{"id":5619,"title":"NAMAC Conference Keynote Address - States of Emergency","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/namac-conference-keynote-address-states-emergency","version":"f589a7f9b5a9dfd8dcffd12db86dc2bc8d789f8573005c7405669151b5acf208","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4422396+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Patricia R. Zimmermann"}],"authorKeys":["Zimmermann, Patricia R."],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Main","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"NAMAC","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"Winter 1999","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1013","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022NAMAC Conference Keynote Address - States of Emergency.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/namac-conference-keynote-address-states-emergency.","publication":"Patricia R. Zimmermann. NAMAC Conference Keynote Address - States of Emergency. Main. NAMAC. Winter 1999.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5619.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC1013","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":29184},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":779}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Dedicated to Leslie Schwartz Burgevin (1958-1998) This talk is dedicated to my good friend, Leslie Schwartz Burgevin, a visionary curator and arts advocate at the Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, New York. Leslie died this past February after a long, 20 year fight against cancer. I think she would have liked what I am going to say today. This is for you, Leslie. TO FLOURISH IN DEFENCE First, I would like to thank the National Association for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) national board for inviting me to speak, especially Helen De Michiel, Charlie Humphrey, and Karen Khan. And I would like to thank the audience for coming here today, this early in the morning. It is a great honor for me to speak to you today, for I speak as someone who is, quite literally, in awe of the incredible work you in the media arts field do to sustain a viable, dynamic media arts culture that carves out some place for public culture in these terribly privatized times. I am deeply grateful, too, because I have benefited directly and indirectly from all of your work. I am not an arts administrator, or a festival director, or a museum curator, a foundation officer, a distributor, a community video access person, or even a media artist. I see all of you as the vanguard, the front-line troops as it were, blazing a trail through the amazing art practices, debates, and work pushing through our cultural lethargy. Against all that says no to public culture, you all provide space for it to flourish in defiance. Your cultural work opens up ideas for me, Arts Conference even when all I can do to participate is read the massive amounts of brochures and flyers that you flood my mailbox with. Your work leads me to artists that I and other writers and scholars want to think about, teach, write about. You make me feel less alone in the quickly corporatizing academy. You give me hope. EMERGENCY: THINKING ABOUT MEDIA ARTS The title of my talk is \u0022States of Emergency.\u0022 I use the plural - states- to suggest that we are currently not in the midst of one, easy to understand state of emergency, but in a multi-layered complexity comprised of many states, as in states of the union from New York to Ohio to Montana to Texas to Utah. But it is also many states, as in conditions of engagement. I use this term \u0022states\u0022 to suggest--perhaps in an invocation of feminist thinking originating in the 1970s--states of consciousness or unconsciousness, words I marshall not to describe a medical or drug-induced condition, but rather invoke to describe our level of political and social/historical analysis. Thus, States of Emergency. I would argue that these States of Emergency in the end don\u0027t have all that much to do with state, federal or foundation funding, although part of it certainly does. States of Emergency as I am using it has much more to do with what I see as a state of emergency in how we think about media, media arts, arts practices. Given the current state of affairs and the globalization engulfing us, we need completely new, risky epistemologies--a fancy, perhaps overly theoretical word for thinking about thinking, for the structure of knowledge-that can account for the complexities of our current era and aggressively imagine ways to carve out some public space in it. There is, then, a state of emergency in how we think. And compared to procuring $100,000 operating budgets from non profit agencies for our programs, new thinking is so much easier to come by if we can just let go and reimagine the universe. Fixating too much on funding or defunding the arts infrastructures deletes the vivid histories of organizations that thrived without any support at all during the 1950s and 1960s: The Flaherty Seminar, Cinema 16, Art in Cinema, to name just a few. These organizations did not simply invent ways to survive and get resuscitated, which is language more appropriate perhaps to hospital cardiac units. More importantly for our discussion here, they imagined the future, which meant, quite simply, unsettling and rewiring the universe with every program, every idea, every event. And this rewiring, we now know from historical reclamation projects by scholars, meant thinking differently all the time. As that great champion of independent media Erik Barnouw once told me, this rewiring meant knowing that the most important thing a media event can do is \u0022boil over.\u0022 By that term, Barnouw meant that what is repressed in our culture and our politics and our lives can come out furiously in a public way, boil over the confines of the pot, get people talking and energized, create conflict out of which can emerge change. I don\u0027t know about you, but it is a rare event where any \u0022boiling over\u0022 of any kind happens. Right now, where on my campus almost any debate and controversy about almost anything is framed as impolite, loud, and above all to be averted, I would be happy with a low simmer of any kind. Somewhere, someplace, there must be room for a unofficial, samizdat culture of hope where things can \u0022boil over.