Items tagged with "conference"

A report from this conference that discussed strategies of change and survival in our ever shifting media landscape.

The Technology in the Arts Conference is a resource for the arts community, sparking dialog around the role of technology in our planning and programming.

Being a dilettante professional relatively new to the field, this conference was a great view from the frontier. From meeting other media makers and supporters from the ‘old school’ to hanging out with fellow VISTAs working at NAMAC’s member organizations, I was thoroughly ecstatic to have attended. In going forth with my work here at NAMAC, I feel better informed as their new Online Community Manager...

I arrived in Austin ready to explore the state of the media arts in a mostly uncharted territory. I had no idea what to expect, as no NAMAC conference has ever taken place below the Mason Dixon line. The theme of the 2007 NAMAC national conference is “The Frontier is Here”. For me, someone who is often seen as being on the “bleeding edge” of education, art, and technology, this frontier is both political and geographical in nature.

This was my first NAMAC conference and my first time Austin. On arriving I was really excited by the energy of the people there: everyone had a project they were working on and their eagerness to share was evident on faces and in the glossy literature passing from hand to hand...

Media distribution, and its quicksilver changeability over the last few years, dominated the conversation on a wide range of NAMAC panels at last month’s conference. It started the first morning, when Rick Linklater, asked by Janet Pierson to assess the state of affairs today, conceded that it’s both the best of times and the worst of times for independent makers.

I don’t know if it was the conference, the city or the wonderful people I met, but I left Austin with the intention and hope that one day I would return. The NAMAC Conference was the first I attended in my life. I had no idea what to expect when I left Oakland. Both the conference and the humid heat were all new to me. But besides a few problems here and there, I’m glad the conference went the way it did.

Last Monday, I boarded a plane to Austin, TX so that I could attend the NAMAC Austin Conference: The Frontier is Here. Yianeth Saen, a fellow young filmmaker and member of BAVC’s Factory video program, was my travel companion and roommate for the week. Yianeth and I arrived at the Sheraton in Austin just in time to meet up with some of the other young adults attending the conference.

NAMAC co-director Helen De Michiel set the tone for the conference with her welcoming remarks. She challenged us to think about the ethical use of new technologies in our work; about how to take action, collaborate and build our communities with concern for the common good. An old theme to be sure, but one that needs deeper consideration as we move into a media landscape that favors increasingly more solitary media. “Do It With Others”, she said “connect, communicate, collaborate”.

What IS this shit? Some stuffed-shirt museums may fit the portrait of "elitist" arts in the NEA's American Canvas (sic!) report. Or maybe the symphony, opera, dance programs... But the media arts? OUR MEDIA ARTS, that sanctified realm of ideological acuity and radical social commitment in the U.S. since before the NEA even applied a name to this field?