well all the other posts are quite long so i just skimmed them, and then went and wrote a long one of my own. trying not to get grumpy, but failing...
This has all been very entertaining, and is fairly well worn ground. Many of us over here have enjoyed the facilities and opportunities of various spaces, residencies, and organisations in Europe and are very aware that we don't have facilities that directly match them here. There are a few things we do have here that are an attempt to address that lack in a way we can achieve here, and there are indeed many more things that can be done. It should be relatively apparent that it's easy for people in New Zealand find it a bit tiring to hear what we should be doing from people who are in other places. Yes, sure great ideas, wanna help make it happen? Cause we're pretty busy already. It's not (just) about 'funding' it's about someone actually stepping up and doing something. As Bronwyn pointed out earlier that's what the Makerspace in Wellington is about, and it's also what the Christchurch Creative Space is about (Damian you may have seen Phil present on that at the ADA Symposium). They are both maybe more geek and craft focused than your ideal european 'media lab / whatever', but they are spaces started, in Phil's case, after visiting exactly those places, in Vienna and such, and finding a practical way to do a version of that here, with dreams of making it bigger + better. The chch group has a space that gets used twice a week as a drop in and hang out + do stuff space - it's about skill + project sharing, about coding and cross stitch, and about building community. Leon de Lorenzo has offered a space of his own in wellington as a possible starting point for something as well. That's a bloody great thing to see, and no-one seems to have acknowledged it (unless i glazed over at that bit). What helps is actually stepping up + offering something, not bitching from afar (not saying that's what some of you are doing, but it's easily read that way). I've kind of skimmed most of this discussion, but there are a few things that leap out that I'll pluck from the midst... Damian, > what is so 'unique' about New Zealand that > means that what works very well in more or less every country in the > world > just won't work there? As douglas has been saying, and as is quite obvious, we are not a country that is attached to a whole lot of other countries, and do not have the kind of people + money flow that those countries + cities have. As well as, and probably more difficult than that, we are spread cross two pretty big islands and just cannot have the kind of relatively easy flow in and out of a central place as others do. Access to an organisation in Vienna from within Austria and a few other countries is a completely different scale than access to an organisation in any nz city is. that is not, ffs, > the kind of post-colonial islander vanity that > defaults to all-excusing apathy; of New Zealand being a land of > geographically > cursed, hard-up battlers gripped with cultural isolationism. it's the geographical reality that we find myriad ways to work around + also celebrate, that we are enriched by and sometimes frustrated by. A lot of us here travel a lot, we are actually involved with the world, and we come back here for many productive reasons. I think that it is more interesting + more productive in the long run to find ways to make the most of that unique geography + relative isolation to create a different kind of distributed, mobile model of building community between practitioners, sharing skills, and enabling access to equipment. I don't believe in concentrating all of the resources for a particular form of practice in a room in a city in the north island. What ADA, for example, is working towards, is creating opportunities for connection, skill sharing, and ideally equipment access, that is as accessible as possible for the whole country. That's why we move the symposium to a different place every time, and more or less swap between the north and south islands. This year we expanded the symposium with workshops, which was hugely successful, and we'll try to increase access to skills + connections every time. This list is ideally a distributed space for building community + ideas about access etc, but it doesn't get used as much for that as it could. We have another project re equipment to announce at our amazingly accessible and distributed AGM on sunday that I can't speak to authoritatively enough yet. Basically we are about being as distributed as possible, and that I think is far more interesting + ultimately productive in this weird distributed country than being concentrated. The symposium is a kind of mobile lab i guess, and I'd like to see other more 'labby' / project and workshops-based mobile labs happen in different places around the country, but I don't have time to organise it. ADA isn't, and shouldn't be, the answer to this 'media lab' thing, but it would be great if every city had someone who sticks up their hands to create a space on some scale for connection + community building. I think it would be great if there could be some funding to enable multiple small-scale spaces, but they need to be able to survive without it, because surely NAct could dismantle CNZ at any moment, and the open Society Initiative doesn't see nz as a location of interest, and we can't get any of the european funds etc etc. That's not proclaiming hard-upness, it's just pointing out that we have to do things differently. On 5/10/2009, at 4:45 AM, Julian Oliver wrote: > Anyway, as I say, you know the weather in NZ better than I. The > picture you > paint is of a country of careerists too self-interested to publicly > dissemenate > skills and knowledge. If so, that's both boring and sad. oh, right, I see it more as a country of people with no concept of a 'career' (how the hell does that work?) in media art, who are unsure of themselves and their work in relation to the kind of work being made in other places, and who are not part of the flow of exhibitions, residencies, etc that traverses Europe, so just don't get to see + be inspired by a whole lot of stuff, and who get together every year or so to poublicly disseminiate skills and knowledge at ADA symposia, and may not feel they have things to offer at other times. > No wonder media artists I know that've visited NZ return entirely > lost as to why > they couldn't find or connect with any local scene of makers. > Perhaps that's > because there just isn't one! No indeed maybe there isn't one. Musicians of course return feeling like they've just connected with an amazingly active + creative scene, and I imagine that artists in other media (as opposed to 'media') would feel much the same. Those are long established scenes that thrive on little money and are well supported by art schools, mythology, venues of various kinds, people's homes, studios, and artist-run spaces, etc... none of which the 'media art' scene has or is. I don't know what the answer is, I still hope ADA is part of it, but it's hard to get away from the feeling that money is. I (obviously) don't think that investing in a centralised resource is the answer, but I'd be really interested in hearing some more innovative, distributed, community-building, creative possibilities that could involve money. I'd be even more interested in hearing from people who are keen to help make things happen. (there are some pretty obvious institutional elephants in this conversation as well of course, which probably make a lot of people nervous about what can happen to centralised resources, therefore, more distributed = better) + btw > Better to see public money in NZ go into a project of this kind than > some > Shockwave Flash art on a DVD or some artist's for-sale, month-long > solo-show > somewhere in Ponsonby.. you could actually look at the cnz funding outcomes online and see what they do fund. + I've completely forgotten what this whole thing was about in the first place - cnz strategic plan anyone? zita > > Cheers, > > -- > Julian Oliver > home: New Zealand > based: Berlin, Germany > currently: Berlin, Germany > about: http://julianoliver.com > _______________________________________________ > Ada_list mailing list > [email protected] > http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/ _______________________________________________ Ada_list mailing list [email protected] http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/
