This is an honor and a challenge. I have been asked by the conference organizers to attend to the range of activities at this conference, and report back to you main themes, trends and issues. Needless to say, there have always been at least three more things going on at any moment than I could attend to, and they’ve been going on until this minute, so I beg your understanding if my remarks don’t quite reflect the conference you went to.

First let me point out the perspective that I came to the conference with. I came here because I think collectively you are important to the public health of a democracy. I believe that taken as a whole, you are guardians and gardeners of the public imagination. That doesn’t require you to see yourself that way, but do let me explain why I think so.

What you do has a unique and unpredictable, but fertile, function in an open society. You cultivate an imagination that is not merely individual, or limited to a small coterie, but that creates expectation for public expression and communication. The people who are here, and with whom you’ve spent the last few days, are people who can do that. It is a precious gift, but it’s not an accident, and it’s not genetic. It’s a cultivated capacity, one that you learned and that you pass on to others in the many activities that you all do here.

That is the underlying, enduring achievement of all of this activity, seen collectively. It nurtures the public imagination. It creates capacities in people to think beyond themselves, to dream beyond themselves, to think not only about others but about the social relationships in which we live, about the importance of cultural expression in our daily informational diet, about the possibilities for our society. It creates expectations that we can contribute to the texture of our open society, expectations about the respect we need to get and to give as we shape our expression for each other, expectations about the tools we have to make media in a world where making media is just as important as purchasing and consuming it.

So that’s the big picture on my perspective. Now, let’s talk about themes that the conference brought forward: maturing, collaboration, and a link between policy and practice.

First, I saw the maturing of the field. A prime indicator of this was that NAMAC was a group identity for many people here.

I saw this as well in a marked concern for cultivating the next generation—through youth media, through youth NAMAC participation through scholarships. I saw structured opportunities to discuss policies for leadership building, for instance in the panel on transitions using the fishbowl approach. And I also saw young people seeing themselves as leaders—people like Gin Ferrara of Wide Angle and Matt Wolf, who’s a budding theorist of youth media. I saw people of several generations talking seriously with each other with a clear, felt need to know.

Evidence that the field is maturing is in the use and reference to strategic planning and other management tools, used appropriately to build community relationships. For instance, discussions on evaluation benefited from a wise application of hard-won knowledge, as Kathleen Tyner’s contribution showed. The number of consultants who are here speak to the development of the field, as do the number of periodicals concerned with the area.

I note, as a sign of the maturing of the field, a concern with mapping, documenting and analyzing your activities as a field: The new report, From Celluloid to Cyberspace, conducted by Kevin McCarthy and Elizabeth Ondaatje; the new New York Foundation for the Arts database (nyfa.org) and the forthcoming Urban Institute report; and the final report from a conference held at my own Center for Social Media at American University are all important aggregators of current knowledge. They all also share some common themes, among them the importance of documenting our experiences as part of the development of the field of media arts.

I noted a focus on process of media arts creation and distribution, not only on one aspect of activity. We had many opportunities here to see links on the continuum between creation, postproduction, distribution, exhibition, and preservation of media arts. I saw new technological challenges—curatorial challenges for ephemeral arts, preservation challenges for obsolete formats, digital production challenges—being put forward within a field-building context.

And finally, I saw a clear concern for history, not only in a panel that discussed historical markers for the field, but also in the timeline that occupied a wall on one of our meeting rooms. I hope that the collaborative spirit evident in the creation of that time line can go on, and that NAMAC can host that timeline virtually, and that each of you with stories of media arts activism can contribute to it.

The second big trend I saw was collaboration, which is also an outgrowth of maturing. I saw many community and issue partnerships. I saw organizations linking with media creators in projects such as Witness (with human rights organizations), OneWorld (a network of non-governmental organizations), media rights.org (which brings together users and makers), Creative Capital (which links funders, support providers, planners and artists), the reborn Manhattan Neighborhood Network (which is building on old and forging new relationships with community makers) and Appalshop (which links local community voices with expressive capacity). I met artists whose work involves creative, complex relationships with movements, organizations and other artists: Gregg Bordowitz, Shu Lea Chang, Iole Alessandrini, Paul Wong. And I saw policy experts who are making links to media artists on issues that are profoundly influential to the future of media arts: the copyright expert Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, Glenn Brown of Creative Commons, Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge.

The third trend I saw was that practice and policy are very closely intertwined. We saw several examples of artists’ practices that are in themselves policy interventions. Kalle Lasn, Sherman Alexie, DJ Spooky and Mark Hosler each demonstrated work that challenges existing media policy. NAMAC as an organization is clearly aware of the critical importance of policy, both cultural policy and media policy, in its third track, which focused on policy. Some of the issues concerned the fencing in of potential makers and also consumers, with copyright law, with digital rights management, and with limited access to pathways of communication and distribution (especially in broadband Internet provision).

