher Next Wave into a new century and millennium, Artistic Director Campion Decent quickly settled on the theme Wide Awake – Dreaming at Twilight. From this a program was curated, exploring ideas of collective dreaming, slipping between subliminal states of alertness. The 2000 Digital Arts package saw technology spill over into everything from live performance to the visual arts. The festival's web site was by far the most extensive thus far, including an events program, audience surveys, discussion lists, and an annexe to the community-building exercise Fest on the Net. 1998 Next Wave Festival – Distance While each festival emerges with its own vision, Artistic Director Zane Trow entered his fourth festival with a decision to develop a program along a single curatorial brief: Distance. The theme encouraged various responses, with artists exploring distance along various lines, including geography, culture and gender. Zane was unable to complete his