(RE)CONSIDER (RE)MIX (RE)FLOW
When I sit in meetings concerned with national media policy, global media reorganization, media reform, or intellectual property and copyright issues, or in briefings on technologies that promise to drive new terms of innovation, an expert will usually refer in passing to “content” and “content providers”—as if the creators of film, video, television, games, the Internet, or whatever motion media platform is being discussed can be neatly contained in a box and brought out only when needed to fill up the pipelines. People who create or support the work at the point closest to the ground and who give public meaning to its shapes are usually absent from these particular discussions, little known, less understood, and generally avoided in the context of these larger systemic issues. The language of the imagination and the articulation of how different groups of media creators (including artists, curators, programmers, funders, technologists, and writers) actively participate in shaping the media landscape are challenging to insert into dialogues where the task is to engineer a contingent yet useful sense of order around these large and unruly issues.
It is often at this point in a particular meeting that I start daydreaming about how I got there—why I was invited and what I have to offer—because I am a practitioner shaped by the media arts landscape both intimately on an experiential level and panoramically, on a social scale. I look through a lens that scans a field layered with new and old structures constantly being built from scratch and obsessively rebuilt by artists and tinkerers enthralled by the visual arts, sculpture, art criticism, political activism, cultural theory, music, performance, or theater and who carry their passions to the moving-image medium. I think about what I want to bring to these discussions—questions and examples about how creators, and the strategies they discover to reach audiences and sustain their work in public, are central to the biggest and seemingly most intractable questions of media change and upheaval we are now facing. The questions stem from a simple belief that change and innovation come from the margins, and in ways that are utterly unpredictable yet profoundly transformative, especially when they are reconsidered, remixed, and reflowed throughout new contexts of understanding.
I recall what I know of the scattered histories of this outer “arts” region of the media world and its ephemeral, fleeting nature—almost invisible in our zeal to see what may come up in the next fifteen minutes of technological seduction. I always want to learn more and to know it from those who lived it, thought about it, and worked it, because from my point of view, the panorama of American media arts practice over the last thirty years is not yet understood fully or deeply. The effort to frame and connect this work—which can often feel both remote yet still contemporary— into the larger picture of social- and cultural-change movements of the late twentieth century is only beginning to find new interest. I don’t think we have yet begun to figure out the significance of the media arts in the greater movements for self-determination and access to tools and distribution systems. Many of these histories are still hidden or temporarily forgotten, with documents and media materials stashed in boxes, closets, and a warren of facilities or archives to which they have migrated. The actual media works may be trapped in co-dependency with aging viewing technologies that are getting harder and more costly to maintain. Depending on your generation—even if you have cared to pay attention, excavate the archives, or talk with the artists whose work may be difficult to find for viewing—you may know mostly only little bits and pieces of these histories. How does this past still speak to us today? When I asked Kathy high, artist, writer, teacher, and publisher of the video art journal Felix, to join me in co-organizing the 2005 edition of A Closer Look, we had been talking about clearing a space in which to reconsider artistic exploration as it unfolded among clusters of media makers who were (and still are) developing organizations and public spaces to facilitate the emergence of an alternative language of motion media, a language that would prove to have a quickly evolving array of dialects and idioms, forms and approaches. It would be a process of reconsideration that seemed right for this moment as media breaks out from its traditional presentation formats and moves into iPods, mobile phones, and other emerging technologies and screening venues.
For this issue, which marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of NAMAC as a national organization serving the media arts field, we put out a call to our members and supporters to write about collectives, communities, and collaborations that embody the spirit of a movement that has gained energy from—and always existed in a key dialogue with—issues of race and identity, marks of regionality, processes of tool exploration and the forms these tools trigger, and the artifacts of mediated communication scattered throughout the environments we inhabit. Historically, the spirit of the media arts has been to push back, to question, to ask the tough questions, to chip away at the rules that say something can’t be done, and to make work or construct processes while the critical investigation is going on. Although it comes at a great price, that is why independents choose to be independents, working alone or in small collaboratives, in nonprofits, or in academic environments where they can be free to succeed or fail on their own terms.
The media arts flourish and gain traction where there has been hospitality from an enthusiastic base of funders and audiences. These two important vectors of the scene are by no means stable and have been coming and going since the field acquired a name for itself in the 1970s. With generous (by today’s standards) local, state, and national funding, along with foundations willing to commit resources to advance media organizations that were incubating new works and new programs, a burgeoning energy magnetized in the 1970s and 80s around nonprofit media arts centers, community exhibition programs, and distribution entities.
