WAVES
Programming
Sporadic describes the L.A. marginal art screenings, for example, one Sunday or Monday night per month. Yet the slightly independent films are showing all weekend with some industry support. Meanwhile galleries and museums are showing only installations and schools and conferences are the only sites for new media.
On the other hand (the artist's), the work is somehow still being produced. Our last open call brought in 400 entries, versus 250 for the previous festival. After Feb. 2, our next deadline, we will take a tally again. We particularly try to blend genres into thematic areas to mix animation, art, docues, and narratives to get to the social and aesthetic issues surfacing in different 'hoods maybe for related reasons.
Collaborating
In general we are working with more systems to get the tapes out without needing to increase staff or office costs. Some freelance help is hired as needed. To get the most bang for our festival dollars we re-curate the video programs for various systems particularly libraries and high schools. Four programs of 90 minutes are made into attractive informative packages and given to 75 L.A. public libraries. We can watch each tape's check out rate in all parts of the city and find they do well though not like Hollywood's. For 40 L.A. public high schools, we hire 8 teachers to examine and recombine our last festival's tapes into thematic programs to be used by History, Social Studies and Language Arts teachers with the aid of curriculum guides. This year's subjects were Gender, Race, Mass Media and Economic Issues. In addition, the local public TV station includes us annually for an hour that garners as much audience as our whole festival.
So we are working with non-profit systems:
- public TV
- libraries
- high schools
- our WWW site is a resource guide for local media makers.
- L.A. Channel is a consortium of local public access stations.
- Free Speech TV is a national group of progressive stations.
We also work with bigger and older institutions. Our next festival will probably emanate out of MOCA (The Museum of Contemporary Art) because of its central location and ability to generate press and audiences. With only one big event every two years, splash is required. This year tourist buses with video monitors at each seat will include artists' works on our way to other artists' video installations and performances, past locales of thematic relation to the works of the evening. Other years we worked with the County's summer concert series with positive yet expensive results and with numerous other small art venues with less expensive but labor intensive and less spectacular results.
Now we are also turning to some commercial ventures to reach new audiences. For a pop music club with a video marquee on Sunset Strip with 65,000 people passing per day, we are selecting artists' videos which will complement the drive-by situation and address the broad audience. The neighborhood is composed of Hollywood yuppies, Russian seniors and gay swingers!!!
There is a small video distributor called VideoActive in Silverlake (my next door neighborhood) who is going to package, advertise and sell a compilation reel from our last festival targeted to the independent stores across the country.
These efforts are in spite of our defunding by the Irvine and MacArthur foundations who have changed their priorities. The City and County are only funding organizations above the $75,000 and $200,000 markers respectively. In other words small organizations are getting squeezed and new organizations are getting locked out as the creeping defunding digs deeper, even though or because there are 1000 arts organizations in Los Angeles, according to Aaron Paley at CARS. The push is to work with corporations about which I try to stay inventive and optimistic, yet solicitations for corporate sponsors for our next festival have continued to evoke mute responses so far.
The commercialization of art is the strongest trend I've encountered since post-modernism was invented, so I am wondering if it will appear eventually in the art history books between the pages about corporate space and private interests. The ring of the phrase "public air waves" diminishes in my inner ear.
So L.A. Freewaves is offering "Intro to Internet" workshops for artists in low income areas to spread the media activist word in a country that idolizes democracy, but that doesn't vote, that prevents other democracies from forming, that penalizes still others for not being democratic, and that economically prevents us from seeing noncommercial media. I am advocating watching more than our own mirror.
Anne Bray is the Director of L.A. Freewaves.
© 1997 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. All Rights Reserved.
