About MWG

The Seventies Meet the Millennium - - Media Working Group

by Pat Aufderheide
October 26, 2000

Published in "A Closer Look, Media Arts 2000." A Case Study Anthology from the Peer Leadership Initiative of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, October, 2000.

The seventies meet the millennium at Media Working Group, where social activist values infuse a wide range of media projects and where cyberspace is just another creative workplace.

MWG is the nest that a small circle of media activists in the Cincinnati area created to keep themselves creatively alive during the bitter years of the late 1998's, when arts funding was drying up and the notion of people-power had ceded to a greed is good mentality. It was to be the nonprofit structure through which a small circle of friends could channel their projects, pool their accounting cost, brainstorm new ideas together, and fundraise. It was their very own 501(c)3 with a soul.

Now fourteen years old, it morphs constantly to fit the members' projects du jour. A sheltering umbrella for film and video production, the organization also has become a knowledge bank and partner for many community organizations in the Ohio Valley. You are as likely to find MWG members writing a media literacy curriculum, as you are to see their work on public television. You might bump into them on a task force charged with coordinating cultural resources, or apply to them for training in building your very own Web site. The common denominator among all the projects is connection: connection between cultural expression and social impact, connection between media-makers and audiences, the connection that media-makers can make between tools, expertise, and expression. Plus, these people can get group insurance rates.

None of this is in any way about making Miramax notice you, but it's not exactly a stroll down a country hollow either. Media Working Group, currently based in Covington, Kentucky - just across the river from Cincinnati has to fight the common misperception of the organization as a center for the celebration of folk culture. Not that MWG members haven't done projects that reclaim Appalachian history or held workshops to address stereotypes and realities. It's just that - as twenty first century media activists rooted as much in virtual reality as in the urban reality of the Cincinnati area--they enjoy acting on their own agendas for cultural activism.

MWG was virtual way before the Internet. When its members developed projects in other regions, the group simply incorporated there (MWG is cur-rently incorporated in Ohio, Kentucky, Arizona, and Oregon). It has resisted any temptation toward bricks and mortar, even though such temptation has come from the outside: funders and arts admin-istrators often urge MWG to become a community center of sorts. "Everyone wants us to buy a building,'' says co-founder Jean Donohue. MWG mem-bers are much more interested, however, in build-ing up the organization's server capacity so that members can access records and conduct necessary business from their laptops wherever they may be.

Coming Together

If you wanted to belong to an organization that protected your individual creative product, that let you use shared equipment, that didn't make your project pass inspection by a panel or a community board but that let yon get the feedback you need, just how would you structure it?

That was the problem in 1987 facing four artists and friends: photographer and community organizer Jean Donohue, Tim Kraus, an activist who got hooked on media as a tool for change; video producer Fred Johnson, and (now deceased) theater activist Stephan Bagnail. They had met one another through Donohue. the founder of an organization called Creative Forces which hosted performances events, and exhibitions of art - painting, sculpture, performance, and a soupcon of video art - that the academic elite of Lexington, Kentucky, had managed to miss. Donohue can still chuckle about an exhibition on Lexington Arts Council space from which a painter was banned for sexual explicitness. Creative Forces rode up and down with it in the elevator on opening night to protest censorship. Donohue had started Creative Forces after traveling to Italy in the 1970s. Italian artists had become highly vocal and visible critics of a repressive government, and she was profoundly impressed by the work of arts cooperatives there.

Johnson had coordinated a municipally owned cable-access corporation, Cable l0, in Frankfort, Kentucky, and sometimes showcased work and recruited new producers through Creative Forces. Johnson involved Donohue and Kraus in his subse-quent cable access corporations, first in Northern Kentucky (Storer) and then in Cincinnati (Time-Warner). In each place, Johnson had raised outside funds, set up training programs, involved new producers, and showcased community expression. But both the Storer and Time Warner cable access centers became political battlefronts as local political incumbents and the cable companies seized the centers' resources. In both places, the people that Johnson and the Creative Forces activists had involved fought back; but in the end they lost. "I don't think we knew before that just how high the stakes are for control of information and culture," says Donohue.

Tim Kraus met Jean while they were both fighting a nuclear power plant and through his activism became the host of a local radio show and then a cable access trainer. (The plant was converted to coal, by the way.) "I was always very interested in the impact that media could have for social change," says Kraus. "I thought I could use media to do community work." Through Media Working Group, Kraus and fellow member Rubén Moreno developed a series of artists' residencies for themselves in the public schools, teaching media literacy through video production, animation, and related arts. Claymation videos record the success of the projects -one tells the story of how the kids' families and neighbors dealt with a 1997 flood; in another, kids describe their efforts, ranging from a mural to dance and theater projects, to the camera. Although Kraus now works full time as a media educator in a public high school, he still develops projects through MWG. "It has allowed me the freedom to explore new projects and to have a collective frame of reference instead of a purely individualistic perspective," he says.