Boundaries between groups, institutions, and venues were permeable as they were in the process of being defined, and experiments in organizational structures as well as media-making practices exploded. With more funding available, artists were able to tour, present their work on a rapidly developing circuit, and create new pieces in multiple locations, both nationally and internationally. It was not always necessary for adventurous artists to confine themselves to one genre. In the 1980s, Bill viola’s single-channel video works were distributed through electronic arts intermix to non-theatrical buyers, his work was broadcast on the PBS series Alive From Off Center, and he was creating site-specific video installations in museums.
Today, platforms, niches, and defining disciplines are solidifying, and compartments are neatly erected. Since the traditional sources of arts funding, beginning in the 1990s, have turned elsewhere, the nonprofit media arts sector is in the midst of a period of broad redefinition and restructuring. And as technologies, viewing platforms, and virtual networks evolve at ridiculous speeds, and generational, political, and cultural identities churn in categoric flux, media makers, too, are being forced to choose to work in specific genres: are you a documentarian or an indie narrative filmmaker? Are you positioning yourself in the rarified world of the museum’s white cube to be an installation video artist? Does you work exist only online, or in digital conference presentations? Are you okay with a small but devoted influential audience, or are you still hoping for a large public to see your work exhibited on a big screen, or broadcast and in eternal DVD release? And how will you be able to support your media-related activities and make work over the long term?
The articles we have chosen to include here cannot, by any means, represent a comprehensive view of the range of histories of the media arts field. They are simply what we have today—an eclectic grouping of voices, passions, and concerns. The authors open up a field of inquiry for a new generation that may know very little about the organizations, times, and artists profiled, and they delve into perspectives about these subjects that only the long view backward can offer. By mapping these activities from a twenty-first-century perspective, they point toward the work that still needs to be done on other histories and chronicles that are missing from our collective body of knowledge.
We realized that the histories of the media arts are not easily explained in linear fashion. They are slippery, ephemeral, messy, multicultural, hybrid, and three-dimensional layers upon layers that may touch one another at moments but that also remain discretely separate or related to other creative or technological disciplines. What makes this collection unusual is that the essays are written by individuals who, as artists, organizational directors, scholars, and programmers, are directly participating in the field as it is developing today, and who have a stake in seeing it expand its centrality in the culture at large. It is thinking from the inside out, rather than the other way around.
Reconsider, remix, reflow from the past into the future. The thread that runs through the subjects of all these essays is that of creating dynamic communities and making welcoming places where the artist can be emboldened to try out new ideas or new processes and to break out of the rigid patterns of conventional media storytelling structures. From explorations in self-expression to political message-making in these stories, we see the beginnings of participatory media interactivity. Whenever tools have become available, artists have flocked to try them out, creating a back-and-forth or give-and-take in which the artist refines the tool and, in turn, the medium opens up an increasing range of expressive or storytelling possibilities.
The past is full of materials and questions still unresolved, especially as relates to older practices that shade the work of today. From an alternative perspective, these histories set the stage for thinking about how media can open up a liberating dialogue: for the individual artist herself, with the tools and artifacts of creation, and for the community of creators and the public seeing and responding to the work. Ultimately, these histories open onto the question of how the whole process transforms society and culture in a larger way.
When Patricia Zimmermann looks at the wide historical range of multimedia performance, she takes us from the beginnings of cinema to the farthest new frontiers of locative media experiments, tracing how programmers and artists are continually mining the archives to break down the barriers erected by participants, by tools, and by the screens that either isolate us or bring us together in shared communal experience.
Scott Macdonald considers his cinematic coming-of-age in a memoir that confronts the challenges of the present. What is the role of the film historian in developing new publics for the classic works of “critical cinema,” and how can that work be kept alive for new generations?
The role of regional media organizations as mediators and incubators between artists and the public is explored by Mary Lampe in her chronicle of the unusual history of the southwest alternate Media Project in Houston, its visionary founders, and the exchanges that occurred as cinephilia took root and opened out into the Texas landscape. Robin Oppenheimer brings back to life Seattle’s multidisciplinary art space AND/OR (1974–84), a fluid and influential environment that reveled in experimentation and ephemerality and that still offers a vital legacy for current alternative multimedia arts practices. Ralph Hocking, sherry hocking, and Kathy High reconsider the history of the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York. ETC nurtured the beginnings of video art and should be considered one of the original ‘open source’ environments in which artists, technologists, engineers, and researchers were able to come together to explore, share, and learn about tools and processes in a friendly, laboratory-like space dedicated to freedom of artistic expression and unswervingly committed to “processing and processes.”
