~19 minutes · Hosted on Cube Commons
This is something I have been working on for a while. The city's salaried artist grant program is up for review again — its third or fourth close call since it launched — and I wanted to think properly about what that program actually meant. Not just in the abstract, but concretely: how we got from the city that fun forgot to somewhere that feels, to me at least, like this special icy jewel.
The video touches on a few different things, and I thought it would help to lay them out here with some context. The essay moves between three moments: the early days of what people were calling the "boring revolution" — that gradual exhaustion with platform speed that started building in the early 2030s — the establishment of the CCB and what those first years of the host program actually felt like from inside it, and the present, where we are in 2050 and what we are at risk of forgetting. The canal is the through line. I shot the ice footage over three winters. It took a while to understand why.
"We didn't chase it. We didn't try to become a global cultural destination. We just decided, slowly and imperfectly, to take care of the people who were already here making things."
If you want to go deeper on the City Cultural Broadcaster program, there is an archived copy of one of the first public job postings from the early 2030s, when the CCB was still finding its shape. It's a good document — it tells you a lot about the ambition of the thing and how seriously the city took editorial independence from the start.
There is also a piece on the printing hub model — the subsidized city-funded printing centres that went in across the boroughs before CCB even existed. I remember when I first heard the idea I assumed it would have this quaint coffee shop vibe, something precious and craft-y. It wasn't. The post-industrial feeling turned out to be the point. Because you had to show up with a USB stick and wait and talk to whoever else was there, it became something the city couldn't have planned.
The most unusual thing in the essay is probably the audio. In 2047, a data breach targeting municipal financial infrastructure inadvertently released fragments of recorded audio from the 2046 artist grant council deliberations. Those sessions were always meant to be private — the program's design was that the council argues behind closed doors and then makes a public, named statement explaining their choices. The breach changed that. The fragments that surfaced are not scandalous. There's no corruption. What they contain is rarer: people arguing in good faith about impossible questions. You can find the original post of the leaked audio files here, with all the fragments that made it out of the hack. Worth listening through in full. I know Patricia, Chen, and Kofi were furious at first, but I think everyone actually comes across alright. It was certainly a blow to the program, though.
Let me know what you think.