Structure

The future members of MWG had all weathered the incredibly shrinking arts-granting environment. They were sick of depending on other institutions to get their work done. "We looked around for models and we really admired Magnum, the photographers' cooperative. That was our core vision for MWG,' says Johnson. "The emotional impetus was that we needed to control our own creative and production processes," Donohue explains. She recalls how "burnt-out" the cable access fights left everyone involved, and how distrustful they had become of community-based organizations and of local politicians. Johnson agrees: "Community based boards can be very conservative, but more importantly, they don't necessarily want to fund ideas that are different, or may fail", he says "We wanted room to be playful, and we wanted to control our own creation."

MWG now has six full members and eleven associate members. The full members act as a kind of artistic family committed to long-term mutual support and to consensus procedure. MWG has fos-tered this culture of consensus and collaboration by basing its decision-making process on the majority vote of three-fourths of its members. But the notion of "majority rule" isn't good enough at MWG when it comes to membership issues; in Gandhian style, everyone must ultimately agree with membership decisions. The group may drop a member - it hap-pened once - but then it must convince the member to agree to leave. Full members develop their projects with as much input from other members as they choose; no approval process is required, and
ownership resides with the individual. Membership guarantees you no money; it merely lets you use the services of MWG and provides a convenient umbrella under which to fundraise for the work.

Right now, three of the six full members work full time at their media arts projects through MWG.

Associate members come to full members with particular projects. The full members then either choose or reject ( choosing is by far the more common options) projects with which they would like to be associated and collaborate with associates only as much as is mutually interesting for the length of that project. At the moment, associates' projects include documentaries, artists' residencies, and a couple of fiction features.

Elizabeth Logan Harris, producer of a feature film project, became an associate member of MWG through the film's scriptwriter, Aralee Strange. Strange knew Donohue through other MWG pro-duction work and thought the film sounded like a MWG project, The Cincinnati-based filmmakers wanted a top-quality film made with "thoroughly grassroots support," and they supported MWG's diversity-with-quality approach. Their first challenge was finding a film crew. Borrowing a model developed by regional filmmaker Julia Reichert, they developed a training program with MWG input. The Ohio Department of Development even-tually teamed up with the Ohio Arts Council and private foundations to pay for a training program that channeled thirty interns into the film. Now MWG members are brainstorming postproduction and the launch of This Train. "MWG's reputation helped us with raising funds, and since then we've had a group of people as our resident advisors and collaborators," says Harris.

The structure is hyper-efficient. The organization's critical accounting and bookkeeping services are outsourced to reliable professionals; project managers are paid through the projects, and the organization's basic administration is executed by a paid coordinator (currently Donohue), with most grant writing done by Johnson and Donohue. Neither draws a full-time salary for this work. About a quarter of the operating budget comes from state arts councils, while another quarter comes from earned income (tape sales, consultancies, production services, workshop fees, as well as membership and fiscal management fees): foundation grants and corporate and individual donations account for the rest.

Donohue and Johnson consider the budget too top heavy with taxpayer dollars and would like to get the organization closer to being self-supporting. They hope consultancies can boost revenues, but that goal wars constantly with their wish to produce more.

Production

As long as they can raise the money, members make the audio-visual productions they want, in the way they want, through MWG. The finished productions range widely in style and tone. Fred Johnson's Hybrid City, for instance, is a witty and troubling film essay on how new technologies used in today's urban design enforce social control. From surveillance cameras to enclosed park spaces that limit large groups, the urban landscape is filled, the video argues, with "spaces to imprison or separate and control." The tape, shown in Britain on the BBC's second channel as part of its commitment to widen public access to television, drew unprecedented audiences for its slot and has since been a lively discussion-starter on urban planning issues in Portland, Oregon, Berkeley, and other cities. An elegantly produced, straightforward 1990 documentary by Jean Donohue features a Kentucky writers' workshop hosted by the Augusta (Kentucky) Writers' Roundtable that focuses on issues of representation and identity; the tape commissioned by Kentucky Educational Television, was broadcast regionally in five states.

Russ Johnson, a regional film artist, has made several meditations on death and dying as well as Finke's Wings, a wacky portrait of a flight-obsessed artist who has a gigantic tattoo of wings drilled into his back. Harris' This Train is an allegorical, urban fantasy film with experimental elements integrated into a narrative format, while Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees's Trail of Hope chronicles a remarkable public installation project. Twotrees, a Lakota-African-American artist who is a full member of MWG, gathered together indigenous people from several continents and elders from the region in the hills near Cincinnati to witness and participate in a ritual of connection and healing. The ritual accompanied the construction of an earth sculpture that honored the indigenous people who had left behind them only a few traces of their earlier
occupation The film has been screened at conferences, aired on cable, and shown at festivals. And then, of course, there are the projects that have been abandoned for lack of funds, or because a member has shifted interests, or because partnering fell through.

