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By Patricia R. Zimmerman
Mediachannel.org
NEW
YORK, JUNE 9, 2005 — Paradoxes swerve through
all public media sectors like Class V rapids.
It’s a dizzying, overwhelming, contradictory raft ride.
And it demands our collective attention, work and thinking.
These paradoxes surface in sweeping technological changes such
as the digital, but others erupt more powerfully in social and
political realms. As noted media historian Erik Barnouw once
shrewdly observed, every new media technology launched in the
last 120 years has been met with equal measures of hope and
despair.
A recently published report from the National Association of
Media Arts and Culture, Deep Focus: The Future of Independent
Media, suggests a landscape of independent media filled with
new technologies, uncertainties, rewirings, models. The report
opens up questions rather than supplying answers -- and that's
the kind of conversation and debate a vigorous, engaged public
media are going to need in the 21st century. This new media
ecology baffles, enthralls, seduces, overwhelms, engulfs and
energizes us all. The political stakes, during the Bush regime,
are higher than ever.
Decentralization of political actions through cell phones
and swarming confront the centralization of surveillance, border
monitoring, data mining, nationalism, racism. The digital divide
separates the global north from the global south, yet many developing
countries, adopting the World Summit on the Information Society
principles, have leapfrogged technologies for digital opportunity
and access.
Old analog tools such as 16mm film and Kodachrome are endangered
species, yet new digital tools open up production for new makers.
Making media available for free can increase its distribution.
Universities may be the last place in the universe that buy
independent media and compensate makers fairly.
The media consolidations of the last 15 years constitute some of the most massive mergers in the history of global capital, yet the bottom-up insurgencies of the anti-globalization, anti-war, digital art and microcinema movements pulse with a mighty energy. Everything seems virtual, yet live artists in real spaces with real audiences, such as the Paper Tiger Shocking and Awful series on Iraq, make a difference.
These unchecked mergers propagate a media monoculture of mind-deadening consumerism, yet a diverse media ecology erupts nearly everywhere and in unexpected places: in anti-copyright music samplers, in remixes in clubs, in socially conscious gaming, in hand processed experimental film, in pirate media projects, in cut-ups of George Bush, in flash animation, in digital video features, in cable access, on public plasma screens, in low power FM, in anti-war media.
Public media makers and thinkers must abandon dogmatism and stasis. We must work the blurs between these paradoxes, operating in the cracks and fissures to make new hybrids.
All new matrixes evolve from older matrixes. Between 1895, the beginning of cinema, and 1914, the emergence of Hollywood, technological and social change produced an equally volatile media environment. Amateur and professional were fluid. Multiple screens and interfaces, from the nickolodeon to vaudeville to the phantasmagoria, intersected. Silent film screenings were performative and mobile, with projectionists and live musicians adapting to audiences.
This historical matrix reminds us that machinery alone does not
determine shifts in media arts practices. Pressing social, economic
and political combustions force realignments. Technology can't
answer the question of economic sustainability for independent
artists and producers. How can they make a living in this changing,
long-tail media environment which markets everything? And when
anyone can make work, but not everyone can pay their rent from
it?
Deep Focus describes independent media practices. Public media
are no longer one unified practice of pure, uncontaminated independent
media battling against corrupt corporate media.
Instead, there
is an exhilarating heterogeneity and hybridity of practices, forms,
communities, technologies. There is no longer one screen, but
many screens. It is analog and digital simultaneously. Works move
between different milieus and across many platforms. New practices,
new forms, and new institutions define a diverse public media
ecology interacting in mobile layers.
Collaboration and conceptualization
dislodge auteurism and romanticism. Content is more important
now than ever, with urgent analysis of race, gender, war, empire,
transnationalism, the global south, clean water demanding our
engagement. New social spaces and new architectures for media
spur us to revitalize our definitions of independent media: the
global indymedia movement, culture jammers, samplers, cut-ups,
flash animation, radical gaming, performance, installation, live
remixers, digital art, creative disturbances.
We are now in the
midst of the archivalization of the universe. Yet not everything
that is archived is on the internet; films and real artifacts
still abound. All sustain histories of all that the transnational
capital would suppress, silence and hide. The archive is the place
of collective memory. But it can no longer remain inert and stagnant,
producing sacred objects and treating media like the holy Shroud
of Turin.
The archive must be preserved, used, mobilized and activated
to morph history with the future. Laptop DJ/VJ remix culture insists
that images and sounds are modular, changing, migrating, fluid,
open to debate and intervention. Remixes create necessary embodied
spaces for fun and pleasurable collectivity.
We in public media
must also refuse the horrors of nationalism, infinite war and
empire by resolutely internationalizing all that we do. We must
shift our vectors away from the U.S. to connect with the rest
of the globe. We must transnationalize our conversations, our
ideas, our practices.
We need a popular front uniting all sectors
of our public media ecology. We need to intermix and crosswire
its heterogeneous elements -- media reform, low-power FM, high-art
cinema, PBS and NPR, film festivals, music samplers, archives,
radical gaming, video installation, net art, long-form investigative
documentary, internet cut-ups, cable access, bloggers and beyond.
Together, we need to detonate and then churn up old ways of thinking,
making and showing. We need to be unafraid: without conflict,
there can be no change. We need to imagine new flows and new landmasses
for an energized, imaginative, and resolutely insurgent public
media. We need hope, not despair. We need more public domains
-- lots of them -- for more public media. And we need them now.
— Patricia R. Zimmermann is the author of States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies and Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film and co-editor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories.
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