How to Build a Restorative Media Arts System

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GoFAr

5 min readNov 17, 2021

I’ve never felt comfortable calling myself a futurist. I just don’t think I personally have any authority or expertise to predict the future. Yet I’m obsessed with it.

My work at the intersection of art and activism has always been tinged with hope and fear for the future. These themes live and breathe through my writing and producing work in comic books such as DIVIDE and episodic series such as FUTURESTATES. They also extend to the development of equity practices I am engaged in as Sundance Institute’s Director of Outreach & Inclusion, attempting to bring more cultural abundance to our media arts system through filmmaker support programs and advocacy initiatives.

Across all of these areas, I am consistently compelled to manifest visions of the future that might finally center the needs and wants of someone like myself: a person of color, a child of immigrants, a Muslim, a parent, an artist. So naturally, when I was recently presented with the opportunity to collaborate with a number of the leading artists and culture workers that I admire most to design a radically aspirational future for our media arts system, I cleared my schedule.

This group originally gathered years earlier as a loose network of artist-support organizations with deep roots and long-standing missions creating opportunities and programs for historically marginalized communities. We met periodically with the simple intention to share strategies to support our overlapping constituents.

When the country and our industry went into lockdown, we began meeting more frequently to not just assess and mitigate harm amongst our constituents in the short term, but most importantly to develop deeper long-term plans to reinvent the systems that have pushed us back for so long — further exacerbated by the pandemic. These systems, rooted in American capitalist principles and practices of exclusion and extraction have perpetuated (among other things) harmful mass misrepresentation, inequitable artist funding and remuneration, exclusion from the means of distribution, inconsistent audience development, financial unsustainability, perpetually extractive business and production practices, and a general systemic devaluation of the role of the artist as demonstrated by an absence of support structures that build resilience in times such as these.

And yet, art drives culture, and culture drives society. Cultural progress creates the emotional conditions necessary to build new legal and political protections for those individuals that are too often pushed to the margins. Past works of science fiction have often influenced the science fact of the present. And as writer, organizer and educator Walida Imarisha often remarks: “all organizing is science fiction,” because (and I paraphrase now) we are imagining a world that does not exist, and then building it into reality.

What then would it look like to bring a practice of speculative future architecture to redesign our media arts system? What radically aspirational visions might it yield, and how might a roadmap to that future influence the way we organize in the present? This was the goal of bringing the Guild of Future Architects’ Futurist Writers’ Room practice into the gatherings of our budding coalition of organizations and individuals. Our aim: to design a media arts system of the future that centers justice and beauty for disinvested communities, embeds restorative values in practice to repair systemic harm, and creates conditions for artists from these communities to not just survive, but thrive, in order to yield transformational change across society.

The result is Restoring the Future, a report which documents our process, maps the future we designed, and distills six key provocations as core values for critical sectors of this field to build upon in order to arrive at this future. They are as follows:

As a media arts system, all sectors must eschew extraction and place restorative values practice at the core of all institutional design.
We must build regenerative and universally accessible economic models that allow artists to equitably remunerate themselves for their work, and build long term wealth.
We must uphold artists as drivers of cultural power and societal progress, and thus as essential workers, deserving of substantial protections.
We must decolonize filmmaking practices and proliferate just practices in production.
Industry structures must redesign for cultural abundance — and we must create financial incentives to uphold those values.
Artist support institutions must invest resources in systemic change, and design for a future in which philanthropy is no longer needed.

These provocations are intended for industry (studios, networks, corporations), the public sector (state and federal lawmakers), artists and collectives, and artist support nonprofits such as those we ourselves represent. Even arts institutions such as ours that have existing missions to uphold these communities must renew commitments and radically redefine what it means to uphold artists on a systemic level in pursuit of justice — even if it means designing for their own obsolescence.

I often remark only half-jokingly that in my work as an Inclusion Program Director, I’m constantly planning for my retirement, as nothing would please me more than for this work to become patently unnecessary. After all, think of what might be possible if we redirected all the creativity and power of those working tirelessly for equity and the conditions for basic survival? In a world where the means to not just survive but thrive are universally accessible, what then could our artists dream into reality? I certainly couldn’t say. I’m not a futurist.

The provocations above are intended as a beginning, a foundation upon which to build. If this vision speaks to you, I encourage you to read the Restoring the Future report, consider the provocations therein, and explore how you can put them into action. If you work within one of the sectors identified in the report, we invite you to collaborate with us. We are currently prototyping tangible manifestations of these provocations in partnership with the NEA and its Independent Media Arts Group (IMAG) as well as industry collaborators, and are growing our coalition across all sectors of our media arts system to build the more just and abundant culture we all deserve. Please join us.

ALLIED organizations (in alphabetical order) are listed below.

How to Build a Restorative Media Arts System

Written by Karim Ahmad