Tomorrow sees the start of the third Dublin Electronic Arts Festival, an event that looks set to stay. Good news, writes Jim Carroll

This year's event hasn't even started and already Eamonn Doyle is talking about how next year's Dublin Electronic Arts Festival will shape up. It's good news. With the third instalment beginning tomorrow - an outing that Doyle, one of the festival's organisers, says will signal a shift in direction - DEAF, it seems, is here to stay.

It's the kind of festival that should certainly be a fixture on the city's events calendar. The huge growth in the popularity of electronic music means an event that showcases innovative acts is always going to create interest. Although some may regard DEAF as a club-oriented event (after all, Doyle runs the D1 techno label and the Model 1 club night) Doyle has always had very different intentions.

"When we first decided to do DEAF, three years ago," he says, "my aim was to put electronic music in those venues you didn't associate with electronic music, like City Hall, the National Concert Hall or Christ Church. Those three were my holy-grail venues, and City Hall is the first of those to come through." Doyle points to the legendary Coil's appearance at City Hall as encapsulating "where we want to go with DEAF: that calibre of act in that kind of venue".

Such a move will mean a much more varied musical diet. "We want to branch out into showcasing all elements of electronic art. The title of the festival is wonderfully vague, and we want to make use of that. It's not a techno festival, it's not a dance-music festival, it's much, much more than that - and it's definitely the direction we're going to take DEAF."

Doyle and his fellow organisers, Karen Walshe and Rob Rowland, have no doubts. "I think people were presuming we were going to end up in the Point with 8,000 people and turn it into Sónar [ the cutting-edge festival in Barcelona]. We don't have the population here to support that kind of thing. So after last year's festival we decided to widen the variety of acts we were booking for the festival and go in another direction."

This means working well in advance, which is why DEAF 2005 in many ways came before DEAF 2004. "Once we had decided where we wanted DEAF to go," Doyle says, "we ended up programming next year before we programmed this year, because you need to be working two years in advance to get the kind of people we're looking to book. This year is very much a bridge between where it looked like DEAF was going and where we want it to go."

Funding could yet scupper DEAF's plans. "Not putting on the poor mouth or anything, but we have not yet got to the stage where we're breaking even. Sure, we're getting a reduced rental rate for City Hall, but we're still paying what we think is over the odds. The British Council, though, have come on board in a huge way this year, and they're pretty much funding the City Hall gig; we've also got a very small festivals grant from the Arts Council, which is a huge step forward for us."

In previous years support came from Finnish, German, British, Austrian and French cultural bodies and embassies, but their Irish counterparts were slow to see what DEAF was about. That, Doyle says, has changed. "We had a fantastic meeting with the Arts Council about 10 months ago, and since then they've directed a lot of people towards us who could be interested in working with us or just looking for advice." More cash from the tightly guarded Merrion Square coffers would help, of course, but that should come with time.

One big fillip was this summer's DEAF Junior workshop, a collaboration between the festival and the Ark children's cultural centre, which gave 20 children access to the nuts and bolts of digital music and video production, culminating in a showcase as part of Temple Bar's Diversions season. "Just doing that workshop has raised our profile outside the club world," says Doyle.

Its success means he and his colleagues are now open to seeing DEAF as more than a series of October concerts and showcases. "We were a little precious before this year," says Doyle. "We had opportunities to do other things in 2003, during the summer and around the St Patrick's Day festival, but we turned them down, because we wanted to keep the name solely for what we were doing in October.

"We really want to explore these new avenues a lot more over the next year, especially the DEAF Junior workshops. I'm very interested in the educational aspects of DEAF Junior, and there are a few ideas circulating about where we might take it, but again it depends on funding."

Not that DEAF has forgotten its roots. "I'm still interested in the dance floor and dance-floor music, and I don't want to downplay it, because it's an integral part of what we do as D1, but the lure of a bigger dance floor has receded," says Doyle.

"Even when we were putting on techno events within DEAF the highlights for us and our friends were the smaller club events. It was quite telling that even when we had a couple of thousand people dancing to techno in the Storehouse I was still a lot more interested in having 200 people in a smaller setting."

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Five to catch

Rahzel (Village, tomorrow) The godfather of noise, former Roots rhymer and recent collaborator with Björk on her fantastic Medulla CD.

Moog (Sugar Club, Wednesday) Screening of Hans Fjellestad's documentary on Bob Moog, the creator of the classic synthesiser.

Bassbin (Crawdaddy, Friday) The drum and bass highlight of the weekend, with live performances from Paradox and Polska.

Coil (City Hall, Saturday) Electronic-music pioneers stage their quasi-ritualistic live show.

Juan Atkins (Crawdaddy, Sunday) The godfather of Detroit techno tops a huge bill, with acts from Cologne, Amsterdam, Tallinn and London.