"One of our goals," says Johnson, "is to increase the quality and quantity of our production. That's always the hardest thing to get money for, and the hardest thing to get done." His collaboration with Donohue on a project concerning "Afrilachian" poets--regional poets of African-American descent--has now become a documentary in post-production called Coal Black Voices. They imagine it as the first of a three-part, international poetry series, the next to be set in Northern Ireland and featuring poets both Catholic and Protestant. "We see how people move beyond geographic bound-aries in their daily lives," says Donohue. "We want artists' projects to reflect that reality, too.

Partnerships

MWG seeks out projects that boost the creative strengths of people at the grassroots. It's unusual to find a MWG project that doesn't involve partnerships with communities of interest, concern, and expertise. 'Media Working Group has a unique style,' says Ken Emerick, an individual artist and media arts coordinator at the Ohio Arts Council. "It's a member organization, but each member also can work collaboratively with the others, as they see fit. They also partner with cultural organiza-tions throughout the region. And they reach out to provide training services far beyond their own organization--in the public schools, with other arts groups, with individual artists."

The organization started out with the social capital of its contacts in community groups and cultural organizations, garnered in the politically charged media activism with which all the core members were involved. Each project has expanded the membership's community base, on terms that keep members in charge of the process. Arts administra-tors, individual artists, and government officials often turn to MWG for advice, co-production assis-tance, or training. A collaboration last year featured an art gallery, a theater troupe, a foundation, and MWG in an event that featured current trends in contemporary media and performance art. The pro-ject on Northern Irish poets has set up partnerships with the Verbal Arts Centre and St. Columb's Theater in Derry, Northern Ireland. An effort to address cultural bigotry toward urban Appalachian children--it became a multi-media presentation building from oral history--was directed jointly by Donohue and Jean St. John of My Nose Turns Red Theater Company and the Covington Community Center. A documentary capturing both the process and performance, Jack in the City, became part of a "Teacher's Tool kit aimed at introducing students and teachers to Appalachian culture as it endured in the city.

"Media Working Group has been the leader in the greater Cincinnati area for many years in bringing artists together," says novelist and University of Kentucky English professor Gurney Norman, who calls himself an aging hillbilly egghead. Norman has participated in perhaps a dozen MWG projects, often as a consultant and on-camera presence. A book of his short stories, Kinfolkds, was made into a play through MWG. "They have also been the primary instructor, facilitator, trainer, and provider of materials to the thousands of teachers who feature cultural studies to the children of this region," he says. "What I really like about them," says installa-tion artist Peter Huttinger, who benefited from MWG training in building his own Web site, "is that they're not just about presenting finished pieces. They're involved with the creative process, so sometimes they're trainers and sometimes facilitators. They assist people in finishing or creating new work, or in providing training·"

Media literacy, in fact, has become a standing feature of Media Working Group's work schedule. Several full members have for years run a summer institute on media literacy for teachers. It has been a challenge, Johnson says, to make critical concepts as interesting to them as the hands-on part. "And we've learned the hard way," he says. "We've created some frustrating situations for some unsuspect-ing teachers as we've learned." Now they are expanding the program for activists, artists, and policy makers as well. The group also has devel-oped a media policy-education curriculum for adult literacy educators. Members hope to teach adults to read their cable and phone bills, and to figure out how policy ends up on the bottom line.

Perennially the "early adopters" of new technology, MWG members also believe that nonprofits and Arts groups need to understand and use technology both to streamline costs and to make new media. As Internet connections have burgeoned, MWG has become--with the help of a Kentucky Arts Council grant--the place to turn to when regional artists or arts organizations need assistance. "They've helped us over the years figure out how to use media to preserve history and educate people," said Mary Northington, a co-founder of the Northern Kentucky African American Heritage Task Force, which focuses on African-American contributions to regional culture. 'As consultants to our all-volunteer nonprofit, they've helped us design workshops, educational materials, videos, and our Web site."

Back in 1993, MWG launched a new media training project called CyberSchool. "We were saying to peo-ple, quite simply, 'This is how your e-mail works, and by the way, this is a Web site, you should have one,'" recalls Johnson, "And even today, we find our-selves doing troubleshooting with people who can't make their e-mail work right. But the whole project has grown far beyond acquiring skills [and moved] into strategic and aesthetic issues." Since I997, CyberSchool has morphed into a project of the National Endowment for the Arts and Benton Foundation's Open Studio project. (See the related case study in this volume on Open Studio/LA.) The project provides "Internet access and training to artists and nonprofit arts organizations to ensure that the communications environment of the twenty-first century thrives as a source of creative excel-lence and diversity." With Open Studio resources, MWG trains artists (whether they're media-based or not) and arts administrators in Cleveland, Louisville, Columbus and Atlanta to plan more efficiently, to reach audiences, and to create Web-based art. Networks are now building on the basis of those projects.

