Narcotrafficantes, U.S. State Department travel advisories, and swine flu.

That’s the incantation I’ve heard repeatedly when I mention to friends and family that I am traveling to Mexico for a film theory conference and an international film festival.  Be careful, they warn. If you don’t get abducted, you’ll be stopped at a roadblock, machine guns rammed up your armpits. If you don’t get slammed with swine flu, the narcos will get you.

But another trio populates my cinematic landscape.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Guillermo Del Toro, and Alfonzo Cuaron.

These three directors broke open the Mexican New Wave in the early 2000s, a gritty, passionate, violent, visceral,  neorealist style mixed with complex –to-the-edge –of-discomfiting acting,  with films like Amores Perroes (Inarritu), Y Tu Mama Tambien (Cuaron)  and Pan’s Labyrinth (del Toro).

The industry trade paper Variety has pointed out that Mexico’s cinematic resurgence and seemingly endless innovations in documentary and narrative films of the last decade did not just hatch from the minds of artistes suffering alone. This movement has been fueled by a convergence of what Variety has euphemistically dubbed “protracted political, social, and economic crises” since the 1990s, the disturbances of the Free Trade agreement, and the shift  from one party to a sputtering, troubled democracy.  Recently, the Mexican government has provided tax incentives for production.

When  I attended the Morelia International Film Festival in 2004, a conversation I had with a Hollywood entertainment industry  insider underscored for me the intricate connections between a vibrant film culture and  politics.  This industry player joined me for breakfast in our classic colonial hotel on the plaza next to the magnificent cathedral.  He wanted, he said, to hang out with a “real film theorist.”

Of course, I was instantly flattered even though I knew that schmoozing people up is hard wired into the software of the entertainment industry. I never have minded this—I am often charmed by its civility since it is about as opposite of academia as I can imagine.

In Ithaca, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone exclaim, “gee, I’d really really like to talk to a film historian and theorist. Really, I would. Really. No lie..”   So  I asked Mogul X why. He said, “why not?"Then he let out a big chortles. "It’s a film festival," he explained. " You get to talk to people you wouldn’t normally meet and learn new concepts and words you can toss around at pitch meetings.” 

I shared that I usually don’t have breakfasts with movie moguls from Hollywood back in upstate New York,  since our commercial film industry went under almost a century ago in the late teens.

I asked Mogul X  why he was in Mexico.  “Talent raids,” he calmly replied.  “When you have political destabilizations, poverty, violence, huge international issues, uprisings, demonstrations,  passion,  and guts to do something new with narratives and camera angles and actors, you have a recipe for great filmmaking.”

I must admit, I really liked this guy. His honesty utterly engaged me.  He cut through the hype and the buzz that infects even the most serious festivals. There, at breakfast, was the history of Hollywood—always mining the globe for talent and markets, a practice that originated in the studio system of the 1920s with moguls like Carl Laemmle who journeyed back to Germany to pick up talented directors and actors for Universal Studios.

Talent raids and moguls aside, another trio actually resonates for me more deeply—and with greater anticipation-- as I wait at Newark International Airport,  sipping bad coffee from MacDonalds and typing on my new blue Asus netbook on the Boingo international wireless network used by transnational airport denizens. Around the corner from me is a Juan Valdez Café, with a large line drawing of what I guess is Juan the man himself, topped off by a sombrero.  Mexico for export.  Mexico shorn of its problems, its specificities and its images in a place-less transnational airport zone.

But then, there's a counterattack to the neutralization of Mexico for export: Natalia Almada, Dante Cerano, and Daniela Michel. 
 

These are the three people I’m looking forward to seeing in Morelia. 

Almada is perhaps one of the most talented documentary filmmakers in Mexico, exemplified in her film about narcocorridos and immigration, Al Otro Lado (screened with Natalia at FLEFF 2005) She’ll be at the Morelia Film Festival with her stunning new epic, El General, an evocative and probing feature documentary poetic essay on the Mexican Revolution and her family’s relationship to the complex political legacy of Mexico. 

