Just the arts

[webmaster]

Blis,

I thought we would be able to post several great Fine Arts Forums links for you. I'm surprised that we didn't find much either. We found several forums, but they had less than 5 posts. We found this interesting too. This is from Fineart Forum:

:: A last hurrah ...

In the last six months or so, I'd received many emails of congratulations in which readers noted that fAf seemed to be thriving: it had strong readership, diverse content (even if sometimes too much) and good profile. Our mothers probably warned us that appearances can be misleading. As was alluded to in a recent issue, fAf struck several obstacles which have proved insurmountable. The most pressing of those was facing the year ahead with a dire lack of everything. It doesn't take a lot to keep fAf going but it does take some level of resourcing which volunteers cannot meet individually or collectively. As mentioned then, fAf had received an Arts Queensland grant to undertake some strategic planning. We didn't get far into that process when it became apparent that fAf was not wholly viable - at least, not in the current Australian climate and not as an independent entity. So, this is fAf's final issue produced by the current team.

fAf approached last year with a vision of how online media arts news and information delivery could be and sought funds and support to realise that vision. As an artist-run initiative, I proposed a vision of media rich and multimedia content that might change the way writers and readers approached arts criticism, reporting and 'writing'. We all saw this approach an opportunity to reinvent fAf and wanted to explore what it meant and what potentialities existed for this critical work to be presented online. We envisaged dynamic content which was syndicated and deliverable on multiple platforms - from email to website to your PDA - so that those in the least technologically resourced areas weren't excluded. We envisaged a different kind of portal and relevance that emerged from a media savvy approach to information and culture. We hoped to evince the value of being a distributed and collaborative organisation based in Australia while looking outward to the world, particularly the Asia Pacific region, through a network of flows, commitment to diversity and understanding of media arts practices.

Unfortunately, others didn't share that vision - or even saw the value of it - and ultimately, the funds and support needed to carry it off were not acquired. Such is the prevailing attitude to online publishing, even in the hothouses of innovation, to the replication of print models in electronic environments. So without much - far from even just enough - by way of institutional and funding support in our current context, fAf is looking for a new home. Roger Malina of Leonardo/ISAST has been kind enough to issue the following call on behalf of fAf and ASTN and will field expressions of interest. You will find this call directly and in Upfront, fAf's news section. The objectives of relocating fAf are to:

+ find a good home for fAf - organisationally, physically, virtually;

+ fill a vital function globally or regionally in media arts; and

+ have some currency in the media arts world among practitioners as a valuable and reliable information service.

Many thanks to those of you who have sent me personal well wishes, expressed your sympathies for fAf's situation and offered server space and the like to help fAf along. Paul Brown, long time Editor and Executive Editor, repeatedly said that these circumstances would eventually lead to the reinvention of fAf. Let's hope so ...

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With that said, if you think you could generate interest for a Fine Arts forum at FG, we'd be glad to setup the forums.