\u0022 HISTORIES OF CIVIL WARS Historically, we have all been engaged in this civil war against difference and public culture for at least ten years. Although, to be accurate, its origins should be located in the early years of the Reagan administration\u0027s attacks on politically engaged documentaries like From the Asbes: Nicaragua Today and El Salvador, Another Vietnam in 1981. For example, my entire professional life in media arts and critical writing over the last twenty years has been flogged by arts defunding, political attacks against people like me or my friends, embattled infrastructures, and the end of public space. The privatization is so bad that in my home state of New York, garbage in state parks has even been privatized. We now have to carry out our trash ourselves. I don\u0027t like the overused term culture war, with its high culture, elitist connotations, because we are not simply embattled over culture as art production, but over social, historical, economic, and political shifts and reorganizations of absolutely monumental scope. The entire globe is being reorganized and reengineered. The entire globe-as well as the entire media arts field in every country-is up for sale like cheap real estate. We can map how bad it is when the Hollywood transnationals see economies of scale by producing feature films in places racked by nationalist genocide like Bosnia or places where the transition from communism to neoliberalization and the free market has left national film industries either in ruins or dead, like Russia, Hungary, Poland. The vultures are no longer circling the corpses, but eating them. We just happen to live in the United States, but similar trends of defunding and privatization can be discerned in China, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Canada. We are therefore poised on a crumbling, frightening precipice as we edge into the enigmatic morphing media landscapes of the 21st century. Therefore, I prefer the term civil war rather than culture wars, language coined by neoconservatives like Newt Gingrich, Hilton Kramer, Congressman Danenmeyer and their buddies. We don\u0027t want them framing what is our debate. I think civil war is much more applicable: we are, of course, fighting about borders, about North/South divides across the globe, about the place of genders, races, sexualities, regional identities, and the differently abled within the reordered white nation, about annihilation of difference and heterogeneity-not just of people, but of a whole range of places, spaces, and practices. We have been engaged in this civil war about who and what will survive and who will define the nation for so long that our energies are flagging. There is now a whole generation of students and new media arts professionals and artists who do not even see this situation as a crisis, but as business as usual, de rigour, common place, what is, reality. If you are a 20 year-old film and digital media student now, all you have known is commercial film screenings of Robocop or Raiders of the Lost Ark on campus, diminished appearances by edgy, outrageous visiting artists, an explosion of agents from the transnational media corporations preaching the ecstasy of free market media fun, and a limited non-profit sector that looks a little boring, a little too self-important and more than little too retro in birkenstocks and tie-dye shirts. Who can blame these students for thinking that all that there is are menial jobs at Time Warner and Disney? Who can blame them for looking for low-end entry level transnational media jobs with high powered computers and ethernet connections so they can surf for web installation art when the boss is off to Korea hiring workers for animation maquiladoras? For most of my students, even the word independent media has a different meaning from how I would guess most of us define it from living in it and watching it. 1981, the first year of Reagan\u0027s unraveling of the arts infrastructure, the welfare state, and federal regulatory controls of media, set in motion the intensive economic and political restructurings encircling us now. This same year also represented a significant turning point for U.S. feature-length, narrative independent cinema, for it was during this period that these films first reached larger audiences in art cinemas and festivals, culminating nearly 15 years of agitation across many different formats and genres. Nearly two decades later, the transnational media companies and their boutique distributors raid independent media, looking for low budget work to attract new untapped audiences and large profit margins. The independent films so heralded by journalists simply function as hip upgrades adorned with tattoos, earrings and designer jeans to the old B picture system developed during the classical Hollywood studio era. Once the elaborate rock and roll sound mixes and special effects are stripped away, it is difficult to discern many significant distinctions between \u0022indy film\u0022 and a Hollywood studio production, because, first of all, the Hollywood studios for all intents and purposes no longer exist. Hollywood films and these independents are merely two sides of the same old/new global Hollywood: a perpetual quest for deals, dollars, and undeveloped niche markets. RECLAIMING INDEPENDENT MEDIA Therefore, it is vital for our field to engage in a historical reclamation project for the term independent media. We need to reroute the current commodification of the term and insist we are not a market niche. We need to revive independent media\u0027s oppositional political heritage from the anti-war, women\u0027s and civil rights movements, but we can\u0027t get stuck in the 1960s. We need to reclaim the parts that still work and recycle them, such as the idea of a committed arts practice where the larger world outside the self matters. This should not be read as a nostalgic evocation of paradise lost, a time when politics and art and the community served the more lofty ideals of social and political revolution. Rather, we need to locate independent media and its supporting organizations within their historical legacies and their evolving futures in order to rethink how the dramatic contradictions of the new global politics, new wars, new technologies and new forms can recharge its purpose. In the transnational economic era, culture matters but differently and in new ways. Culture is no longer the place where the nation state revitalizes itself away from the instrumentality of capital. It is now the place where transnational capital defines itself. In other words, transnational capital has subsumed culture. In older formations of nation, culture was where dreams and nightmares, fantasies and realities resided. Now, these same discourses resurface as problematic sites, eruptions, disturbances. The fronts this civil war is waged on also look different from earlier periods of independent media. Previously, radical media was ","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":29184,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}