You may not have noticed it, but we're living through an audio-visual revolution. There's been so much talk in recent years about the impending arrival of digital television, that not enough attention has been paid to the facts that film-making has already been transformed by digital technology, and that the transformation is continuing at an ever-faster pace. For this reason, the first Darklight Digital Film Festival, taking place this weekend at the Irish Film Centre and ArtHouse in Dublin, is a welcome addition to Ireland's proliferating film festival circuit. Conceived and organised by three young women working in the city's new media industries, Darklight is an ambitious attempt to showcase the wide variety of digital work being produced around the world and, increasingly, in Ireland.

"I came back from America, and found that all the people I had been at NCAD with were working in post-production," says Susan Patterson, co-director of Darklight with Chantal Doody and Nicky Gogan. "The most creative people had access to this amazing equipment, and they were being encouraged by their companies to explore the possibilities of that equipment." Gogan, Doody and Patterson set up their digital media company, Sink, a couple of years ago, and Darklight was always part of their plans. "We wanted to get the festival off the ground last year," says Doody, "but Sink wasn't established enough at that point; we needed to get ourselves on a sounder commercial footing, and we probably didn't quite realise the lead-in times and planning involved."

The range of work can be daunting, ranging from games-based graphics through all forms of animation, and from gallery-based, conceptual pieces to documentary, drama and experimental work. But an international circuit for digital work is rapidly developing, which Darklight was able to tap into. "There are digital film festivals all over the world now," says Patterson. "The work we received formed the basis of our programmes. We could only anticipate what that work would be like, and in some cases we had no idea. We got some astoundingly beautiful 3D work, for example."

In putting together their programme, the festival organisers found that they were receiving more work than they expected from within Ireland. "We thought we'd be promoting the festival on the basis of the American stuff like The Last Broadcast, but there's a huge interest in what Irish people are doing," says Doody.

"If you look at someone like Orna Bradshaw, who has a piece in the festival - she bought herself a G3 and a camera, and now she's making a film. So you can do that for a few thousand pounds rather than hundreds of thousands of pounds. The technology lends itself to letting your imagination run riot, because the compositing packages are so amazing now. It's also possible for just one or two people to do work that would have needed a full film crew before."

The festival takes the form of six main screening sessions, with seminars, workshops and sidebar events: Visual Motion explores the development of CGI and 3D animation; Digital Light brings experimental and narrative works to the big screen; Exposure is a programme of new works from students and professionals; Digital Salon is a selection of the latest developments in digital cinema from America and London, and the Digital Feature is The Last Broadcast, a no-budget mock-documentary murder mystery which American film-makers Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler claim is making cinematic history, by being released via satellite. Avalos and Weiler are coming to Dublin from the Cannes Film Festival, where they presented that festival's first all-digital programming exhibition. They will give a workshop on Saturday addressing the new forms of production, distribution and exhibition opened up by digital technology.

A seminar entitled Creating the Digital Future - Media Convergence and Distribution, will also discuss distribution, including Internet and broadband technologies and the impact they will have.

Non-projectable work has been compiled in an art exhibition featuring printed digital work, Websites and interactive CDROMs, while Darklight comes to an end on Saturday night with Future Shadows, a multimedia event in the IFC and Meeting House Square featuring Coldcut, one of the music industry's most enthusiastic proponents of new media.

Darklight's organisers hope the festival will be an opportunity for Irish audiences to see what's happening in new media around the world, to take part in debates about future technologies, and to discuss the creative implications of the digital revolution. "The industry is really starting to develop over here," says Doody. "And we're hoping that this will be the spark that moves things further along."

For information on screenings, contact the IFC booking office at 01-6793477. For other events, tel: 01-6629035 or the festival Website at www.darklight-filmfestival.com