Surprising and Unpredictable: Reflections on NAMAC's 20th Anniversary Conference
I started hearing about digital convergence at my first NAMAC Conference in 1998. Three gatherings later, I think we are beginning to sense a real, grounded, and palpable convergence: of media people whose paths don’t usually cross; of ideas and experiences that are not usually spoken about in the same space; and of technologies that truly are beginning to manifest concrete changes in the way we interact as social, cultural, and political beings in the world. This is, after all, what we do: build dialogue through the wide range of motion media forms.
“Taking Liberties: Freedom, Creativity, and Risk in the Media Arts,” unfolded during three gloriously beautiful days in the city of Philadelphia. The timing was perfect, the venues expansive, and I had one surprising and unpredictable experience after another, from conversations in the hallways after panels and at dinners, to business in the hotel lobby, to an experience never to be forgotten: our group visit to the city’s Eastern State Penitentiary, now a preserved ruin and site for embedded art installations. Conference coordinator Gretjen Clausing, along with Scribe Video Center’s executive director Louis Massiah and their skilled and sensitive team of content developers, created programming and hospitality events that cross-generated formal and informal dialogue among peers (for those three days, everyone attending was a peer) that could appear nowhere else in the media world.
Progressive media reformers have their gatherings, and art world people have theirs; producers, curators, and artists go to festivals and broadcast expos; and nonprofit administrators and funders speak among themselves. But the NAMAC Conference makes a point, year after year—and by now, decade after decade—to bring a convergence of practitioners, supporters, and thinkers together across generations and across disciplines to strengthen the core principles of the independent media ecology. In doing so, they discover new (and rediscover old) ways of conducting their missions when they return home to their communities.
Since 1998, when we convened in Pittsburgh, it has been a tradition to invite several Conference participants to write brief reports or impressions about their experiences. The idea is to capture quickly and informally an overview of what these reporters were taking away from the event, including some unique details not to be forgotten. We aren’t interested in reviews as much observations that can be stitched together into a whole—one that would contribute more than the individual parts—without pretending to be comprehensive.
One attendee told me that he was sensing this Conference doing things that still didn’t even have a name or category; the experience was that fresh and nuanced. It was, for him, a truly hybrid experience, where a wide range of participants—media arts leaders and youth, policy experts and artists, activists, journalists, technologists, and archivists—could share a common space and find a common language. This convergence set the stage for keynote speaker Lani Guinier’s marvelous invocation, “Turn your grievances into a cause,” a cause that will open up larger possibilities for us to band together and seek freedom, creativity, and risk, no matter how gloomy or impossible the stakes appear at this shifting historical moment. What else is the point—at this point?
