Lightening Talk
Judy Barrass 3 minutes of fame COMMUNITY DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT For Arts Queensland Low Fi Forum
Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts Monday April 11th 2011
I didn’t set the title of this talk. I’m guessing whoever chose that title was referring to ‘LOCAL’ community engagement. A sort of warm fuzzy thing—local /community/engagement—feel good words. The sort of REAL life we are told is good for us and important. The equivalent to politicians kissing babies.
We’re told sitting at our computers all day is bad for us. Having Facebook friends instead of real friends is bad for us. That computers will destroy our ability to relate properly etc, etc.
I’m not so sure it’s right, but it’s a pretty common opinion. (But it might just be a CIA plot.)
As someone who was a teenager before television I remember all the same things being said about that piece of new technology.
I live in a regional community but I work in a global community. That’s nothing new, it’s always been the case that professional artists looked outside their local community. Technology just makes it easier.
Apart from my life as Judy Barrass, artist, I also have another life as my avatar Juanita Deharo. Juanita has her own career as a virtual artist, her own website and CV, and a business selling virtual landscape elements to be used in on-line game worlds.
Both Juanita and I belong to rich and diverse global communities of interest and we have many friends , networks, connections and colleagues all over the world. These are not less valuable or less real than local friends and networks.
The Internet and those connections to the global arts community have allowed me, and Juanita, to work on a world stage, to become known in places like Portugal or France but totally unknown in my own community.
Whether it’s good or bad, it is true that the more our careers and our social and leisure activities take us into the global arena the less we seem to engage locally, and the less relevant the local community becomes to our lives.
This is doubly true for professional artists who are often already marginalized in the community because of their minimal incomes and solo work practices.
It doesn’t have to be like that.
In 2009 Juanita became a lead artist in Sunshine Coast’s local ‘Treeline’ project.
She set up a Virtual Treeline Gallery in the on-line world Second Life and curated a series of exhibitions of international artists themed around trees and conservation. She kept a Flickr site, talked in local schools and pecha kucha nights, and on international television. She introduced the international Virtual Treeline artists and their work to the Sunshine Coast community in a projected exhibition and live stream artist talks. She showcased the work of local artists in the virtual gallery. She made virtual installations about her own conservation values. A couple of books were produced about the project and published as print on demand. The National Library of Australia recently acquired one for their collection.
So… now there’s a heap of people on the Sunshine Coast who have an understanding about what I do when I am at the computer, and they know that virtual art is more than putting images up on a website. They’ve met some of Juanita’s friends. They have a sense of ownership. They sometimes call me Juanita. I’m locally known.
In 2010 I participated in Neogeography, a Queensland Writers Centre and Sunshine Coast Regional Council project looking at the intersection of writing and technology. While Virtual Treeline attempted to bridge the gap between cyber and local space, I used Neogeography to experiment with value adding to my local community, using my knowledge and skills to help individuals and organisations use digital technology creatively. I chose to focus on ‘Alternative Publishing’ introducing people to simple high and low tech ways to get ideas out there. We started with zines and postcards, but we moved on to You tube, Flickr, blogs, Place Stories and the whole gamut of e-publishing opportunities. Amazingly a lot of this seems so simple these days, but the project started before the first ipad was released.
http://alternativepublishing.info
As well as free community workshops on zines and e publishing I also offered my technical expertise to a local environmental organization that was in the midst of a campaign to have a marine park declared on the Sunshine Coast. I helped them to put together an educational book that is available as print on demand on-line. It’s also a template they are using to find sponsorship for a larger publication. As an adjunct to their campaign I also made a video of a virtual underwater environment using images they had, taken on reefs off the sunshine coast, as the basis for the virtual environment. The video is on their website and has been used in various contexts as part of the campaign.
What I got out of working on this project was not necessarily about the products, or about my own art.
It was about seeing that ‘Pling’ of understanding when someone realizes that technology is something they can use for their own ends. It’s not all bad or difficult.
Working in cyberspace and belonging to global communities does not neces-
sarily mean we have to be less connected to our local communities. We can straddle the boundaries, but it’s certainly not easy. Working in local communities is personally rewarding at that warm fuzzy feeling level. Funders and arts organisations love it. For artists it’s a mixed bag.
People out there are hungry for engagement with technology– they can eat you up and spit you out. Community projects can stifle your ability to get on with more complex and rewarding things, take you away from your global connections. When I look at the number of websites and blogs I maintain and the number of projects I’m now involved in at local level I realize that I have now spread myself very thinly, and I’m in danger of losing track of my own directions and practice. It takes a lot of time and effort to be a successful artist in one community, let alone two or three.
There’s a need for balance. Do artists have to make a choice?