Deep Focus: a report on the future of independent media

Afterimage, July-August, 2005 by Chris Burnett

On June 2nd at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) hosted a discussion panel and reception for the release of a far-reaching report on independent media entitled Deep Focus. The project began in spring of 2003 when a consortium of San Francisco-based media arts organizations engaged with Andrew Blau and others of the Global Business Network to take stock of the media arts environment (following the bursting of the dotcom bubble) and to identify and generate ways for independents to flourish in a changing media world. The starting point, and indeed the end point of the report, seemed to orbit around the awareness that we are situated at a decisive turning point, an intersection of multiple roads that require navigation, and that, rather than simply overcome them, we need to look at the uncertainties around us in an enhanced way. Out of this awareness, the report and discussion emphasized powerful planning tools that can make a friend of uncertainty.

To cope with the uncertainties endemic to an accelerating media culture, the group employed the technique of "scenario planning." Though it wrestles with images, impressions, hopes and fears about the future, the technique does not claim to foretell the future. Instead, it encourages participants to step outside of the common strategic planning box and place uncertain developments within a more open-ended framework of scrutiny to find unusual perspectives, stories and opportunities for future action. Furthermore, the method usefully advances an ecological awareness of the media environment where a welter of complex factors interact unpredictably. In this respect, Deep Focus contrasts with another major report on the condition of the independent media arts by the Rand Corporation in 2002, From Celluloid to Cyberspace: the Media Arts and the Changing Arts World, which isolated conditions of identity for determining its critical questions. Refreshingly, Deep Focus takes the multiple identities of the media artist as a proper mirror, rather than anomaly, of a given shifting landscape. With a similar focus on context rather than identity, the main point of scenario planning is not the scenario itself but the context of imaginative interaction that can spawn insights into previously held assumptions, situational opportunities and risks.

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Within this planning context of scenarios, the report raises a number of critical ideas. It brings together a range of practitioners, scholars and entrepreneurs proffering a swirl of opinions, ideas and stories about where things are going with independent media. The ideas shake out to five key aspects of the new ecology: 1) Pervasive in that motion media will be on par with every kind of media; 2) Noisy in that there will be more of everything all the time; 3) Inverted in that the producer/consumer relationship is shifting from "broadcast" to "broadcatch"; 4) Fragmented in that audiences are breaking apart and organizing in new configurations; and 5) Financially reorganized in how independent media is funded and who funds it. To explore these prospects, the panels included Blau (the project director from the Global Business Network), Helen DeMichiel (co-director of NAMAC) and Joan Shigekawa (Associate Director for Creativity & Culture at The Rockefeller Foundation) in addition to representative voices from "outside" critics and commenters: J. C. Herz (a researcher/designer and author on the subject of computer games) and Patricia Zimmermann (a historian, theorist, educator of film and media and contributor to After-image). Antinomies such as hope/despair, boom/bust and monoculture/diversity were skewered with words and phrases like "counterpoint," "new blurs," "unexpected," "niches," "transnational," "remix culture," "endless realignment." According to Zimmermann, it is the role of the media artist, if not the scenario planner, to work these hybrids, fissures and gaps.

Even if none of this clarifies, it brings home the necessary insight that the field of independent media art must enter a new stage of development in a complex ecology. The report is available through NAMAC at www.namac.org which includes very useful supplemental resources.

CHRIS BURNETT is Director of the Visual Studies Workshop.