A MWG summit in 1998 for Kentuck-area cultural organizations, for example, addressed strategic planning for communications in technology in the arts. The Kentucky Arts Council went on to create a master plan and a training schedule around tech-nology and communications for arts organizations. MWG has gone on to target five regions of the state for technical assistance and strategic planning, and a symposium will showcase the knowledge gained.

Filmmakers, video producers, and other artists fit their newfound Web knowledge to their needs. Producer Elizabeth Logan Harris has created a Web site for This Train--featuring regional artists, from scriptwriter to the composer of the sound track--that promotes the film to potential funders, distributors, and viewers (www. mwg.org/openstudio/this-train). Peter Huttinger used his training to create a Web site showcasing his installation works (www. mwg.org/openstudio/huttinger). "It resulted in my work being used in a couple of exhibitions," he said. "It has a real impact." The other benefit Huttinger appreciates is that "people who came for Web training came from across disciplines: they were writers, visual artists, dancers, theater people, and filmmakers."

"What I particularly appreciate about Media Working group," says novelist Norman, "is the way they globalize our thinking." He recalls the docu-mentary project From tec Shadows of Power; in which strikes in the Kentucky coal fields were compared with coal miners' strikes in Wales. And he calls the ritual sculpture event that Kaylynn TwoTrees organized one of the most profound experiences of his adult life. He met people he had never known, from as far as New Zealand and as close as around the corner. "They broaden the reach and they nourish the source," he says.

Policy

MWG members also sometimes wear the hats of policy wonks, as befits people who are bent on carving out new opportunities for media expression at the grassroots. When Fred Johnson went to Britain on a Fulbright grant in 1990, he saw how localities hard hit by Thatcherite cutbacks of the welfare state turned to culture and the arts as a possible motor of economic renewal. "They call them cultural industries," says Johnson. "We loved that language. It cuts a lot of the nonsense out of arts and development discourses. It sure changes the way a city official talks to you when you talk in terms of jobs and economic growth."

Johnson and Donohue got themselves on the mental maps of local arts officials and state legislators with the term "cultural industries/and local policy makers have hired them as consultants on cultural development. "They are advancing toward new technologies," says the Ohio Arts Council's Emerick. "Because technology itself and its social consequences have been a thematic resource for.their own media pieces, I think it's a natural out-growth of their concern with the function of media in society."

Donohue has served on several task forces for inter-state cultural planning and for telecommunication infrastructure. 'There, she has championed the need to include media arts in cultural planning. Too many administrators, she finds, think video is just for recording the symphony or a dance concert. She also urges the value of putting a little money behind incubators, like the famed BFl: Channel 4 audio-visual training workshops in Britain for new film and video projects and producers. Johnson has run workshops and seminars for elected officials on broadband investments in telecommunication, using some of the skills for policy analysis that he had honed as an access administrator and, in the mid 1998s, as an advocate of telecommunications issues for the United Church of Christ Office of Communication. He even brought over some of the leaders of the British cultural industries approach to meet with local officials.

How Many MWGs?

In some ways, Media Working Group is a unique creation of its moment in history. A group of friends and allies inspired by the activism of their youth--a time of perfervid social turmoil and immense technological upheaval--goes on to use their seasoned skills creatively. The group is also the product of the unique talents that have formed it, especially the driving personalities of Johnson and Donohue. They constantly match their media and media-policy expertise with the changing needs of community and arts organizations. They relentlessly seek out new connections, new partner-ships, and new inspiration. They make things happen in some ways where they can happen, while their own work reflects their social engagement. They have built a home for organizers, activists, and producers who see cultural expression as a tool of power.

At the same time, MWG provides an important model to anyone searching for an alternative to isolated, individual production, on the one hand, and enslavement to an institutional agenda on the other. It offers a way to win some freedom to create, invent, collaborate, and dream. That freedom however, is won with carefully chosen collaborators, solid business expertise, a politician's understand-ing of the never-ending need to cultivate relationships, and the discipline to juggle agendas so that everybody's grant deadlines are met on time.

PAT AUFDERHEIDE, A PROFESSOR IN AMERICAN
UNIVERSITY'S SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION, MOST
RECENTLY PUBLISHED THE DAILY PLANET: A CRITIC
ON THE CAPITALIST CULTURE BEAT (UNIVERSITY OF
MINNESOTA PRESS).