What do we do with these trends? First, let me speak to the maturing of the field. There are exciting realizations that go along with that maturing. You realize that you are not alone. You are part of a dynamic, changing network; you’re making history. You realize that—as Sally Fifer said to me today, “Hey, it’s not me, there’s a structural problem out there.”

It also activates the No Whining Clause. This is a great moment to just say no to the role of heroic victim of commercial media, to the secure position of helplessness on the margins of someone else’s history. You are not victims. You are artists and activists and troublemakers. No one has asked you to do what you do—far from it. You are volunteers in this movement for expanding, independent media arts expression. You can aspire to some kind of strategic participation in our society, participation that by your very acts makes this a more open society, one that is more resilient, and has greater capacity for democratic behaviors.

The collaborative trend we saw here is critical to that kind of strategic participation goal. But it is important to operate from strength, not to pool weaknesses. To operate from strength, you need to know who you are, and what you do well. You need to have something to offer, so that partnerships can truly be successful.

What shall we do with the history lessons we’re taking away from here? Well, one thing to note, for the young people here, is that your predecessors did not do what they did to sacrifice for you. They were having fun. You can too. Another thing to carry away is that there was no golden age. It sucked back then too. Another thing to note is that independent media arts have had a long, intimate history with galvanizing social movements—civil rights, women’s movement, gender rights, anti-globalization. And another lesson is that government matters. Legislation matters. Policy matters. Regulation matters. You’ve heard people talk about the critical role of the government employment subsidy CETA in feeding the arts in the 1970s, and about the role of the NEA and the NEH. Public television has been much in discussion here, and you know that ITVS, the production fund dedicated to making work for underserved American audiences, was created by a movement of independent filmmakers.

What shall we do with the link between policy and practice that was so marked in our discussions? For me, this is a delicate issue, because I have long had a foot in both worlds, both as a critic and as a policy analyst. I have seen the enormous excitement you’ve brought to issues that often are regarded as arcane—intellectual property, rights management, copyright, conglomeration and concentration of ownership, digital spectrum management, cable access. And now I’m afraid of backlash, that when you get on the plane, you’ll be afflicted by BIFF—the Big Issue Fear Factor. And then you’ll decide you don’t actually understand enough about these issues, and that you either have to drop your media arts practices, whatever they are, and become a policy activist, or that you have to just sign over responsibility to worry about policy to me or Gigi or Siva or somebody else.

So let me just say to you: You don’t have to drop everything you’re doing and go write an FCC docket entry right now. Unless you want to. You already are fully implicated in policy, because your practice bumps up against the constraints of today’s policies and against the limits created by the refusal of federal government to support the arts. You are valuable if for no other reason that that what you do is to demonstrate the opportunities and challenges in today’s media environment for the public imagination. You can be the poster children for policy advocates and activists; you can be clients for public interest lawyers; you can participate in affidavits, become sources for journalists’ articles.

That all implies, though, that you understand the relationship between your practice and policy. And that is why it is excellent that NAMAC had its third track, that’s why it’s great that magazines like The Independent and Release Print run articles about policy issues, that’s why it’s good to connect the dots between DJ Spooky’s performance and Siva Vaidhanathan’s urging you to exercise your rights to fair use of copyrighted material. When you understand that relationship between practice and policy, then you do become an effective advocate and partner for advocates. And the fear factor goes way down, because you know advocates who are fully briefed on the issues, who are familiar with the legislators and other policy players, and who can help you make connections. You’ve had a great introduction to some people and resources here at the conference. For instance, Gigi Sohn’s projects, all available on her website, publicknowledge.org, are all great places to start making connections on information issues. Creative Commons is opening up the possibility of shaping your own licensing requirements for your work. You can get there, as well as other places that really showcase knowledge and take action on media policy and cultural policy through the NAMAC resources and links site on its website.

In a nutshell, you need to collaborate with professionals and experts on policy, but you don’t have to be them. You have to know how what you do connects to policy, which is all around you. Your collaborative spirit makes for great partnering on policy, but it only works if you know who you are and why you’re important. This collaborative approach is also helpful to building media arts into the agendas of many other allies in the independent (nonprofit) sector—schools (through technical upgrades, curriculum enhancements, parent and afterschool activities), local government (through cable franchises, smart growth, human rights commissions), and unions (through cultural activities, documentation, and education).

As I leave this conference, I see a community that can build from experience, take knowledge into relationships and move toward action. This community has a viable vehicle of community identity and action: NAMAC. I know that when I return two years from now, many things will have changed. But two things will stay the same. You will still be busy turning private experience into public knowledge. And you will be part of the project of helping personal expression contribute to public imagination.
Thank you.