Circulation and Exhibition

Taking into account the tactical and innovative ways in which filmmakers resist assigned peripheral modes and spaces of cultural circulation, I demonstrate the operation of an idea critical to independence, that of resistance to the commercially reified roles of consumer–producer assigned to the artist–audience relationship. Circulation I contend, is re-framed as a forum for dialogue that creates “involved” publics rather than limited to frameworks of cultural dissemination marked by logics of quantity, profit and markets. I argue that the construction of participant-publics and the re-evaluation of cultural ownership or ‘copyright’, repurpose both technological and historical norms, giving shape to Geert Lovink’s (1997) proposition of tactical media through which filmmakers create alternative systems of exhibition containing the vital potential to disrupt a highly regulated public domain.