Dante Cerano is one of the most original indigenous filmmakers in the world. A P’urhepecha from Michoacan state, his films opened my eyes to the variety of works--poetic and political and environmental--produced by indigenous makers.  We’ve programmed indigenous works at FLEFF ever since. 

And Daniela Michel is the effusive, gracious and cuttingly brilliant director of the Morelia International Film Festival who has the vision and the moxy to mix Hollywood movie stars, art films from Cannes,  indigeneous works, experimental cinema, and political documentaries together to rusrtle up a combustible brew.

This year, she’s done something that literally stopped me in my tracks:  she’s programmed 20 Romanian films, contending that Mexico and Romania share some similar trajectories. Christian Mungiu’s Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days was probably the most powerful and disturbing film we programmed for FLEFF’s 2008 edition.  It’s a rigorous, disciplined style of filmmaking that captures the intensities of being pregnant—and not wanting to be—in communist Romania before the fall.

Groundbreaking cinematic New Waves have erupted in both countries  with some of the most riveting, gut wrenching, disturbing, stay-with-you-for weeks films.  I am intrigued to see more and to figure out the connections between these big three.

No, not narcotrafficantes, travel advisories, or swine flu. I’ll leave those overwrought sensationalized beats to Fox and CNN.  I’m resolved to be “al otro lado”, working on figuring out a different triad:  international feature films, Mexican political documentaries, and indigenous media.

More on-the-ground reports from Morelia to come.

Blog written by Helen De Michiel, filmmaker and codirector, National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture, and Patricia Zimmermann, professor, Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts

We’ve decided to roll out Part II of our working papers on our open space documentary project so that folks at the Sepancine Film Theory Conference and Morelia International Film Festival in Morelia, Mexico—and readers of this blog-- can have access. We’ve included the Spanish translation as well in the document on the sidebar.

We wanted to share a bit more about our new research initiative, The Open Space Documentary Project.

We also decided  to open up the conversation further before we arrive in Morelia in central Mexico  this week. The comments on our previous posting have been really provocative. They have pushed us into some new thinking. We’ll be writing more from Morelia, Mexico, so stay tuned…Join the conversation and share your thoughts.

A WORK-IN-PROGRESS:

SPECULATIONS AND PRINCIPLES FOR OPEN SPACE DOCUMENTARY

1. If technology is now the primary shaper of human identity in a world of increasingly seductive illusions, how can we re-envision those illusions as a step to dreaming them in a new and different way?

2. Open Space documentary stimulates creative inquiry into how we practice empathetic dialogue: within ourselves, with other individuals, in a larger community, and across our broader society.

3. In this model, rapidly evolving technological interfaces liberate artists to explore new ways to frame community activities as creative practice, and weave them into a larger social fabric of history and memory rather than as simply products for purchase and consumption.

4. For Open Space documentary to be successful, a project team must agree with a group of commonly shared values that organize the project. They must also constantly articulate and test how much they can tolerate a horizontal process that allows inputs from a variety of different participants.

5. This model holds the promise to help in the building of strong local infrastructures by developing living archives of public memory and history that resist control by consumer and corporate agendas.

6. Open Space projects embrace a spirit of "amplitude" including:

* the intention to view a subject from every possible perspective;

* a curiosity about and compassion for the thinking of other people and other eras (i.e. holding deep historical perspectives and transmitting values across generations);

* the assumption that collaborations and interactions are reciprocally beneficial and open-ended.

7. Open Space documentary reanimates the processes and outcomes of co-creation among individuals and groups. These processes can be:

* Playful, reflective and capable of endless variety;

* Always moving between self-awareness and the external world of public interaction;

* Permissive of competing theories and systems;

* Protective of the capacity to learn and grow beyond original conceptions or storylines.

8. Open Space documentary equals a networked game structure with many potential outcomes that cannot always be planned for.

