You can't even sit at home these days without dealing with something "digital": a toaster, a camera, a television... It can't be long before the advent of digital pyjamas. In the arts, however, "digital" should mean a certain breed of work - modern and, hopefully, creatively exploiting new technology.

Sightsonic, York's festival of digital arts, occasionally stretched that definition: Elephant Talk used commonplace technology in quite a conventional way; there was an element of the "Because we can" to some of the abstract projections that accompanied the Sonic Arts Network's late-night Diffusion gig.

But at its heart Sightsonic had a courageous mix of works, from Viennese record label Mego's sonic battering - laptop DJs surfing the line between noise and music - to short films, drop-in have-a-go sessions and children giving concerts using new technology.

Most innovatively, some of the works were responsive to their surroundings. Ambrose Field's Frontier X had an intriguing take on "background" music. Set up in the bar of the City Screen, it used sensors similar to those of an alarm system to read the movement and number of people in the room. Behind the scenes, a computer was knitting together sounds from a huge bank of possible sounds or ambiences. It was rarely intrusive, but always present: one minute jungle noises, then those of an airport; the gentle sound of lapping water; a clap of thunder.

Over at the City Art Gallery, Chaotic Constructions (by Peter Fluck and Tony Myatt) was also celebrating unpredictability. A rotating wall-mounted sculpture of interconnected lines, curves and coloured shapes (like elements from a Kandinsky painting orbiting each other) is tracked by a video camera, and the movement of certain points is again used to influence music that a computer is creating to its own complex set of rules. A brief glance will yield little satisfaction, but the longer you look and listen the harder it is to walk away. It will never, ever repeat itself. Hopefully this festival will.