Making a New Reality: Furthering Equality in Emerging Media
How do we ensure equality in the industries of emerging media?
Editor’s note: Here at Vantage, we are getting to grips with the complex, critical, and fast-changing field of visual storytelling. In our effort to look beyond conventional conversations about photography and visual media, we are thrilled to publish a series of articles by transmedia producer Kamal Sinclair, resulting from her groundbreaking report on social equality in emerging media, Making a New Reality.
Sinclair is Director of the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Labs Program, supporting artists who work at the convergence of film, art, media and technology. Her practice includes development and curation of landmark projects in the evolution of story, including experiments in VR, AR, and data as storytelling media. One of her signature production credits is a transmedia art project Question Bridge: Black Males. Sinclair was profiled by New York Magazine as one of the leading women in an emergent VR industry, alongside Bjork and Nonny de la Peña.
The progress of racial justice and the development of technologies are not linear. Every time you develop a new technology, you need to have a thought process about the history and system of oppression that the technology is being created, and released, into. Think about ways to bend the technology to justice and not allow it to replicate, entrench, and worsen injustice.
— Joshua Breitbart, Senior Advisor for Broadband at the Office of the Mayor, New York City
In 2008 my life took a turn from the world of live performing arts and tangible visual arts to an increasingly more virtual engagement with arts and creativity. I went from a primarily analog world to a primarily digital one in a period of rapid innovation and fundamental changes to the human communication architecture. This personal journey has informed a long-form research project, titled Making a New Reality, that I’ve been conducting with support from the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms program, now being published in Immerse and Vantage over the next several months.
The commission enabled me to intensively listen to a host of voices answering the questions: How do we provide robust support for those working to further equality through emerging media? How do we ensure equality in the industries of emerging media?
Transforming alongside the world
As a long-time cast member of an Off-Broadway show, the owner and artistic director of a dance theater company, a teaching artist, and a strategist for one of the largest traditional art campuses in the country, the transition into the primarily tech-driven environment of emerging media made me feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. First, I became a producer and artist on a landmark transmedia art project archived at the Smithsonian, then a producer for the top transmedia production studio in Hollywood, then the director of the New Frontier Lab Programs at the Sundance Institute.
It was a huge adjustment to be the outsider turned insider, and not just because I transitioned from engaging with some of the oldest art forms to some of the newest, but because I have an intersection of identity backgrounds that are not well represented in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, gaming or corporate America (some of the fields that converge in emerging media). As an insider, I’ve noticed a lot of details that seem curious, both in the awesome and fearsome sense of the word. Now, in 2017, I can tell the story of a woman of color, social justice advocate and single mother of three who stands near the epicenter of a media paradigm shift and has a front row seat to the process of power replicating itself.
It has been a cherished and privileged journey, but also a disturbing one that has shaken my core. I’ve been witness to the pitfalls of new technologies born into systems of oppression that caused me to deeply question the possibility that justice and equality could ultimately prevail — though there have also been profound moments where small interventions made a significant impact on furthering inclusion and fair distribution of power.
Each post in Making a New Reality will provide a summary of major findings, with links to detailed segments of the research. What this research makes clear is that the scale of disruption in creative media making, distribution and moving image storytelling will touch every aspect of the way societies are organized. The goal is to help Ford Foundation, as well as its grantees, peer philanthropy organizations, and the greater community of changemakers better navigate disruption on a scale seen only once a century.
Ultimately, I hope this series will fuel a broad-based and vigorous discussion, as well as informing actionable, critical interventions that can improve equity and inclusion in emerging media and ensure that a broader set of stories are influencing our collective vision of the future. This is our challenge.
Interventions for equity
The thought leaders I interviewed had varying ideas for interventions that, as interviewee Jennifer Arceneaux observed, fall into four focus areas:
Industry — direct interventions in the tech, gaming, film, and bio-media industries
The goal of these interventions is to disrupt the centers of power to ensure that diverse voices are included and represented at every level of these industries.
Strategies include:
- Creating an impact investing fund that would focus on supporting social entrepreneurs from the creative sector, with a special priority for traditionally underrepresented voices.
- Mitigating the wealth gap and high barriers to entry.
- Advocating for funding programs that embed diverse artists into the think tanks and councils forming to design the “rules” for integrating emerging tech and media into our societal infrastructure
Education — interventions focused on educating the citizenry, through the formal education system, professional development programs, and community programs
The goal of these interventions is to disrupt the power imbalance that exists between code-literate and code-illiterate communities, in terms of designing human-centered futures and equitable economic systems.
Strategies include:
- Increasing STEAM curriculum
- Teaching ethical design practices
- Supporting code/tech literacy programs in traditionally oppressed or under-resourced communities.
Public Space and Policy — Interventions focused on circumventing the commercial marketplace by creating a public or noncommercial emerging media ecosystem that can be competitive with for-profit platforms for audience engagement
The goal of these interventions is to develop approaches to media distribution that are decentralized and diverse, while building a brand that can incorporate multiple content types and attract audiences.
Strategies include:
- Building inclusive interdisciplinary communities outside of industry power-centers
- Publicly funding creative workforce development initiatives
- Creating policies that break echo chambers in media
- Maintaining net neutrality protecting privacy
Shifting Attitudes — interventions into the consciousness of people through strategies that mitigate bias.
The goal of these interventions is to encourage equality by helping people learn to mitigate their own negative biases about others and themselves.
Strategies include:
- Advocating for creating safe spaces
- Adjusting the center of design — building media infrastructure and tech innovation that centers the imaginations and value systems of traditionally marginalized people
- Breaking the innovator stereotype by amplifying diverse innovators
- Disrupting dependency narratives and rigid bias narratives
- Expanding identity literacy
- Bridging the gaps between art, science and technology cultures
This is not meant to be a definitive or comprehensive survey of equality in emerging media. It is meant to be a catalyst for collaborative reflection and discourse that may help us resolve the issues raised. Each article invites responses from the field so that we might mitigate blind spots and find effective strategies for achieving equality and justice in emerging media.
We look forward to finding out how your own experiences have given you inspiration.
Click here to read the next installment of Making a New Reality.
The Making a New Reality research project is authored by Kamal Sinclair with support from Ford Foundation JustFilms and supplemental support from the Sundance Institute. Learn more about the goals and methods of this research, who produced it, and the interviewees whose insights inform the analysis.
This article was originally published on Immerse, an initiative of Tribeca Film Institute, MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund. For the complete publication of the report, please, visit Immerse.