9. This model offers an environment for dialogue around a topic or issue that is not based on opinion or argument; but rather catalyzes possible next steps needed to connect, communicate and collaborate on human-scaled local actions.

10. Open Space documentary intentionally reclaims media technologies in order to re-envision interactive public, democratic and social relationships in all their subtle and complicated interactions.

Blog post by Helen De Michiel, filmmaker and co-director, National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture and Patricia Zimmermann, codirector of FLEFF and professor of cinema, Ithaca College

In the old world order, writing entered  public space like a piece of fine artisanal pottery, all the edges smoothed, the colors subtle, the shape pleasing and proportioned, the surface  carefully etched with perfectly balanced markings.  Precious, perfect, poised.

In the new world of “open space,” writing, we think, enters other worlds as an incomplete text inviting context and collaboration. It’s a space where ideas need other people and their insights to breathe, expand, get pushed.  It’s a process of letting go, in order to go somewhere else.

So we’d like to invite you to comment and respond to some of our arguments about Open Space Documentary below. We need you.  And we need to put these ideas into a larger conversation.

We’ll be presenting our ongoing research project, “The Open Space Project: Towards a Collaborative and Relational Documentary Practice” as one of the keynotes at the Sepancine 5th International Conference on Film Theory and Analysis in Morelia, Mexico, October 1-3, 2009. Sponsored by the Mexican Society of Film Theory and Analysis of the Metropolitan Autonomous University-Cuajimalpa (UAM-C), the conference is also part of the Morelia International Film Festival, one of the premiere film festivals in Mexico and Latin America. The festival runs October 3-11, 2009.

Oh…almost forgot…if you are a reader of Indiewire.com and Variety, you might be wondering what a film theory conference has to do with major world class film festival. The answer is simple:  in the exciting, explosive, and expanding space that is Mexican film, video and new media at the moment, practice needs theory and theory needs practice because the stakes are high, the politics intense, and the questions large.

We hope you will comment on some of our opening arguments, posted below.

WHY “OPEN SPACE” FOR DOCUMENTARY?

1.  It can restore social, human-scaled and local agency in new and unimagined ways. It invites new conversations and behaviors while connecting people.  It fights fear with pleasure and fun.

2.  It can convene people intentionally around and in real community spaces, offering an experience that reclaims patches of the social media environment from global corporatism.

3. It lives in and evolves through expansive networks, communities and clusters beyond traditional media distribution channels by experimenting with multiple versions and reaching out to contributors across disciplines and generations.

4.   It invites media makers and exhibitors to become “context providers” rather than “content providers,” reframing the more fluid movement and interconnections across disciplinary, epistemological and political boundaries.

5. It encourages attention to micro-territorial media ecologies where different discourses, practices and dynamically shifting elements will engage both convener and participants in unanticipated ways.

6. It acknowledges and works within a permeable space in which collaboration, contingency, horizontality, adaptability, decentralization and the migration across media platforms occurs frequently and with force.

"I will bring Americans together to strengthen our communities," exhorted Fox News pundit Glenn Beck, sarcastically acting out the AmeriCorps pledge in his July 24 broadcast. Costumed in lederhosen, white knee socks, and a blue tie, he stood atop a desk in front of a blackboard with an American flag last July during his Fox broadcast. He sung a refrain from "Edelweiss" at the end.

Quoting President Obama that "Americorps will be better financed than the military," Beck has insinuated that Americorps members are Nazis and Obama’s SS.

Beck’s vitriol against the rise of socialism, the inclusion of community activists into the current administration, and the destruction of the free market empire has picked up steam since President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act on April 21 The Act reauthorizes and expands national service programs to engage 4 million Americans.

The goal is to expand AmeriCorps from 75,000 to 250,000 by 2017. According to a White House press release, applications this year to AmeriCorps tripled from 2008.

