Positive Core Value: Innovating and inspiring audiences across disciplines
Media arts practitioners value innovation and interdisciplinary approaches that reach new audiences. Participants’ stories emphasized their willingness to experiment with new ideas, challenge existing frameworks, and work across disciplines to engage audiences.
When
Francesca Talenti agreed to take part in a film-dance collaboration as
part of the Cucalorus Film Festival’s Dance-a-lorus program, she gave
up a measure of creative control over her short film in exchange for
the potential benefits of a creative collaboration. Not only did the
film and dance pieces work beautifully together, the initial project
has led to a continuing collaboration.
George Fifield described the process of launching the first Boston Cyberarts Festival as, “taxiing down the runway while learning to fly.” He got the ball rolling based on an awareness of trends in technology and the arts, and a growing sense that people were wanting to come together across disciplines. “There was a vision and a broad structure, not really a plan, but a willingness to leap in and take action based on the opportunity.” As the process unfolded, more partners came on board and the festival attracted funding and international artists.
In opening its 10th biennial festival at the Hammer Museum in 2006, L.A. Freewaves screened video art “like paintings,” according to Freewaves’ founder Anne Bray. Using 50 projectors on internal and courtyard walls, the Hammer exhibition “changed the form” of the work while reaching 1300 people. According to curator Amy Beste, the new media project [FRAY] challenged existing aesthetic frameworks and built audiences for new media by “linking historic film and video art with new media work.” The project included a conference, discussions, and screenings over a six-month period with the collaboration of several departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago plus national and international artistic partners.
When Tucson’s Jewish Film Festival needed to build attendance, they brought different communities together with programming that combined film screenings with live acts. According to the festival’s Susan Silverman, a particularly memorable example was a documentary screening and gospel music performance featuring Joshua Nelson, which drew a multicultural and intergenerational crowd of 500. Nelson, a black and Jewish gospel sinter, was the subject of the documentary. The Jewish Film Festival is now in it’s 18th year. The Tucson International Children’s Film Festival, which was launched in 2007, is now set to become an annual event thanks to creative interdisciplinary program offerings. According to organizer Jeff Yanc, examples included pairing films with an African band, a sing-along and a puppet-making session, which helped to fill the house every day of the weeklong festival.
In 1987, EZTV created 18 different events within the Fringe Festival, including screening documentaries and pioneering video-performance hybrids. With a total of 800 different events, the Fringe Festival was self-directed and self-funded by the artists. According to EZTV’s Michael Masucci, one of the main strengths of the endeavor was that artists could move fluidly between disciplines. In the 1970s, as he was planting the seeds for Bullfrog Films (a distributor of environmental and social justice film titles), John Hoskyns-Abrahall and his partner were hired by Rodale press to create and promote a documentary based on the book, Diet for a Small Planet. Working with churches and other faith-based groups concerned with hunger, the duo created and distributed 25,000 dinner placements with a world hunger quiz to help raise public awareness.
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When Francesca Talenti agreed to take part in a film-dance collaboration as part of the Cucalorus Film Festival’s Dance-a-lorus program, she gave up a measure of creative control over her short film in exchange for the potential benefits of a creative collaboration. Not only did the film and dance pieces work beautifully together, the initial project has led to a continuing collaboration. find this story on the timeline |
