Community Arts and Technology: Confessions of a Quiet Practitioner

I have a confession to make. As I sat down to write this article, I thought I would just look on Google.com and see what I could find on Community Arts and Technology. I had a bunch of ideas about the article, but I was curious: What is out there on the subject that can be captured in the click of a mouse?

Sure enough, at the top of the list was this CAN website, specifically a page with a space waiting for this article.

What that suggested to me was two things. First, very, very few artists working in the context of new media and computer-based technologies are self-described community artists. Second, so many community artists have intersected with the world of technology, that to distinguish between Technological Artists and Artists today seem irrelevant.

From this starting point, I then proceeded to tackle the subject from my purview as a practitioner. For those that don't know my work, I co-run the Center for Digital Storytelling, a small nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif. Our work has eight years of history in new-media, Internet and other information technologies involving a range of community applications. Before that I was active in the performing arts for about 12 years.

I don't consider myself particularly prescient about going digital. I knew of artists who had played with computers in graphics, midi, authored interactions, e-mail communications, bulletin boards and performance environments from the late ’70s and ’80s. They were pioneers. Folks in Peacenet, LaborNet, the environmental movement and grassroots organizers of all kinds had integrated computer-based communications into their work long before I thought it might make sense to create a community arts center in new media.

But in 1993, in San Francisco, it felt to me like a digital tsunami was forming off the coast of California that was going to sweep us all away. And in my adopted California attitude, it was either surf’s up or the big wipe-out. I found a surfboard.

The context for our work was personal storytelling. The computer seemed like a great place to help people integrate their family albums with stories about the experiences of their lives. I simply borrowed from the history of oral-history theater, solo performance, conceptual art and progressive literacy campaigns to inform our particular practice. As I say to my old friends, I didn't leave theater, I simply morphed into a new media organization.

At that point, new media was mainly a convergence of the graphic-design arts and traditional media producers. Many of the artists that joined me on arts-conference panels or came to speak at our Digital Diner in San Francisco were people who a few years before had produced visual or media art, and they had brought those crafts onto the computer as the hardware and software tools became more reliable. A few conceptual artists dove into the fray, interested in how narratives could be reorganized with hypertextual interaction, and they were quite excited about their results. On both sides were artists, for the most part, who had operated from a relative degree of privilege within their communities, and who did not see their work in the context of social change.

I remember speaking to fellow community artists about having joined the digital revolution and hearing their responses about how virtual realities were going to replace our connection to real world, and how designing computer interaction was fodder for the Nintendo generation.

It sounded like my parents talking about television.

It sounded like Paleolithic parents talking about their kids staring at a fire.

I couldn't relate. Computers were a tool; tools can be used for social benefit, or as weapons against communities. Developing a method of progressive practice meant hanging out in the medium and developing one's schtick for popular dissemination.

More to the point, my fellow community artists argued that computers were the tools for an elite class of users. How could you go into a community of working people with machines that cost $5,000 each and expect to make a sustainable, accessible program? In 1994, that was a real dilemma. One colleague that year called the Internet "the newest form of white flight." And at the time, I really couldn't argue. As a poor-theater organizer who once viewed a length of rope and a platform as all the props and set needed for a successful production, I felt a bit ashamed of my indulgence. But underneath my attitude was: Be patient, cost will not always be the principal factor mitigating broad digital literacy.

The emergence of the Web in 1995 changed this dialogue. Suddenly, particularly on college campuses and among the generation entering the workforce at the time, the digital was redefined as the means of revolution. Activists immediately jumped on the Web form as alternative broadcasting, and Sub-Commandante Marcos and the Zapatista movement had dozens of Web sites that emerged overnight to carry clandestine media ventures into the public sphere. The current antiglobalization movement, and many of the arts activists tied to it, traces the roots of their efforts to these early interventions in the Web, as well as e-mail.

It was about that time I met Adriene Jenik, a former Paper Tiger TV producer from New York, who had just completed a beautiful CD-ROM, "Mauve Desert," and a project with one of my favorite collaborators, Guillermo Gómez Peña, as a cable broadcast intervention. She brought the issues of Paper Tiger's aesthetic and activist traditions into her practice in the digital environment, with concerns about representation, distribution, agency and innovation. In the years that followed, she has developed a number of outstanding community arts projects using new media, including her more recent work in Desktop Theater, theatrical interventions into online visual chat rooms, space akin to a virtual, "real-time comic book."

Similarly, the artist Abbe Don had taken her work in interactive installation, We Make Memories, into a community arts context with her online project Bubbe’s Back Porch and her 1998 network project The Digital Story Bee, which brought women together in four countries and four U.S. cities to share stories.

