For a conference that was ostensibly about media arts and culture, there was lot of talk about the Slow Food Movement at the national NAMAC convening in Austin, Texas last month. Helen De Michiel, the co-Director of NAMAC, opened the conference by embracing the phrase “slow media.” The comparison highlights how NAMAC’s member organizations support localized media like concerned foodies and environmentalists support local farmers. Richard Linklater then came to the stage and riffed on the Slow Food metaphor, comparing the refreshing quality of independent film to the pleasure people draw from eating healthy, locally produced foods. Rick, a filmmaker whose work calls out for the big screen (if you’ve seen Waking Life in the theater you know what I mean) is particularly concerned about the distribution problem for slow media—that many of us won’t be able to access it. He feels that there is a human need for independent media that exists even if the marketplace doesn’t provide an easy way to get it. He likened corporate media to McDonald’s and independent media to the food we might have to go out of our way to get at the farmer’s market (see NAMAC’s blog for Wendy Levy’s take). I liked this idea: it echoes something we discuss at Arts Engine about seeking alternative measures of success apart from box office returns. And the conference’s Keynote Speaker, Gary Chapman, a professor at University of Texas who runs the 21st Century Project, used slow food as a reference point as well, describing how Italy’s Slow Food movement has spawned “Cittaslow”, Slow City, which works to devise new ways to promote civic life. This movement critiques globalization for creating mediocrity, and instead strives to find means to disseminate “excellence” (which he pointedly indicated is not something that should only be available to the elite).
This conceptual framework appeals to me in part because it provides an alternative to the culture of marginalization that characterizes much of the dialogue within our field of slow media. And, appropriately enough, here at Arts Engine we’ve been working to promote both slow food and slow media in parallel for the last two years through our Good Food program, which helps get short films about sustainable food options out to large audiences.
But the slow food / slow media analogy only goes so far. The key difference between food made by a farmer and media made by the independent maker is in our capacity for wide distribution. By definition, a small farmer can only produce a relatively small amount of food, whereas we independent media makers are working with a MASS medium (even if we sometimes fail to meet the masses with our stories). So in a way, I feel we have a responsibility to take advantage of our medium, and at least attempt to reach more people through the power of mass replication offered by video and film and the engine of mass distribution offered by the internet. If we fail to reach a wide audience, so we fail, and that’s okay, too—we’re slow media after all, and we don’t value quantity above quality. But the effort to go wide is important. While I don’t object to an artist creating a piece of media designed to only reach a handful of people (as if a film were a bushel of fresh beets), it seems a shame for that to be all we aim for. Perhaps the way of looking at is to say that the making of the media is analogous to, say, artisanal cheese making, but the distribution of it has the potential to be McDonalds itself: available almost everywhere to everyone, for cheap. This perspective could inspire a new generation of media artists to take their cheese making on the road in a big way, and give big media a run for its money.