[spectre] FWD: Electrohype throws in the towel

[Chris Byrne]

I'd agree with Zeljko that small organisations often struggle to gain 
recognition from their local arts 'ecology' of funders, patrons, etc. 
That's certainly been my experience. Funding often comes down to 
old-fashioned politics and lobbying, which smaller organisations find 
more difficult to do effectively. So the tendency, regardless of 
artform, is for larger organisations to attract funding into their 
gravitational pull as it were.

I think it's also a problem with media arts more generally. Ultimately 
the cultural mainstream - painting, classical music, theatre or cinema 
- has more supporters, institutional presence, and power. Organisations 
like ZKM, Ars Electronica, V2 and FACT are exceptions, and it's no 
coincidence these are based in industrial/post-industrial cities where 
economic regeneration or cultural transformation are important issues. 
North American funding models are different, so perhaps not so relevant 
here in Europe: as the failure of Media Lab Europe has demonstrated.

The question is thrown back at media arts practitioners and promoters: 
what is so important or essential about what we do that the State 
should fund it?

Chris

On 20 Jan 2005, at 16:14, zeljko blace wrote:

> I would say this just ads to a big pile of similar cases, where small 
> organisations who have no interest (for different reasons) in growing 
> to big institutional sizes can locally be ignored very easily and that 
> cultural capital never measures up to the political one or to the 
> strategic connections to individuals in governing bodies.
> It is always easier for outsiders to recognise size then expertise or 
> specific aesthetic quality, then to spend time learning about field 
> and issues they are dealing with.
>
> If there was a way for cultural administrators to see that new media 
> culture and digital arts can function on different scales we would not 
> end up today with such a big gap in-between hundreds of small "on the 
> survival edge" organisations and few huge mostly dormant or at least 
> inefficient institutions.
> One musicologist told me opera took half a century to be established 
> internationally as art form and with it's curent form and 
> infrastructural standards... so maybe we should be patient and hope 
> for best ;-)
>
> Good luck to all of the individuals who worked for Electrohype in 
> their future work.
>
> Best - Zeljko
>
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