At the same time, spaces with long histories of analog technological innovation and some interest in community arts activism, the Electronic Cafe International and the Kitchen, were supporting new artistic explorations tied to cultural and political concerns of the day. Spaces like the 911 Media Center in Seattle, Franklin Furnace and the Gertrude Stein Repertory theater and Eyebeam Atelier in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and DiverseWorks in Houston developed innovative arts-activist-oriented programs in technology as well.

In more modest contexts, the community technology centers that were sprouting up around the country and those public-access TV spaces that were converting to digital were developing grassroots Web-arts and digital-media production projects, allowing community members to expand their voices through these tools. In addition to the work of our center in San Francisco, a number of fabulous community projects emerged including the work of organizations like TILT, working with youth in new media and video, and the MediaLink program with the Bay Area Video Coalition in Web production and media design for working-class adults, and Southern Exposure gallery's media-literacy work with Mission District residents. We helped to initiate the Digital Clubhouse Network in Sunnyvale, Calif., that integrated our digital storytelling practice into ongoing creative programs with youth, people with disabilities, seniors, breast-cancer survivors and community-service professionals and their clients.

By 1997, the Web industry and the newly created digital-arts programs at many colleges and trade schools around the country were creating new generations of artists, many of whom had deep commitment to democratic cultural practice. We were introduced to Justin Hall and Derek Powazek, two young artists who saw their mission as the democratization of the Internet space. Justin's Web diary site, Justin's Links from the Underground became one of the most popular early sites on the Web as a space for organizing literacy campaigns in Web production. Derek took the skills he gained as a production worker in San Francisco's Web industry to create The Fray, an ongoing personal storytelling Web site that has created a community of thousands in real and virtual space for exchanging stories and creative writing. Both these artists in turn had communities of dozens of fellow Web artists/activists developing fascinating projects well outside the mechanisms of art funding and review.

This is perhaps another important confession for my work. In connecting with the digital culture, I no longer existed as a primary dependent of the economy of the grant world, and as a result, many of my friends in the nonprofit arts activists and professionals found us less likely to intersect on a frequent basis. While we operate a nonprofit, and have continued to work with foundations, we have brokered our technological awareness to create alternative mechanisms for sustaining our work. Many in the digital culture exist in this hybrid state, with ways of turning their community building and democratic facilitation skills at into means for a limited living in the commercial space. These spaces have been so intensely hungry for alternatives that this work can often be done with relatively little compromise of integrity, at least compared to the fields of commercial theater, film and television of my generation.

In many urban areas, collectives of young Web designers/producers acted as de facto arts organizations, building community, connecting and discussing values and practices, and making effective discourse with the larger culture. For several years, Cyborganic.com in San Francisco was just such a center. While few would call themselves community artists or find themselves being reviewed by NEA, Rockefeller or Ford Foundation panels, they engendered the same respect and admiration within their generation, as the artist-run spaces, community-based organizations and arts-activist organizations had done before them.

When I think of what the future may bring, I think the efforts of people of color in this field will define an entirely new generation of community arts and technology practice. Folks like Kwame Anku with his Urban Campfire project; Alex Rivera and his friends at Invisible America; the pioneering work of our colleagues Thenmozhi Soundararajan, China Ching and Faviana Rodriquez's Third World Majority; and Ricardo Dominquez and his Electronic Disturbance Theater are the seeds of this coming generation of work.

I was in New York in January for the protests responding to the World Economic Forum. As I looked around the crowds, I didn’t doubt for a minute that a large number of the under-30 participants were tech savvy organizers. As I visited some of the Web sites assisting with communication about the various protest activities, I saw some pretty state-of-the-art design and programming. Seems to me a number of facilitators in the antiglobalization movement are on sabbaticals as a result the current recession in the tech industry.

The Web industry's loss is the movement's gain.

Joe Lambert is founding co-director of the Center for Digital Storytelling (with Nina Mullen and Dana Atchley). Lambert has authored books and led many projects involving media production, publication and curriculum development and on digital storytelling. He was also co-founder of Life On The Water and executive director of the People's Theater Coalition.

Desktop Theater: http://www.desktoptheater.org/
911 Media Center http://www.911media.org/
Franklin Furnace: http://www.franklinfurnace.org/
Gertrude Stein Repertory theater: http://www.gerstein.org
Eyebeam Atelier: http://www.eyebeam.org
Walker Art Center: http://www.walkerart.org/
DiverseWorks: http://www.diverseworks.org/
ctcnet: http://www.ctcnet.org/
Justin's Links from the Underground: http://www.links.net
Invisible America: http://www.invisibleamerica.com/
Third World Majority: http://cultureisaweapon.org
Electronic Disturbance Theater: http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html

Original CAN/API publication: May 2002