Parking the Info Van, Parramatta, 1995: locality and relationality in media practice

Abstract

This commentary examines the intersections of mobility and locality in community-based media practices. In order to investigate how media-oriented practices intertwine with understandings of community, the article sets out a brief history of a community arts organization, Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE), which began as a mobile information service based in Western Sydney, Australia. I examine projects conducted by the organization over the last 25 years to tease out wider shifts from ‘information distribution’ towards ‘community cultural development’. Drawing on interviews with former and current workers at the organization, the article explores how the organization has transformed within the different scales and speeds of communication networks afforded in digital media. The article explores four key themes in order to track these broader changes through shifts away from physical transportation towards virtual communication, from face-to-face community organizing towards digital and networked media systems: ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘where’ was/is the organization, and ‘how’ did/does it meet and respond to changing technologies? While questions of scale (the ‘where’ axis) and technologies (the ‘how’) persist and have become increasingly complex, the organization’s purpose (the ‘what’), the communities that the organization speaks with and listens to (the ‘who’) seem to have changed rather less.