by Wendy Levy, Director of Creative Programming

I’m heading to Boston on Wednesday for an industry conference called Commonwealth. The conference, co-hosted by the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) and the Center for Independent Documentary, is a place where community media centers, national media arts organizations, university educators, museum presenters, film festivals and archives, youth media programs, public access television stations, national arts policy think tanks, and related groups come together to assess the state of the field, share resources and best practices, inspire each other, build relationships to benefit local neighborhoods, national movements, and global communities.

This is very much the driving force of NAMAC – an alliance of member organizations whose mission is to strengthen both the culture and industry of independent media arts. NAMAC serves organizations working on the ground to help them build program capacity, technical expertise, advocacy tools, best practices, dynamic partnerships, and strategic, sustainable funding.

There is a wide-ranging conference program that seems like it will encourage some healthy introspection, deep insight and critical analysis into what we do every day as part of a collective commitment to social change, art in public life, personal and public expression, human rights, education, and lifelong learning. Even just the title of the conference this year is thought-provoking; it’s an interesting choice to name a public media conference like this CommonWealth, when it’s readily apparent that what connects our organizations often feels like common need.

This conference is very much about transforming that need (for funds, resources, infrastructure, whatever) into creative opportunity, and empowering both fledgling and veteran organizations to create and sustain high quality innovative, visionary, provocative programs. You can’t do too much without serious money; but all the money in the world won’t tell the stories that really matter.

So we come together to re-locate the center of the work, to create some shared language, to laugh, to dance, to listen to smart people talking, to spark the idea for the next killer projects and partnerships.

I’m moderating a panel on Thursday, August 27^th called Exhibition and Distribution in Technological Public Spaces – it deals with the new interactive spaces for sharing media like online galleries, social media platforms, and virtual worlds – with the assumption that public viewings for art and media are no longer necessarily an in-body experience. Can online exhibition and screening spaces replicate the community aspect of real-world spaces? Should it? Some really incredible people from Rhizome, National Black Programming Consortium, Games for Change and the Smithsonian are planning to work with me during this session to blow things up in the room. Participants will hear first-hand and see examples from projects like micro-storytelling kiosks in hospital waiting rooms that digitally capture and distribute the voices of the real victims of the health care crisis; a virtual museum gallery where visitors can share the riveting stories of the Elders in their community, and your avatar walks amongst larger-than-life photographs; massive multi-player video games that engage players in raising awareness about issues like human trafficking and the global water crisis, and more. We hope to create a creative laboratory in 90 minutes,  a platform that will throw the traditional boring panel discussion out on its head, a radical conference model for vetting new ideas.

Power to the people – that’s a commonwealth.

More to come after the conference!

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