If Beck took a minute to abandon his avant garde performance art career, he might have noticed that passage of the Act garnered bipartisan support. Even George Bush supported it.

But if you take off your lederhosen, hop off the table, and get out of the Fox Studios in New York City, the view from the ground looks, well, quite different. One might even ask, has Glenn Beck ever left the safe confines of his well-lit New York City studio to actually talk to real people working to build the non profit media arts infrastructures in the United States? I doubt it.

Take the Digital Arts Service Corps and the Transmission Project for example.

"The Digital Arts Service Corps is a small investment to cause exponential change in communities," counters Belinda Rawlins, the focused, passionate and clear-eyed executive director of the Transmission Project.

As Free Press’ Craig Aaron has pointed out, the US spends a paltry $1.37 per person for public media, compared to Canada’s $22 per person, England’s $80 per person—and the even more mind boggling figure of the US spending $565 per person to bail out AIG.

The Transmission Project, a non-profit center housed in the College of Public and Community Service at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, matches Digital Arts Service Corps (DASC) members with public media organizations. Its motto is "amplify the power of public media and technology."

A 2009 Tulane University graduate from Maryland, Kelsey Parris embodies this motto. The Transmission Project placed her with the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, which preserves the cultural foodways of minority cultures of the American south and advocates for literacy, nutrition and health. Parris is helping to maintain their webpage, migrate to a new website, and to stay visible online. "It’s a great experience to help a small organization," explains Parris. "I’m learning a lot and I’m having fun."

Digital Arts Service Corps members work with nonprofit public media groups around the country to help organizations become stronger in serving their mission and delivering their services. DASCorps members contribute skills and knowledge in website building, technical programs, board development, fundraising, managing volunteers and other key capacity building activities. The goal of DASCorps members is sustainable change for organizations.

The range of organizations where DASC have been placed show the depth, breadth, reach, impact and yes, redefinition of the public media field in local communities—about as opposite from Fox News as one can go. There’s the Academy for Career Development in Rochester, New York that provides educational opportunities for disabled, disadvantaged, and displaced children, youth, and adults. And Pro Bono Net, focused on increasing "access to justice for the millions of poor people who face legal problems every year without help from a lawyer." And the Grand Rapids Community Media Center, which uses media to tell stories from Western Michigan. And the New Mexico Media Literacy Project which cultivates critical thinking about "media culture to build healthy and just communities."

"The goal of the Digital Arts Service Corps and the Transmission Project is to help organizations do more with less, to build infrastructure, and to have strength to withstand the economic downturn," explained Rawlins. For the Transmission Project, public media can be media centers, PEG access, digital literacy groups or any organization that that deploys media for the public.

Latinitas in El Paso Texas, for example,  works  with at-risk, low income youths "to build confidence and express themselves through lessons on writing, graphic art, desktop publishing, web design, photography, film-making, and radio production."

"I have learned that change doesn't come quickly but hopefully with my year of service I can leave something useful for Latinitas," observed Claudia Escobar, a DASCorps member. "So far I have helped in recruiting new club leaders for the clubs and setting up all the afterschool programs activities and locations."

Formerly the CTC Vista program (CTC referred to Community Technology Centers), the Digital Arts Service Corps is part of AmeriCorpsVISTA. VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) is a federally funded program to help communities transition out of poverty through capacity building. It started in 1965.

Many vectors have realigned to bring national service into the public eye in the last year. Both Obama and McCain pushed for national service during the Presidential campaign—and propelled excitement about contributing to communities. The Millennials, the tech-obsessed, digital natives generation born since 1979 to baby boomers, have embraced group oriented community service. The economic collapse of Fall 2008 propelled layoffs, threatened the nonprofit media arts sector, and dimmed the hopes of new college graduates for jobs with health insurance. Many unemployed workers have transferred their skills to the nonprofit sector, making contributions to ideas and organizations larger than the self while looking for a paycheck.

