You've heard the A side. You've even heard the B side. Now...
'Encouraging, resourcing and promoting postindustrial creativity'
C-Side Media is a vehicle for ecouraging, resourcing and promoting creativity. It arose originally in the Cityside community - a group well known for creativity in the international alt.worship movement. However, other like-minded and like-hearted creative people and groups are also very welcome.
It is intended to take the form of an artists' co-operative run under the umbrella of (probably) a trust. Contributors will receive "kudos" which can be converted into cash, used to buy services such as editing or illustration from other contributors, or invested in other projects.
As well as promoting creativity, the trust will also promote community, spirituality and humanitarian action.
C-Side Media will act as a unifying label (or "freebrand" - Mark Laurent's term) for various creative projects, and will provide means and resources for doing and publishing creative work of all kinds - books, music, spoken word, film, animation, posters, art prints, playscripts, graphic novels, computer games - anything that can be reproduced. It will also be involved in promoting performing arts.
C-Side Media has a number of purposes, including but not limited to:
Digital reproduction technologies for art (posters and prints), books, and audio and video recordings is entering a new phase. It is now feasible to produce a fully professional copy of a creative work with minimal upfront costs in small quantities - even down to a single copy in some cases - and still sell it at an affordable price.
This opens up huge potential for 'niche' publishing and means that we can bypass corporate gatekeepers and go directly to the public who want what we create - however large or small that public may be.
Where possible, we will use existing commercial 'on-demand' companies to produce and deliver copies of our creative works.
(In the initial phase, we will offer existing works which have already been published.)
C-Side Media material will be accessible through its website, www.csidemedia.com. We will use the Cityside website as a channel to connect with the several thousand people who already visit that site and so are probably interested in what we are doing.
The basic site, with several different creative works available, is scheduled for completion in early 2004. During 2004 we will extend, expand, improve and promote the site and develop more tools for creative contributors and more options for people ordering creative works.
Who has started this?
Mike Reeves-McMillan. He also has a full-time job, and this isn't it (not yet, anyway), so he is very open to offers of help.
Who else is contributing?
Contributors for the initial launch include:
Who else can contribute?
Anyone else. If you have creative material lurking on your computer hard drive, in your desk drawer or on top of your wardrobe, pull it out, dust it off and tell us about it. We want to know.
If you're not an artist yourself, you can still be a vital part of C-Side Media. If you have skills in any of the following areas, we'd love to hear from you too:
Mike Reeves-McMillan (info [at] csidemedia [dot] com).