MONDAY, 29 January 2001
Breakout: Business
Personal Video & Public Access: The Future of Media Arts Centers
Neil Sieling, moderator:
I date back to the early years of media arts centers, when our main concerns were with the institutional, with bricks and mortar, with staffing, and with the crucial technology that could give a media maker the necessary talisman or key to get into broadcast space. Media art centers were designed to provide communities with the requisite collective tools, expertise and motivation. They could then push a social point of view or an aesthetic out into the world.
| "Media art centers were designed to provide communities with the requisite collective tools, expertise and motivation." NEIL SEILING |
Many of these centers have been going all this time, and they habe had to evolve along with the evolution of different technologies. The onset of digital poses the question that Andrew Blau mentioned in the opening address, when he referred to the kinds of unseen and unexpected changes that will happen when digital media are established and traditional boundaries and moorings are displaced.
Tommy Pallotta and Bob Sabiston, producers of the short animated clip, have proceeded from different sources. Bob was trained at the Media Lab. He never encountered a media arts center. They have learned the coding, they do the shooting, they do the cutting, and the piece gets put together completely within a bungalow in Austin, Texas. So the factory is somebody's basement, as is the delivery of the work, which is crunched and digitized and can be accessed via a website. So viewers, even if they miss it on PBS, can always go to the website. Tommy and Bob also work on a festival called Conduit out of Austin, where they are intending to rethink the whole notion of what a festival is and try to move toward the notion of a virtual festival. Other people are also moving in this direction, so we are a far cry from media art center culture was 25 years ago.
A lot of people are seduced by this kind of power, by the ability to run virtual operations, even though one thing that's missing is the pleasure of being in a social space with a lot of people attending to some vision. That space could be a media arts center or an exhibition venue. This kind of social need isn't often taken into account by theorists of the digital and the virtual. Media arts centers have always provided that kind of service, and this panel will be telling us how some media art centers have evolved over the last twenty-five years, and also discussing the centers' future prospects.
Gail Silva, FAF
The Films Arts Foundation (FAF) was really created by a group of mostly political documentarians and experimental filmmakers. It was created for two different reasons. First, because film equipment was so expensive that no one could afford flatbeds on which to edit. Secondly, because motivation was needed to create a circle or a community of people w
ho could use this very expensive machine collectively while at the same getting together socially.
| "We represent a community that continues to make social-issue, social-change documentaries." GAIL SILVA |
I think one of the things that's been vital to media art centers, and I know to FAF in particular, is the whole shared social context and shared value system of the members of our community. We started as and continue to be a membership service organization, however we define service in the new technological age. We have 3,400 members. We represent a community that continues to make social-issue, social-change documentaries.
The whole idea of digital technology making a difference for people, making it easier for them to produce work, can only become real if we give tools to people who haven't had such access before.
I think one of the things that has made all these organizations particularly important, and will continue to do so, is the sort of political access we've been able to provide and the policy areas where we've been able to make an influence. If you have an organization with three to four to five thousand people behind it, you can do something really tangible, something real. For example, you can be part of the creation of something like ITVS. You can be one of the voices needed to make sure that non-mainstream creators partake of all these new delivery systems.
In the future, in all probability, we'll also be doing some sort of online teaching, but much of our activity will still involve people sitting around in a circle, people having actual personal contact. We sponsor a lot of events that are about bringing people together. We do screenings all the time. Part of our job any time we do exhibition is to bring new people to the work of independents. We're doing open houses all the time now. We're planning one a quarter. This is all about getting people in front of other people's work.
Mindy Aronoff, BAVC
I think people still want to work with, and still want to learn from people that they like, and we gravitate towards those people that seem to be like us. That's one thing that media arts organizations can do.
Demystifying technology is one of our big goals. We can break down a lot of the hipness around technology and can make it more accessible for folks. We want to democratize it. One way we can do this is by commingling community and industry. So we're learning all the time ourselves and then we're turning around and teaching what we learn.
Ken Jordan, Writer
I think we are now coming to an interesting moment. The Internet and the rise of a lot of new digital media technologies suggest that in the future media art centers may take other forms and become accessible in many different ways. We may see them popping up in unlikely places, or see organizations and institutions offering similar kinds of services appearing in places where we would never have looked for them in the past.
| "The Internet and the rise of a lot of new digital media technologies suggest that in the future media art centers may take other forms and become accessible in many different ways. " KEN JORDAN |
When you look at what services a media art center can provide, you realize that they have much to do with information sharing and with giving people access to resources and to other people with whom they want to work. The Internet, meanwhile, is teaching us that what we think of as a community doesn't necessarily have to be local or regional.
We've been working with the National Dance Project to see all the efficiencies that may be obtained from a single infrastructure with many levels and layers that people can use to enter from different directions and cross-reference to find each other in different ways.
This relates directly to something Larry Kirkman said earlier this morning. Not-for-profit institutions have a lot of value that can be leveraged when they go online. They've got brands, they have existing audiences, they have relationships with the media, they have experience in producing great content, they have a tradition of values that is trusted in their regional communities. What the National Dance Project understood was that one could empower presenters by using strong websites promote and support the performing arts via the Internet. At the same time, we also realize that the performing arts community is notoriously cash poor and resource poor. So to use the web effectively we really needed to do some capacity building. You have to teach skills, and you have to provide people with the right computers and software to make sites effective.
Now I'm not saying that small media arts centers and independent organizations need to do this by themselves. Not at all. I'm very appreciative and aware of how you work, what it is that you need and how much you can get done with how little you have. But all of us in the not-for-profit field have the potential to look for alliances across many smaller organizations on a field-by-field basis, looking to see where large investments could make a difference. In this way smaller, independent organizations can take advantage of technology and communication tools that they could not otherwise afford.
Software for specialized direct marketing services is being developed in the business community at a pretty remarkable rate. The question is, how do our under-resourced communities get access to what the business world takes for granted? It's very hard to pay for these services on our own, let alone learn how to implement them. The answer surely lies in the development of larger national organizations designed to serve small not-for-profits.