We need to rethink how we think about media. In the decrepit remains of this degraded public sphere that demobilizes nearly all collective action, a new world image order has bloomed, one where difference makes a difference. New technologies are raided. Corporate images are pirated. New combinations of ideas and people remake our vision.
Media makers invent ways to work without grants.
And teachers, students, programmers, writers, and funders resist this stagnation in big and little ways. But perhaps most urgently we also need to aggressively, unceasingly take back public spaces for these new world image orders to grow and flower. In its small, persistent way, the Black Maria Film and Video Festival serves as a model reclamation project for difference, hybridity, and publicness. It is a place where production budgets don't matter as much as heart, guts and bold, unrestrained imagination. It intervenes in these global flows.