In a roundtable e-mail discussion, Melinda Stone, Andrew Lampert, and Rick Prelinger investigate the role of the secret archive in encouraging the ongoing public relevance of works and in sparking the rediscovery of hidden materials by new viewers. What power does “lost film” have? “Access is our highest calling as archivists,” says Rick Prelinger. But what are the tensions and balancing acts that arise between hiding films for preservation and collection purposes, on the one hand, and opening them up to access for the public to rediscover and enjoy or for media makers to use for remix? Erika Dalya Muhammad opens up vast new terrains of inquiry when she traces “electrocultures,” the underecognized lineages of artists of color who continue to reshape digital culture and ideas of race, gender, and multiculturalism as they converge in hip-hop practice and cut-and-mix culture.
It is often at this point in a particular meeting that I start daydreaming about how I got there—why I was invited and what I have to offer—because I am a practitioner shaped by the media arts landscape both intimately on an experiential level and panoramically, on a social scale. I look through a lens that scans a field layered with new and old structures constantly being built from scratch and obsessively rebuilt by artists and tinkerers enthralled by the visual arts, sculpture, art criticism, political activism, cultural theory, music, performance, or theater and who carry their passions to the moving-image medium. I think about what I want to bring to these discussions—questions and examples about how creators, and the strategies they discover to reach audiences and sustain their work in public, are central to the biggest and seemingly most intractable questions of media change and upheaval we are now facing. The questions stem from a simple belief that change and innovation come from the margins, and in ways that are utterly unpredictable yet profoundly transformative, especially when they are reconsidered, remixed, and reflowed throughout new contexts of understanding.
I recall what I know of the scattered histories of this outer “arts” region of the media world and its ephemeral, fleeting nature—almost invisible in our zeal to see what may come up in the next fifteen minutes of technological seduction. I always want to learn more and to know it from those who lived it, thought about it, and worked it, because from my point of view, the panorama of American media arts practice over the last thirty years is not yet understood fully or deeply. The effort to frame and connect this work—which can often feel both remote yet still contemporary— into the larger picture of social- and cultural-change movements of the late twentieth century is only beginning to find new interest. I don’t think we have yet begun to figure out the significance of the media arts in the greater movements for self-determination and access to tools and distribution systems. Many of these histories are still hidden or temporarily forgotten, with documents and media materials stashed in boxes, closets, and a warren of facilities or archives to which they have migrated. The actual media works may be trapped in co-dependency with aging viewing technologies that are getting harder and more costly to maintain. Depending on your generation—even if you have cared to pay attention, excavate the archives, or talk with the artists whose work may be difficult to find for viewing—you may know mostly only little bits and pieces of these histories. How does this past still speak to us today? When I asked Kathy high, artist, writer, teacher, and publisher of the video art journal Felix, to join me in co-organizing the 2005 edition of A Closer Look, we had been talking about clearing a space in which to reconsider artistic exploration as it unfolded among clusters of media makers who were (and still are) developing organizations and public spaces to facilitate the emergence of an alternative language of motion media, a language that would prove to have a quickly evolving array of dialects and idioms, forms and approaches. It would be a process of reconsideration that seemed right for this moment as media breaks out from its traditional presentation formats and moves into iPods, mobile phones, and other emerging technologies and screening venues.
For this issue, which marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of NAMAC as a national organization serving the media arts field, we put out a call to our members and supporters to write about collectives, communities, and collaborations that embody the spirit of a movement that has gained energy from—and always existed in a key dialogue with—issues of race and identity, marks of regionality, processes of tool exploration and the forms these tools trigger, and the artifacts of mediated communication scattered throughout the environments we inhabit. Historically, the spirit of the media arts has been to push back, to question, to ask the tough questions, to chip away at the rules that say something can’t be done, and to make work or construct processes while the critical investigation is going on. Although it comes at a great price, that is why independents choose to be independents, working alone or in small collaboratives, in nonprofits, or in academic environments where they can be free to succeed or fail on their own terms.
The media arts flourish and gain traction where there has been hospitality from an enthusiastic base of funders and audiences. These two important vectors of the scene are by no means stable and have been coming and going since the field acquired a name for itself in the 1970s. With generous (by today’s standards) local, state, and national funding, along with foundations willing to commit resources to advance media organizations that were incubating new works and new programs, a burgeoning energy magnetized in the 1970s and 80s around nonprofit media arts centers, community exhibition programs, and distribution entities.
Boundaries between groups, institutions, and venues were permeable as they were in the process of being defined, and experiments in organizational structures as well as media-making practices exploded. With more funding available, artists were able to tour, present their work on a rapidly developing circuit, and create new pieces in multiple locations, both nationally and internationally. It was not always necessary for adventurous artists to confine themselves to one genre. In the 1980s, Bill viola’s single-channel video works were distributed through electronic arts intermix to non-theatrical buyers, his work was broadcast on the PBS series Alive From Off Center, and he was creating site-specific video installations in museums.
Today, platforms, niches, and defining disciplines are solidifying, and compartments are neatly erected. Since the traditional sources of arts funding, beginning in the 1990s, have turned elsewhere, the nonprofit media arts sector is in the midst of a period of broad redefinition and restructuring. And as technologies, viewing platforms, and virtual networks evolve at ridiculous speeds, and generational, political, and cultural identities churn in categoric flux, media makers, too, are being forced to choose to work in specific genres: are you a documentarian or an indie narrative filmmaker? Are you positioning yourself in the rarified world of the museum’s white cube to be an installation video artist? Does you work exist only online, or in digital conference presentations? Are you okay with a small but devoted influential audience, or are you still hoping for a large public to see your work exhibited on a big screen, or broadcast and in eternal DVD release? And how will you be able to support your media-related activities and make work over the long term?
The articles we have chosen to include here cannot, by any means, represent a comprehensive view of the range of histories of the media arts field. They are simply what we have today—an eclectic grouping of voices, passions, and concerns. The authors open up a field of inquiry for a new generation that may know very little about the organizations, times, and artists profiled, and they delve into perspectives about these subjects that only the long view backward can offer. By mapping these activities from a twenty-first-century perspective, they point toward the work that still needs to be done on other histories and chronicles that are missing from our collective body of knowledge.
We realized that the histories of the media arts are not easily explained in linear fashion. They are slippery, ephemeral, messy, multicultural, hybrid, and three-dimensional layers upon layers that may touch one another at moments but that also remain discretely separate or related to other creative or technological disciplines. What makes this collection unusual is that the essays are written by individuals who, as artists, organizational directors, scholars, and programmers, are directly participating in the field as it is developing today, and who have a stake in seeing it expand its centrality in the culture at large. It is thinking from the inside out, rather than the other way around.
Reconsider, remix, reflow from the past into the future. The thread that runs through the subjects of all these essays is that of creating dynamic communities and making welcoming places where the artist can be emboldened to try out new ideas or new processes and to break out of the rigid patterns of conventional media storytelling structures. From explorations in self-expression to political message-making in these stories, we see the beginnings of participatory media interactivity. Whenever tools have become available, artists have flocked to try them out, creating a back-and-forth or give-and-take in which the artist refines the tool and, in turn, the medium opens up an increasing range of expressive or storytelling possibilities.
The past is full of materials and questions still unresolved, especially as relates to older practices that shade the work of today. From an alternative perspective, these histories set the stage for thinking about how media can open up a liberating dialogue: for the individual artist herself, with the tools and artifacts of creation, and for the community of creators and the public seeing and responding to the work. Ultimately, these histories open onto the question of how the whole process transforms society and culture in a larger way.
When Patricia Zimmermann looks at the wide historical range of multimedia performance, she takes us from the beginnings of cinema to the farthest new frontiers of locative media experiments, tracing how programmers and artists are continually mining the archives to break down the barriers erected by participants, by tools, and by the screens that either isolate us or bring us together in shared communal experience.
Scott Macdonald considers his cinematic coming-of-age in a memoir that confronts the challenges of the present. What is the role of the film historian in developing new publics for the classic works of “critical cinema,” and how can that work be kept alive for new generations?
The role of regional media organizations as mediators and incubators between artists and the public is explored by Mary Lampe in her chronicle of the unusual history of the southwest alternate Media Project in Houston, its visionary founders, and the exchanges that occurred as cinephilia took root and opened out into the Texas landscape. Robin Oppenheimer brings back to life Seattle’s multidisciplinary art space AND/OR (1974–84), a fluid and influential environment that reveled in experimentation and ephemerality and that still offers a vital legacy for current alternative multimedia arts practices. Ralph Hocking, sherry hocking, and Kathy High reconsider the history of the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York. ETC nurtured the beginnings of video art and should be considered one of the original ‘open source’ environments in which artists, technologists, engineers, and researchers were able to come together to explore, share, and learn about tools and processes in a friendly, laboratory-like space dedicated to freedom of artistic expression and unswervingly committed to “processing and processes.”
In a roundtable e-mail discussion, Melinda Stone, Andrew Lampert, and Rick Prelinger investigate the role of the secret archive in encouraging the ongoing public relevance of works and in sparking the rediscovery of hidden materials by new viewers. What power does “lost film” have? “Access is our highest calling as archivists,” says Rick Prelinger. But what are the tensions and balancing acts that arise between hiding films for preservation and collection purposes, on the one hand, and opening them up to access for the public to rediscover and enjoy or for media makers to use for remix? Erika Dalya Muhammad opens up vast new terrains of inquiry when she traces “electrocultures,” the underecognized lineages of artists of color who continue to reshape digital culture and ideas of race, gender, and multiculturalism as they converge in hip-hop practice and cut-and-mix culture.
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