The numbers mark these shifts in stark, almost overwhelming terms. This year, 130 organizations applied to the Transmission Project for 45 placements of DASCorps members. 800 new college graduates, retirees and career transitioners applied for 45 spots.

Members of the DACS, who must be at least 18 years old, receive a stipend ranging from $11,000 to $14,000 depending on placement. Their student loans are deferred for the year of service. At the end of their service, they can opt for a cash award of $1,000 or an educational award of $5,300.

"We’re building the next round of leaders for the field," explained Rawlins. To this end, the Tranmission Project sets up a four day orientation for new corps members on poverty in the United States and the role technology and media plays in moving people out of poverty and into the workforce.

They also provide roadmaps for how work happens on-site, budgeting, health care, expectations, project management, and project outcomes. Organizations have the corps member for one year, contribute $3,500, provide living assistance , and offer opportunities for professional development at a national conference.

Rather than the abstract ideologies propagated by the likes of Glenn Beck and his cronies, the Transmission Project emphasizes results: strong, sustainable organizations, professional growth, increased capacity in the media technology movement, new skills, and innovative programs matched to community needs.

Instead of best practices, the Transmission Project offers artifacts of what they term "honest practices." Artifacts span the gamut from how to to hands on in the new media technology terrain: a community radio manual, a guide to palnning and running festivals, concerts and fundraisers, a windows/MAC translation guide, a iGoogle dashboard, a basic search engine optimization technique, and Twitter guidelines and policies.

So, it's your time to choose. Fox News or your own local community? Glen Beck-- or Belinda, Kelsey, Claudia and the rest of the Digital Arts Service Corps?

.

It’s not a transformation of the media ecology. It’s a total inversion.

In Baroque music, an inversion turns the melody upside down, flips chords, exchanges vocal registers, reorganizes intervals.

At this year’s National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture ( NAMAC ) conference, the outside jumped inside, and the inside hopped outside.

CommonWealth was not about transitions. It was about jacking conferees into a series of inversions. In the ladies room following a plenary, one conferee confided "This conference is beyond my comfort zone." I probed if that was good or bad. She said, "I’m somewhere else. I am not sure yet."

It’s a heady, confusing time when the tectonic plates of new technologies, changing public policies, economic collapse, job uncertainty, a new president, and enormous challenges in figuring out strategies in a multiplatformed environment are crashing together and disturbing the geographies of public media.

The ground is unsteady beneath our feet. The foundations from our public media past are loosened and wobbly, swaying under the pressures of new business models, emerging technologies, hemorrhaging audiences, depleted funding.

The questions are complex, the technologies confusing, the survival strategies unclear, the technologies proliferating, and the allies shifting.CommonWealth functioned like a primer on telecommunications policy challenges like net neutrality , low power, broadband, and arts stimulus packages while it provided navigational systems and clear mappings of digital media, social media, and new ways to think about outcomes in media arts funding.

Depending on where you stood at the NAMAC conference, you might see something completely different. Telecommunications public policy or creative arts. Social media marketing or questions of real live audiences. Grant funding or business models. Digital possibility or digital divide. The euphoria of the Democratic administration or the fear and panic of a bone-crushing, hope-smashing recession. User-generated content or business models for institutional survival.

But a smaller spatial configuration also emerged: open space sessions. The CommonWealth NAMAC conference might be the first public media conference to deploy this process of sitting in a circle with like-minded people unpacking a topic of mutual, pressing concern through focused conversation, a brainstorming strategy growing out of the open source community.

These open space sessions pulsed with urgency and new-found community around unresolved issues such as digital exhibition, disabilities, building audiences for events, youth media, boards, film festivals, youth media, volunteers, art house challenges, gaming. I sat in on two on film festivals. They energized me. I left with new ideas and new allies.

A range of panels on social media, social networking and digital technologies mapped significant inversions of our conceptual frameworks about public media. The audience is now a participant. Building audiences is now going to where audiences are. Limited access to media works is now dispersed unlimited access. A precious curatorial zone is now a user-centric community. Finished works that premiere have shifted into works continually in process and in public.

