Re: topic of the month - Festivals

[Variant]

Title: Re: <ambit> topic of the month - Festivals

Dear Cavan

In quick response, re: �...wondering if certain aspects of [the Edinburgh Science festival] would serve as a model for a new media festival...So it was ironic that the worst event I've been to was at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, a talk about 'sciart'.�

Why was it ironic?  What ongoing relationship (if any) does the Fruitmarket have with practitioners with regard to new media, or practitioners full stop?  Understandably for the Fruitmarket the Sciart event is another slot in its programme which fulfils its funding remit and encourages private hire of the gallery space.  A very real problem was that artists installing their next show in the Fruitmarket the day before it opened had to vacate the gallery space.  I�m uncertain what role the Fruitmarket actually had in conceiving the event other than playing host.  Perhaps artists & arts organisations should have had a greater input into the whole event, but then perhaps that is reflective of what I take to be the unequal relation here and perhaps artists would have precisely wanted something else.

It is not just a question of �entertaining� presentations but of content, of what the actual relationship is between the so called science and art - the science does after all come first in this equation with the art placed in some kind of attendant relationship.  My concerns over much of what has been presented through the Sci-art stance is that the art-partnership has for the most accepted an illustrative role.  That the �science� is some how lacking an aesthetic interface with a constructed �public� and that art is somehow to placate difficulties/complexities rather than actually throw them up.  Have the expectations of artistic practice, of creativity, really been reduced to that of allegedly benign mediator, and for whom?  Do such organisations really want sticky questions asked of them - and that includes the accommodating host?  

Where�s John Latham in all this?

Before launching into appropriated issues of accessibility, actual platforms for new media that are actually of relevance to practitioners are desperately required FIRST and FOREMOST, as are actual resources in Scotland outwith privileged and highly limited access to academic institutions�.  (There are other issues here of  artists encouraged to be treated as �client groups� to be �serviced� (Stills etc.); the ludicrous collapsing of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling into one constituency as �the Central Belt� - imagine the furore if resources in Manchester and Liverpool were to be challenged on the basis on duplication, so why accept it in Scotland; and the importance of archives especially after the arrest of LUX - Ann Vance recently completed voluntarily archiving at G-Mac...)

Yes, New Media Scotland has a role, just as the Fringe Film & Video Festival and New Visions also have essential roles for the very reasons you mention, such as independent platforms, meeting places, esoteric programmes and self-organised events.  You might actually call this real cultural diversity, a lived culture that comes from the ground up, not insinuated from the top down.

It wasn�t the case that there weren�t audiences for �new media� as either part of a gallery programme or as a festival - it was and still is a case of cultural rationing and underfunding.

All the best
Leigh French