Calling all media arts centers, community technology centers, museums, film festivals, media distributors, film archives, youth media centers, community access TV stations and independents working in the field of media arts to contribute to this digital timeline and scrapbook to help assemble a history of the organizations and people who have pioneered and nurtured the growth of independent media production, exhibition and distribution around the globe.
What is the media arts? And what is a media arts center? How have these vital non-profit and community-based cultural organizations, collectives and educational centers, as facilitators of storytelling using film, video, audio and digital arts, contributed to how we see ourselves and our communities?
Take a moment to compose the history of your organization and post it on this site. Illustrate it with choice mementos from your personal or institutional archives. Such items could include old press clippings, mimeographed flyers, meeting agendas, film calendars, audio and video tapes clips of specific events.
This website has been created on the occasion of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture Conference hosted by Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia from September 28 – October 2, 2005. Entitled Taking Liberties: Freedom, Creativity and Risk in the Media Arts, the conference brings together independent filmmakers, media arts center staff, programmers, broadcasters, new technologists, archivists, educations, youth media makers, telecommunications experts, community producers, new media artists, cultural critics, activists, policy makers and funders to share, plan, educate, conspire and take some liberties with our previous ways of thinking about our field of the media arts. It’s a call to action to put new meaning to the media arts as a practice of freedom, creativity and risk.
This website, mediaartsmovement.org, is one of the commissioned works made for Taking Liberties, but this website has been designed to have vibrant life after the conference and extend well beyond the participants who gathered for 5 days in Philadelphia.
Created by Philadelphia-based web artists Jen Simmons and Darian Anthony Patrick, the site itself depends on you, the reader, to contribute to what is here. You can not only add a new entry, but you can update, clarify, embellish or otherwise modify any entry in this scrapbook. There are no usernames or passwords required, we have built this as an entirely-open-source space, open to the media arts community and beyond ot make it what you will. Please browse, read, learn, correct, write, and contribute to your heart's content.
As the independent media ecology is changing daily this seemed like an important moment in time to take stock as NAMAC celebrates it’s 25th anniversary.