Engage, aggregate, collaborate, amplify, transform: that’s the new public media mantra for this recession-infected, panic-stricken digital age.

This strategy displaces the older independent media strategy of what I would call "the wedding model," where the big day is planned and fantasized for years with every detail from flowers to gowns in place and every guest and seating chart carefully considered.

Now, the new model resides more in what I might term "the cooking with friends model." Projects continually roll out in various states of completion, invite audiences in, change incessantly, and get served up across different platforms and in different iterations depending on the ingredients at hand. Temporality in public media changes forever: no longer discrete, it is continuous, fluid, open, and malleable.

Now for my own set of inversions on CommonWealth.

I was utterly engaged and stimulated throughout the conference.

I noticed that plenaries, panels and open space sessions were jammed with people obsessively taking notes on their netbooks, iPhones, and laptops. People seem to crave clarity and community.

However, I must share that I departed both clearer and more confused.

Questions about politics, ethics, and live humans pressed into me in more and more intense ways as the days progressed.

As someone who has been involved in pitched debates about public media for over three decades, I could not get my head around the lack of vigorous critique at the CommonWealth conference—it felt like my fellow conferees were installing the information like neutral, virus-free downloaded files on a USB drive.

I am struggling with the euphoria of digital technologies when 40% of Americans don’t have access to broadband and when governments around the world—and the US military in Iraq-- can shut down open networks with the flick of a switch.

I am still perplexed by the ethical questions of circulating images of other people’s suffering on YouTube and other user-generated sites—particularly if circulating their image means that some repressive regime might jail or beat them.

I’m disturbed by what I deconstruct as the vaudevillian spaces of the user-generated world, which sport lots of room for fun but not many spaces for more serious, gnarly, and chaotic social and political issues.

I am troubled by the reduction of everything to the digital simplicities of 140 character Tweets when the questions we must ask and the politics we must engage in around race, nation, gender, sexualities, disabilities, empire, war only get more and more complex.

I worry that in the brave new world of user-generated, social networked digitality, the only images and media that can travel the toll-free viral superhighways are ones that are fun, cute, clever, ironic, silly, inane, or mean.

I am really uncomfortable by proponents of social media slapping old fashioned capitalist economic models of acquisition and consumerism onto new digital technologies as they discuss monetizing content and growing "fans" and "followers."

I’m disturbed by hip social media practitioners selling me a push out model of media participation that seems recycled from the manipulative practices of commercial media buzz production rather than a pull in model of engagement and open space community building.

I am nervous when arts funding consultants and funders look for outcomes in audience numbers and programmers shift to more popular programming at the expense of more challenging experimental and political art forms.

I can’t get my head around public television entities working with producers in China and imposing an unexamined epistemological imperialism through their installation of a narrative model of character development and story arcs imported from the classical Hollywood studio system that effectively neutralizes cultural differences.

Boot camp and strategy session, CommonWealth superimposed telecommunication policy on creativity, technologies on arts organizations, and public media on cultural policy.

Pushing beyond the comfort zones, CommonWealth hurled out a 21st century public media game plan.

And… it contained a series of necessary and urgent inversions that still need to be plotted—and critiqued.

The National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture

Biannual Conference

Boston, Massachusetts

August 26-29, 2009

Stand close to the wall of eight images. See eight head shots of Albert Einstein.

Walk back 15 paces. Albert transforms into Madonna and Harry Potter.

A visual inversion from physics to popular culture, "Eight Einsteins: Hybrid Illusions", by Aude Liva, Antonio Torralba and Amanda O’Keefe, is an installation at the MIT Museum. The National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture conference, entitled CommonWealth, opened with a party where conferees migrated between installations probing interfaces between new technologies, the body, perception and data flows.

