I am delighted to be introducing this issue of Filter as the incoming Executive Director, and am looking forward to the next three to five years at ANAT. I see this as time for an expansion of ANAT‘s programs and projects into new arenas, made possible by the consolidation of the substantial work done by my predecessor Julianne Pierce. My aim is for ANAT to forge new partnerships with academia, science and industry, both locally and globally to deliver increasingly substantial benefits to our members. But more of that in the coming months…
I am supported in this by the vibrant and fresh office team in gracious Adelaide – Heidi Angove, Jen Brazier, Sasha Grbich, Mimi Kelly, and Patrick Tam who have a wealth of experience in project management, marketing, design and membership services. Our diverse and knowledgeable National Board – Linda Carroli, Simon Hackett, Chris Joyner, Julian Knowles, Tim Magarey and Sue Skinner are also keen on taking ANAT into new and sustainable directions.
Like many of you I recently attended the Vital Signs Conference in Melbourne. A good proportion of those concerned with the future of Australian media arts were present – artists, curators, writers, producers, critics, theorists, as well as representatives from the key funding and media arts organisations and festivals. As I said in my keynote speech “Media Art is the art of our times – art about how we live our lives at the beginning the information age. It is an amalgam of fragile, relatively newly emerged genres, and we need to nurture it with special care.”
Many at the conference were focused on how the dissolution of the New Media Arts Board will affect these vital artforms, and I would encourage all of you to make your concerns known to the Visual Arts and Crafts Board. The Australia Council is also currently seeking peer assessors on all Artform Boards and I especially encourage all Media Artists with valuable expertise in these disciplines to apply, so that Media Arts funding applications can be judged by those with specialist knowledge of the field.
Our way forward is through cooperation rather than competition, through collaboration and in forging partnerships, where the truism that the sum of the whole is greater than that of its parts. Together we can achieve significantly more than one organization or individual could alone, so it is timely then that this issue of Filter focuses on Creative Commons.
Our guest Editor Elliott Bledsoe from iCommons at the Queensland University of Technology has done a fantastic job gathering together writers to provide both the philosophical underpinnings as well as practical applications of Creative Commons licences as it applies to Media Arts practice. These co-operative principles can enhance not just our practices, but also many areas of our lives.
Melinda Rackham
Melinda was the Executive Director at ANAT from 2005 to 2009.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia.