DA+C Festival began in 2011 and became Malaysia’s first culture and heritage-inspired digital festival. The inaugural festival was held in July 2011 over a three-day period at the UNESCO award-winning Suffolk House, Georgetown, Penang. It showcased the country’s most innovative talents from the fields of animation, video, design, computer programming and music. This was part of the organizers’ attempt to kickstart a renewed interest in heritage buildings. Notable Malaysian artists were commissioned by the Festival to reinterpret the history, stories and environments of the venue into digital-based mediums. The resulting works were then presented via interactive art installations and building video projection mapping; a Festival highlight was heritage building projection mapping featuring Suffolk House, a first for Malaysian digital art.


In 2015, the Festival returned to Georgetown with the theme CULTURETOPIA- looking at the city’s urban fabric and searching for ways to include it in the (digital) dialogue of a modern town. Artists created dialogues and engaged with the local built environment through different ways of urban intervention. The artworks featured also explored forms of networked spaces; connecting the disconnected, temporal, ephemeral, sublime, specificity, and field forces. Encompassing a wider geographical location, more programs, as well as additional artists from around the region, this year’s installment further explored the conversations sparked by the first DA+C; an experimentation to shed light or to create a new, contemporary definition of modern intangible heritage.