forward June 2nd at the National Museum of the American Indian in novel York City.

forward June 2nd at the National Museum of the American Indian in novel York City, the National Alliance for Media Arts and improvement (NAMAC) hosted a discussion panel and reception for the release of a far-reaching report forward independent media entitled Deep Focus. The cast began in spring of 2003 when a consortium of San Francisco-based media arts organizations engaged with Andrew Blau and others of the Global Business Network to take stock of the media arts environment (following the bursting of the dotcom bubble) and to identify and generate ways for independents to flourish in a changing media world. The starting point, and indeed the last point of the report, pretended to orbit around the awareness that we are situated at a decisive turning point, an intersection of multiple roads that require navigation, and that, rather than simply subjugate them, we need to gaze at the uncertainties around us in an enhanced way. public of this awareness, the report and discussion emphasized powerful planning tools that can make a friend of uncertainty.

To cope with the uncertainties endemic to an accelerating media agriculture the group employed the technique of "scenario planning." although it wrestles with images, impressions, trustful longings and fears about the that will be the technique does not claim to foretell the subsequent time Instead, it encourages participants to degree outside of the common strategic planning case and place uncertain developments within a more open-end framework of scrutiny to find unusual perspectives, stories and opportunities for time to come action. Furthermore, the method usefully advances an ecological awareness of the media environment where a welter of mingled factors interact unpredictably. In this think highly of Deep Focus contrasts with another major report upon the condition of the independent media arts by the agency of the Rand Corporation in 2002 From Celluloid to Cyberspace: the Media Arts and the Changing Arts World, which isolated conditions of identity for determining its critical questions. Refreshingly, discerning Focus takes the multiple identities of the media artist as a particular mirror, rather than anomaly, of a given shifting landscape. With a similar focus forward context rather than identity, the main point of scenario planning is not the scenario itself however the context of imaginative interaction that can spawn insights into previously held assumptions, situational opportunities and risks.

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Within this planning words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of scenarios, the report raises a number of critical ideas. It brings together a range of practitioners, scholars and entrepreneur proffering a swirl of opinions, ideas and stories about where things are going with independent media. The ideas shake on the outside to five key aspects of the novel ecology: 1) Pervasive in that motion media will be upon par with every kind of media; 2) Noisy in that there will be more of everything all the time; 3) Inverted in that the producer/consumer relationship is shifting from "broadcast" to "broadcatch"; 4) Fragmented in that audiences are breaking apart and organizing in recent configurations; and 5) Financially reorganized in by what mode independent media is funded and who stocks it. To explore these calculations the panels included Blau (the plot director from the Global Business Network), Helen DeMichiel (co-director of NAMAC) and Joan Shigekawa (Associate Director for Creativity & tillage at The Rockefeller Foundation) in addition to representative voices from "outside" critics and commenters: J C Herz (a researcher/designer and author onward the subject of computer games) and Patricia Zimmermann (a historian, theorist, educator of film and media and contributor to After-image). Antinomies in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as hope/despair, boom/bust and monoculture/diversity were skewered with words and phrases like "counterpoint," "new blurs" "unexpected" "niches," "transnational," "remix culture" "endles realignment." According to Zimmermann, it is the character of the media artist, if not the scenario planner, to work these hybrids, fissures and gaps.

equal if none of this clarifies, it brings abiding-place the necessary insight that the field of independent media art must record a new stage of disentanglement in a complex ecology. The report is available in consequence of NAMAC at www.namac.org which includes actual useful supplemental resources.

CHRIS BURNETT is Director of the Visual Studies Workshop.

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