Ryan Conrad

MVAN (2006-2010)
screening & talk by Ryan Conrad in collaboration with la lumière collective

The Maine Video Activists Network (MVAN) was a monthly video newsreel produced by activists throughout the state of Maine from 2006 to 2010. It was an extension of the Indymedia movement, in which grassroots organizers and average citizens produce their own media content and distributed it through non-commercial avenues such as the internet platforms, public-access television, print, and community radio. Maine Indymedia was founded on the Maine/Quebec border during the April 2001 Summit of the America’s demonstrations in Quebec City in order to relay coverage of the events back to Mainers. MVAN was co-founded a few years later by Lewiston, Maine-based video activists Craig Saddlemire and Ryan Conrad. The program received regular contributions from other media makers based in Biddeford, Freeport, Portland, and Madison. MVAN was an entirely volunteer-run and the show consistently aired more than 40 monthly episodes online with Democracy Player and through 16 Maine public-access television stations covering most of the state’s inhabited areas.

Ryan Conrad is SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in Film Studies at York University. He holds a PhD from the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Society and Culture at Concordia University and an MFA in interdisciplinary studio arts from the Maine College of Art.

This event is part of Politics of Alternative Media, a year-long project conceived as a series of workshops, screenings, and lectures organized by a collective of researchers, artists, and curators gathered around la lumière collective, Concordia University’s Global Emergent Media Lab, and Feminist Media Studio. It aims to foster the exchange of ideas about grassroots, non-commercial and emancipatory practices using media as instruments of mobilization, empowerment, and community building. As an effort to counter the intensified reconfigurations of media landscape according to neoliberal logics, the project advocates forms of media cultures accessible to everyone and simultaneously invests in reimagining alternative media formations. It is conceived is a platform for developing research modules and analytical tools for understanding the contemporary entanglements of media and activism, while simultaneously creating a leeway to foster bonds of solidarity amongst cultural workers engaged in the pursuit of alternative media cultures. PAM is curated by Giuseppe Fidotta, Sima Kokotovic, and Sanaz Sohrabi.