Forward to @banff

As with all right wing liberal organizations you can do  what you
like except question the hierarchy of those high in the ranking.

Banff Centre for the Arts makes every effort to collapse public
and private space into institutional reality and cover its tracks
in doing so. It was my main intention while at the Banff to not only
expose this but also reverse the process.

Examples of this included unsuccessful attempts to create a
public meeting area with a kitchen and to set up networked public
services such as free email and web space for any artists who
wanted them.

Successful examples of expanding public and private space were
the creation of a public radio studio; the living in and enforcing of
my studio as a private space; and the creation of the at-banff
mailing list.

The Banff Media and Visual Arts department was running an
authoritarian internal mailing system called q-mail, which enabled
one control obsessed member of staff to monitor and filter all
staff member's correspondence.

Under the guise of modernizing the system, we set about issuing
uncontrolled mail boxes to anybody who would take them and set
up a non-hierarchical mailing list called at-banff to connect them
together. People could construct their own counter hierarchies on
at-banff, and assault incompetence and corruption with the best
known weapon against privatized power, exposure in a public
space.

The at-banff mailing list offered people the chance to post
anonymously, thus removing the fear of stealth dismissal via the
recursive short term contract system, which employs people for a
few months at a time for several years until they become
troublesome.

I finally resigned once I realized that I had achieved all that I
could in the light of massive opposition from the directors
towards my attempts to democratize the department.


Heath Bunting