"Eight Einsteins" stands as a digital trompe l’oeil : it superimposed two images, one at a low spatial frequency and one at a high spatial frequency. Depending on where you stand, you’ll see either Einstein or Madonna—interpretation resides as a function of viewing distance. Einstein inverts into Madonna.

This installation serves as a structural metaphor for the entire conference, a system of superimpositions of different spatialities and altitudes of our complex, endlessly inverting public media ecology.

Like "Eight Einsteins", depending on where you stood at the NAMAC conference, you might see something different. Telecommunications public policy or creative arts. Social media marketing or questions of real live audiences. Grant funding or business models. Digital possibility or digital divide. The euphoria of the Democratic administration or the uncertainties of the recession. User-generated content or business models for institutional survival.

The well-organized, provocative conference evoked "Eight Einsteins" by offering panels on current telecommunications policy initiatives, social media and new artistic practices. Overflowing with conferees Twittering comments and rapidly scribbling notes, the panels were jammed.

But a smaller spatial configuration also emerged: open space sessions. The CommonWealth NAMAC conference might be the first public media conference to deploy this process of sitting in a circle with like-minded people unpacking a topic of mutual, pressing concern through focused conversation, a brainstorming strategy growing out of the open source community. These open space sessions pulsed with urgency and new-found community around unresolved issues such as digital exhibition, disabilities, building audiences for events, youth media, boards, film festivals, youth media, volunteers, art house challenges, gaming.

The panels and plenaries jumpstarted conferees into the battles for net neutrality, broadband access, low power radio, proactive boards, software development, arts stimulus packages, digital arts, and strategic visioning. Jaoquin Alvarado, VP for diversity and innovation at CPB, observed hip hop has spurred technological innovations in mobile, social networking, and remix. Harold Feld (Public Knowledge) pointed out that the US is the only industrialized country lacking a national broadband plan. He argued for a shift from the broadband market to a broadband ecology where consumers would no longer be "slaves to the marketplace" and the MPAA and RIAA could no longer control copyright.

Holly Sidford (Helicon Collaborative) explained that organizational focus and nimbleness were more important in these economically challenging times for nonprofits than size. She forecasted significant funding reductions which could possibly total up to an 85% projected decrease in funding.

Craig Aaron (The Free Press), insisted that the field move from defense to offense. He argued that Washington D.C. is changing, and it matters who is at NEA, CPB, FCC. He lamented the paucity of public media lobbyists compared to the 500 plus commercial media lobbyists in Washington. The U.S. spends about $1.37 per person on public media, compared to $22 per person in Canada and $80 per person in the UK.

San San Wong,( San Francisco Arts Commision) asked how public media can move beyond a black and white paradigm to a more nuanced, multicultural and global way of thinking, given that the margin of immigrants and people of color will become the center by 2043.

A range of panels on social media, social networking and digital technologies mapped significant inversions in our conceptual frameworks about public media. The audience is now a participant. Limited access to media works is now dispersed unlimited access. A precious curatorial zone is now a user-centric community. Finished works that premiere have shifted into works continually in process and in public.

Jessica Clark (Center for Social Media) contended publics form around media. "A commons," explained David Bollier, (Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own) "is created when a community gets together to manage resources for sustainability, like wikis, blogs and social networks."

Aggregate, collaborate, amplify, transform: Suzanne Steggerman (Games for Change), Christain Ugbode ( National Black Programming Consortium), David Kirsner (Fans, Friends and Followers) and David Dombrosky (Center for Arts Management and Technology) repeated this digital mantra. Wendy Levy (Bay Area Video Coalition), suggested new media systems offer "two way communication in a multiplatformed distribution space."

Boot camp and strategy session, CommonWealth superimposed telecommunication policy on creativity, technologies on arts organizations, and public media on cultural policy. Pushing beyond the comfort zone, CommonWealth hurled out a 21st century public media game plan.

How do you envision public media for the 21st Century?  Join the discussion in the comment sections below!