community media
National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture Hosts 2009 National Conference in Boston
We Make the Road By Collaborating
Collaboration has moved from the sidelines to the center of how we do business and fulfill our arts and cultural missions. As media arts organizations and practitioners, our context is an increasingly interdisciplinary and participatory culture.
Commonwealth Comes To Boston
The Mighty Oak of Access: Community Media Mourns the Loss of Dirk Koning
On February 10, 2005, Dirk Koning died of complications during an operation to correct a heart malfunction.
When Dirk Koning entered a room, you knew it. In most places, with the possible exception of an NBA locker room, he was taller than everyone in sight. His size, however, was never imposing; his was a presence that inspired affection. This gentle giant was able to create what has been called the best media center not only in the United States but in the world.
Survival and Resistance: Appalshop’s First 40 Years
Four decades ago, in a Whitesburg, Kentucky storefront that once held a “tire supermarket,” Herb E. Smith, a seventeen-year-old member of the Appalachian Film Workshop—Appalshop, for short—learned to work the 16-millimeter Arriflex-S camera.
CONTEXT
Looking back at the late nineties fifty years from now will be quite entertaining. I won't be here to do it, but being one never to miss the fun, I'll take a crack at it now.
The 1990's have been dubbed the decade of the Web. What hype and hyperbole spewed forth with the onset of the primitive Internet application. Prognosticators predicted the end of every non-virtual institution. Fortunes were made by college grad's overnight with the offering of things appropriately called, "YAHOO".
HEAT
While Seattle's cable access station (TCI, Channel 29) recently has taken some heat for one program with some questionable content, the overwhelming volume of its high quality arts programming has gone unnoticed. Writing as an organizer of the Seattle Independent Film and Video Consortium (SIFVC), I find this lamentable, since the curators of these programs have taken creative steps to network their content with the community and leading media arts organizations in the city.
Videazimut: An International Coalition for Media Democracy
While most people in the United States were celebrating the 4th of July last year, some of us gathered for three exhilarating days on the other side of the Americas to discuss and organize for global democratic communication.
Videazimut, an international coalition of community and public media activists, convened its fifth seminar and first general assembly of its membership at the Instituto Cajamar, near Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Community Networks and Media Arts Centers: What's the Connection?
Seattle is at Ground Zero in the convergence of all the communication technologies - computers, video, audio, satellite, phone, radio, you name it. We just duck and cover and learn to live with the frequent media blasts that hit whenever Microsoft rolls out their latest product or smaller startups like Progressive Networks announce that RealAudio and RealVideo are here. Those of us like Doug Shuler, founder of the Seattle Community Network, who work here in the alternative media world, can see past all the hype and understand the deeper truths of where all this technology is taking us.
Bay Area Video Coalition: Getting Out of the Nonprofit Mindset
In 1996, Bay Area Video Coalition moved to a larger space next to KQED (San Francisco's public television station) and Theater Artaud, a unique and important live performance center. For the last fifteen years BAVC has been located in a lonesome industrial area, so lonesome that sometimes I wonder how BAVC made it.
Right now all media are centers are experiencing how tough it is to adjust to being force fed the "new world order." Shrinking funding, shrinking audiences, blah, blah, blah.
Do the tags, contact information, or descriptions in this profile need updating?
If so, send your updated info to Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz at aggie [at] namac [dot] org!
